Review of The Hours author's latest book wins inaugural hatchet job award

Speaking of book reviews, here's an award for a specific type of book review:

His "killingly fair-minded and viciously funny" review of the Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Cunningham's latest book, By Nightfall, has won novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year award.

Mars-Jones demolished the US writer's story of a middle-aged gallery owner attracted to his young brother-in-law in a 1,000-word review in the Observer last January. Beginning by ridiculing Cunningham's numerous bookish allusions – "nothing makes a novel seem more vulnerable, more naked, than an armour-plating of literary references. If you're constantly referring to landmarks, it doesn't make you look as if you're striding confidently forward" – Mars-Jones then mocks his artistic pretensions, saying "the book's pages are filled with thoughts about art, or (more ominously) Thoughts about Art".