Back in April, when Alex Kuczynski last contributed to the New York Times Book Review, she struck out against "jealous book critics" who like tearing down modeling novels because they "aren't tall and gorgeous" and because they want "to wield their puny amount of power to establish some sort of moral order." She sort of whispered it, but we heard her; this weekend, she appears in the Book Review once again, writing on a pair of short fiction lady books (not yet online, mysteriously), and her campaign for singularity in the scribble sphere is becoming more pronounced.


The stone is cast broadly this time, leaving an impenetrable (impregnable?) circle of fire separating Kuczynski from all the flabby buttheads who populate her industry. As it happens, that enormous, heavy stone is lit on fire/parsed into flames right up top, when Kuczynski introduces Grace Hanford, the fictional protagonist of Lesley Dormen's collection of stories, "The Best Place to Be." Grace Hanford, we are told, is "married, childless, newly orphaned, Ambien-dependent, frequently head-shrunk and in the middle of a major kitchen renovation." Kuczynski explains: Grace is a woman whom "reviewers in most parts of the country would describe as neurotic. I would simply call her a New Yorker."

An army of one.

EARLIER: Alex Kuczynski: Book Critics Ugly, Power-Hungry