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Photo of Michiko Kakutani, 29 May, 2017

 Basic Info: Well, who is she?

• Michiko Kakutani was a legendary critic who served on The New York Times for 34 years and announced her retirement almost a decade ago in 2017. This has made her one of the most significant powerful voices within women in journalism and also one of the most longest serving women in the criticism department. She won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1998.

• “Not only is she one of the longest serving book critics writing for an American newspaper – an impressive 34 years – but she is also one of the most respected, and with that, feared. For more than two decades, Kakutani’s book reviews have commanded an authoritativeness that is emblematic of the newspaper itself.” - Kill Your Darlings https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/the-subtle-resistance-of-michiko-kakutani/

Reputation: Her reputation is a vigorous, spiteful force within the world of criticism. 

• Her trademark was a cut-and-dry approach — reviews could swing from rich, laudatory praise to unapologetic, analytical takedowns. This was to the point in which she even became a verb: getting Kakutani'd. She has been referred to one of the powerful book critics of the English-speaking world and helped boost many careers of other writers and critics alike such as: George Saunders, Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace.

• Ultimately her power was unmatched. A quote from Slate stated, “It islike having the good fairy touch you on your shoulder with her wand." Slate The flip side was equally powerful: her negative reviews could overshadow even the most celebrated authors.

• “She delivered her reviews with the serene assurance of someone who was always right, seemingly able to see into writers' hearts to judge how deeply they were feeling. Slate ”

• “The legendary book critic is part of the larger vanguard of the New York Times – and indeed the New York media – interrogating the worrying new Trump era. Building on her unique position at the newspaper, Kakutani has been able to extend her book criticism beyond reviews, enacting a more political pivot in her writing to critique the current political realm through the lens of books, language and writing.”

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Photo of Michiko and one of her famous books

Famous Feuds: Kakutaini was never afraid to be blunt and to the point which is why so many different book critics, reviewers and even writers almost despised her.

• They thought of critics to be shallow and unheard of, but that is truly what made her stand out the most was the fact that she able to get her point across with a lot of immediacy. She was successfully able to skew the literary establishment and what it all stood for. A perfect example of this was in 2006, when she called The Discomfort Zone by Johnathan Franzen’s a “odious self-portrait of an artist as a young jackass”. The author replied and called her “the stupidest person in all of NYC”
• Other criticisms have been far more high profile. In 2007, she faced significant backlash for breaking a strict media embargo of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, releasing her review on the day of the book’s release. In 2015, Kakutani once more broke a tight media embargo around Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, one of the first reviews to reveal the beloved Atticus Finch was now ‘a racist’.

• These same criticisms, though, are part of Kakutani’s appeal: her unapologetic, cut-and-dry approach to assessing a book, even ones by the likes of Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie; her playful ploys and strategies in reviews (such as imitating a fictional character) that engage or enrage readers; her indifference to media embargoes; and her antiquated vocabulary, which may frustrate readers but highlights a keen intellect: Something that stood out to me as I did research on her, was that there is so little about her readily available despite her actively speaking her truth at any opportunity she got at the end of the day.

• Lots of articles who covered this legend referred to her as “the mysterious one” or “a recluse”. Overall, not too nice words in order to successfully crack down upon her indeity and personal information.

Her reclusiveness and refusal to attend book launches or literary ceremonies ironically amplified the importance of her work, turning her reviews into something almost sacred and private. Kill Your Darlings”

After her career: Once she retired officially in 2017, that was not the end of her legendary impact.

• Even a mere year after in 2018 she published one of her most famous works that I was able to uncover which ws called: The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. I found this to be partciualry interesting due to the fact that we are in a similar state only 8 years after this book was published. In this book though, she was able to draw parrells between philosophy in a post modern world wheel also the circle of misinformation in a digital age. Despite her retirement and her work still being on archived sites she still continues to inspire young writers today by giving them a glimpse into her synthetic style of writing.
• Overall, she is a fascinating figure — someone whose opinion genuinely shaped the literary landscape for decades, which is pretty rare for a critic.