History's Greatest Literary Takedowns

It has been a season of literary takedowns, but then it usually is. You can always get a rise out of the otherwise lethargic reading public by launching an offensive against one of its icons. In the past two months alone, we have had Kathryn Schulz disliking “The Great Gatsby” in New York magazine, Christian Lorentzen’s salvo against Alice Munro in the London Review of Books, and Joseph Epstein in the Atlantic Monthly, asking, “Is Franz Kafka Overrated?”