Many authors fear Michiko Kakutani, book critic for the daily edition of The New York Times, because if she doesn’t like your book she can make you wish you’d gone into the heating and air conditioning business.
Slate’s Ben Yagoda takes a more balanced view and assesses her twenty-five years of reviewing books at The New York Times, in Michiko Kakutani: A Critic With A Fixation.
Many illustrious authors have butted heads with Ms. Kakutani. When she interviewed Gore Vidal for The New York Times, they had the following exchange:
Michiko Kakutani: First question, ‘You hate the American people, don’t you?’
Gore Vidal: ‘No I hate The New York Times. They are not, you’ll be amazed to learn, the same.’
Sample the meta-fallout on the Slate piece in: Turning Scrutiny Back Onto The Critic,” compiled by Adam Christian.
Given the plummeting sales of hardcover literary fiction, this might be one of those academic controversies that is so bitter because so little is at stake. Don’t these people realize that everyone under thirty is over on MySpace.com and YouTube uploading videos of themselves?
