What a sour book [The End of Intelligent Writing] is—no allowance made for its "heroic" attack on entrenched elites, or its wide-eyed support of the new and the young, or its implacable earnestness will alter this central fact, and the reader will leave it frazzled and stale…. Granted that paranoia and apocalypse currently serve to authenticate artistic believeability, Kostelanetz' network of sinister, aging moguls … are hard to recognize in their desperate power game, hell bent on conspiratorily censoring Jonathan Cott, Madeline Gins, and Clark Coolidge, thereby assuring that "serious new and young writers are publicly dead." There are, to be sure, more villains in the cast than this, and more putative heroes as well, but the outlines of the struggle are cast in such melodramatic cliches that many will find it hard to take the argument seriously. Some of the book—the chapter on the fortunes of...