Spoiling the Potter embargo

When America's biggest literary critic tangles with the world's biggest book, where will the story end?

Spoiling the Potter embargo

When America's biggest literary critic tangles with the world's biggest book, where will the story end?


Read it and weep ... boxes of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Photograph David Calvert/ AP

So - he who must be embargoed until midnight Friday has been outed ahead of time. The New York Times has this morning published a criminally early (I speak only slightly figuratively) review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

If anyone in the books world is powerful enough to take on the Potter publishers' legal team - busy yesterday hoovering up samizdat photos of what Bloomsbury and Scholastic refuse to confirm is an early copy - it's Michiko Kakutani.

Kakutani holds the crown as America's most powerful critic, making and breaking authors every weekend in the paper's books supplement. The article does not give away the ending, but Rowling is a pretty powerful adversary - whether even Kakutani can get away with what JK Rowling has condemned as "spoiling it" for her devoted fans is against the odds.

So, the question this morning for you, the jury, is whether or not the Times's spoiler is a brilliant exclusive, or reasonable grounds for drawing and quartering.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/jul/19/spoilingthepotterembargo
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