Tag Archives: fiction/literature

“The sense of effort lies heavy over the whole work. That the book has greatness and passages of beauty redeeming its ugliness none will deny. But the mind demands of literature something that it can approve as well as something that it can enjoy; and in ‘Cities of the Plain,’ so full of dignitaries, so devoid of dignity, this instinct finds little to satisfy its craving.”

Saturday Review of Literature reviewing volume five of Remembrance of Things Past

“My dear fellow, I may perhaps be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can’t see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.”

Marc Humblot, French editor, rejection letter to Proust, 1912

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“It would be useless to pretend that they can be very widely read.”

Manchester Guardian

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“We sympathize with Mr. Anderson and with what he is trying to do. He tries to find honest mid-American gods. Yet either he never does quite find them or he can never precisely set forth what he has found. It seems probable that he caricatures even Winesburg, Ohio.”

The Nation

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“…we should classify Mr. Crane as a rather promising writer of the animalistic school. His types are mainly human beings of the order which makes us regret the power of literature to portray them. Not merely are they low, but there is little that it is interesting in them.”

The Nation

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“More than any of its predecessors chargeable with not simply faults, but absolute want of construction…meagre and melodramatic.”

George Brimley, The Spectator

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

Dorothy Parker

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

“Last winter I forced myself through his Tale of Two Cities. It was a sheer dead pull from start to finish. It all seemed so insincere, such a transparent make-believe, a mere piece of acting.”

John Burroughs, Century Magazine 1897

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.