Peck has since said of his lede, "When I wrote a sentence like 'Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation,' in my head, I'm imagining 50 people reading that line. I'm imagining 50 people reading it in context. The very next line, which is an apology for the opening line of the review, says that that line is meaningless." Moody and Peck have since participated in a pie throwing for charity and appeared together on a panel about Thomas Bernhard. In the online journal The Rumpus, Moody slammed pop-country star Taylor Swift and her music, labeling her lyrics "artificial and repellent" and equating its interest to that of Olestra-based products, Swiffers, tiered Jell-O dessert products, home cosmetic surgery, and rectal bleaching. After commenters objected to Moody's anti-Swift screed, Moody took to Salon and wrote "I am happy, in the end, that a lot of young women like Taylor Swift. I am glad they have music they love, even if I believe they will be bored of her ultimately, just as I once was happy about the Bay City Rollers, or Sweet, or Alice Cooper, or, differently, Kiss, even though I recognized that music was kitsch... But it’s the job of the critic to sort through the collision of contemporary music with the history of the form and to assess music based on more enduring values, which are, it’s true, partly subjective, but which also come to rest on an understanding of what music has been". Bibliography Novels Garden State (1992) The Ice Storm (1994) Purple America (1996) The Diviners (2005) The Four Fingers of Death (2010) Hotels of North America (2015) Short fiction Collections The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven: A Novella and Stories (1995) Demonology (stories, 2001) Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas (2007) Stories Non-fiction The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions (2002) On Celestial Music: And Other Adventures in Listening (2012) The Long Accomplishment: A Memoir of Struggle and Hope in Matrimony (2019) Satire Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13 (Illustrated by David Ford) (1999) Book reviews As editor or contributor Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited (co-editor, with Darcey Steinke, and contributor) (1997) The Magic Kingdom, by Stanley Elkin (introduction to the Dalkey Archives trade paperback reprint) (2000) A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by Joseph Cornell (contributor) (2001) The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy (introduction to the Oxford World's Classics