Literary boys’ club attacks NYT critic

Two New York-based writers have had a go in recent days at America's most feared literary critic, the New York Times's Michiko Kakutani (pictured), famous for describing a Nick Hornby novel as a "maudlin bit of tripe", a memoir by Jonathan Franzen as "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass" while one of her victims, Nicholson Baker, said a review had left him feeling like his liver had been removed "without anaesthesia".

Salman Rushdie, whose pal Martin Amis's book The Second Plane she panned for being "chuckleheaded", has waded in, describing Kakutani as "a weird women". And Franzen told a Harvard University newspaper this week that "the stupidest person in New York city is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times".

Kakutani, now 58, grew up in Connecticut and studied Eng Lit at Yale where her Japanese father, Shizuo Kakutani, was a noted mathematician. She began reviewing books for the Times in the early 1980s and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for her "fearless and authoritative" criticism. "The boy's club are out to get her," says a Manhattan literary source.

But Kakutani has survived worse. In 2005, the late Norman Mailer described her as a "one women kamikaze pilot" and said he didn't know what had "put her hair up her immortal Japanese arse". He went on to accuse her of being a "twofer", being "Asiatic" and "feminist" and urged the Times to fire her.