In posting this angry message, Mr. de Botton joined the novelist Alice Hoffman in the unhappy ranks of authors who have lately given into the temptation of lashing out at critics publicly over a bad review. Over the weekend Ms. Hoffman posted furiously to her Twitter feed about Roberta Silman’s lukewarm evaluation of her new book in The Boston Globe. She even went so far as to post Ms. Silman’s email and phone number, and encouraged her fans to contact the critic and voice their displeasure.

Ms. Hoffman’s publicity team over at Goldberg McDuffie Communications moved quickly to throw cold water on the mockery and disapproval that followed the author’s outburst, no doubt panicked at the possibility that their client’s name would come to be linked to such an unsavory incident. The offending tweets were scrubbed from the record and an apology of sorts was issued.

Mr. de Botton’s publicists at Pantheon/Knopf will not be following suit. In an interview today, Knopf executive director of publicity Paul Bogaards said he exchanged emails with the author after the comment on Crain’s blog went up, and asked him if he had anything to say.

“He said no, which is, in my view, entirely defensible, in that he said what he needed to say in the forum where he wanted to say it,” Mr. Bogaards said. “He’s not deleting his post. It’s there and he isn’t retracting his statement. … Clearly, Alain objected to the tenor of the review from Crain and he made his objection known on his Web site. It seems an appropriate forum in which to register that complaint.”

Mr. Bogaards said Mr. de Botton’s post to Mr. Crain’s blog differed from what Ms. Hoffman had written on her Twitter, because he had not done anything as outlandish as posting his target's personal contact information.

“That’s a little over the top,” Mr. Bogaards said. “Some people might not agree with the semantics or the language, but ultimately it’s two people arguing in conversation.”
 
He added, “All is fair in love and war.”

UPDATE (8:29 A.M.): It appears this morning that Mr. de Botton actually is a little sorry. Starting three or so hours ago, he has been posting reflective little dispatches to his Twitter account, starting with a quote from Montaigne ("To learn we have said a stupid thing is nothing: we must learn a more ample, important lesson: we are but blockheads") and followed by an admission that the message he left on Mr. Crain's blog was "clearly an insane thing to write in a new public age." "I do apologise," he continued, "and hope you won't think ill of me forever."

A little later, after apparently searching his name on Twitter and coming upon someone who'd referred to his latest book as "subpar," Mr. de Botton wrote: "I won't bite, but do sum up what makes it sub par? Sorry about outburst."

UPDATE 2 (2:50 P.M.): OK so Mr. de Botton is a lot sorry! An hour ago: "i was so wrong, so unself-controlled. Now I am so sorry and ashamed of myself."

The book, which was handled by D.C.-based literary agent Gail Ross, will be published by Pantheon, an imprint of Random House, and edited by Errol McDonald. The tentative title is Say What?

Ms. Norris said in an interview today that the book will focus on the “hidden conversation on race” that has been taking place in this country since the start of the 2008 presidential campaign. One chapter of the book will focus on the way race is addressed in Hollywood movies, she said; another will focus on “the way black men view themselves.”
 
“People talk about race one way in public and they often—not always but often– talk about it in a different way and at a different tempo in the private sphere,” Ms. Norris said. “And I just want to pull back the curtain a little bit.”

Ms. Norris said the idea for the book came out of a series of three group discussions on race that she and Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep led in the fall featuring a diverse group of people living in York, Pennsylvania.

“People started talking about race in a different way,” Ms. Norris said. “It’s my belief that this has happened in large part because of the campaign and now because of the presidency. Maybe it will continue but I don’t know that it will. With the book, I’m trying to capture the conversation in this moment: how people talk about race, how people think about race, and how people approach subjects that involve race, and how that’s changed.”

Ms. Norris said she’ll spend the summer traveling and talking to people around the country. Her first stop: Alabama, where she’ll conduct interviews with some of her own family members.

“It’s hard for me to reach out and penetrate the private space when I’m sitting in studio 2A, because the best I can do is talk to someone on the phone,” she said. “The conversation in York proved it was possible, but you have to go to it—it doesn’t come to you.”

Many of the people she’ll be interviewing, she said, are people she has spoken to in the past for segments on All Things Considered, where she has been a host since 2002.

Anna Christopher, a spokeswoman for NPR, said Ms. Norris will return to the air in mid-September. From July 13 until August 14, her co-hosts Melissa Block and Robert Siegel will be joined by California-based radio journalist Madeline Brand, whose show Day to Day was canceled last December amid cost-cutting at NPR.

Dan Frank, who oversees Pantheon's editorial department, referred all questions to Knopf's executive director of publicity, Paul Bogaards, who confirmed the fact of Ms. Goldklang's departure but declined to comment further.

Kimberly Burns, a freelance publicist who used to work for Ms. Goldklang at Pantheon, said she "felt a little sick" when she heard the news at last night's Granta party at SoHo House. 

"I've worked for a lot of publishers, and Janice was one of the best," Ms. Burns said. "She has impeccable taste, and this is another cultural hit."

Founded in 1942 by German émigrés and sold to Knopf in 1961, Pantheon was known during its early years as a bold and visionary destination for European books in translation such as Michael Foucault's Madness and Civilization, Marguerite Duras' The Lover and Nobel Prize-winner Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, and in more recent years has distinguished itself as the publisher of classic graphic novels by Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Marjane Satrapi, Daniel Clowes and others.

More layoffs at Random House are expected to be announced during the next three weeks as each of the company's three divisions--Crown, Knopf, and the flagship Random House Publishing Group--adjust to the changes enacted last month by CEO Markus Dohle.

Andre Schiffrin, who spent almost 30 years as the head of Pantheon before being ousted in 1990 for refusing to take cost-cutting measures, did not respond immediately to a request for comment. For a full history of Pantheon, see chapters one and two of Mr. Schiffrin's 2000 book The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read.

The title of Netherland, the third novel by Irish-born Joseph O’Neill, refers not to “Neverland” or a place at the end of mist and mystery; it embraces rather the Dutch origins of New York City. The events of 9/11 plant dismay in a modern marriage, not eased by a move into the Chelsea Hotel. Rachel is inclined to go back to London with their son, while Hans, a banker, stays in the city and tries to work things out. The novel never sounds Irish, despite the yearning and unwinding strains in Mr. O’Neill’s writing. But does it really sound Dutch (the author was raised in Holland)? If not, where is the steady pull of the language coming from? This is as much of a puzzle as the city that Hans begins to discover, thanks in part to his Trinidadian friend Chuck Ramkissoon, whose great cause in life is to restore cricket to the New York area.

Far too little happens. Mr. O’Neill has no urgency or facility at developing character or plot. But there are many back-of-the-hand ways in which we feel a real novelist’s spin at work. Above all, this involves an eye and an ear for the local groupings, habits and foods of the New York area. In the gentlest possible way, Netherland appreciates a city of so many preoccupations—cricket being no stranger than the passion for security—in an urban structure where unfamiliar cultures are on a conversational footing.

It’s hard to make a great case for Netherland, though this is being attempted by elements of the literary establishment. It really doesn’t want to be found in possession of the kind of lofty ambitions that presage a great novel. But Joseph O’Neill writes quite beautifully—whether describing the breeze of nature on cricket, or companionship warming lonely immigrants.

And that is the true stuff of our urban modernism. Netherland may be what comes in the years before a great novel—a tender mapping out of territory and its alien occupants, a way of seeing that New York is far from just an American city.

The undeclared irony within the book is that in sniffing out a thing called cricket that may ease an untidy world, Mr. O’Neill has to ignore what he knows to be true—that cricket itself is a dying pastime, nearly eclipsed by the crowd-catering vulgarities learned from soccer. So there’s an elusive Arthurian possibility hovering over the best evocations of that charmed and unlikely game: “You do not know whether a twenty-two-yard strip of turf, often cut so closely as to appear grassless, will deliver a quick or slow or high or low bounce, whether a spinning ball will deviate upon bouncing and if so to what degree and with what speed. You do not know if it will be a featherbed, or a dog, or a slow- and low-bouncing pitch dispiriting equally to batsman and bowler. Even after you’ve begun to play on it, you do not know what it holds in store. The nature of earth, like the nature of air, is subject to change.” All of a sudden it seems like a game at which Chekhov might contest Oscar Wilde.

David Thomson’s “Have You Seen …?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films will be published by Knopf in October. He can be reached at books@observer.com.