Why has Rick Moody been a favorite target of critics over the years? Jonathan Callahan explores the roots of their displeasure, and makes a case for why Moody’s latest novel, The Four Fingers of Death – an ambitious 725-page Postmodern epic – is the book that will silence the naysayers.

McGurl, a professor of English at UCLA, is a literary scholar who actually likes writers. More amazingly, he likes MFA programs. In The Program Era, published by Harvard University Press, McGurl argues that the rise of the MFA program in the twentieth century made a uniquely significant contribution to the excellence of postwar American literature.