[This botched assessment refers to Bernard Malamud’s second novel, published in 1957, produced as a movie, and included in Time’s All-TIME 100 Novels.]
“Despite its occasional spark of humanity and its melancholy humor this is on the whole too grim a picture to have wide appeal.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, readings/research
“The splitting of a hair into forty parts was believed in the magically inclined early times to have been achieved by the six great physicians of antiquity–Plato, Hippocrates, Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Galen. The physicians then used it to make a ladder in which science could ascend to the heavens, but there they failed to find a cure for death and returned to earth. Sometimes their number is extended by allowing King Philip II of Macedon to join this band.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, numeracy, philosophy/religion
“Optimism: The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof—an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“I am relieved to find the critics shrink from saying that Mr. Yeats will ever be a popular author. I should really at last despair of mankind, if he could be…absolutely empty and void. The work does not please the ear, nor kindle the imagination, nor hint a thought for one’s reflection… Do what I will, I can see no sense in the thing: it is to me sheer nonsense. I do not say it is obscure, or uncouth or barbaric or affected–tho’ it is all these evil things; I say it is to me absolute nullity…I would not read a page of it again for worlds.
That he has any real paying audience I find hard to believe.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
[This refers to the novel by Owen Wister, which is available as a free e-book from Project Gutenberg.]
“A burlesque and grotesque piece of nonsense…it is mere fooling and does not have the bite and lasting quality of satire.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“A satirical novel (1980) by the US novelist John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969). Thanks to the efforts of his mother it was published more than ten years after he committed suicide, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is set in New Orleans, and the central character, Ignatius Reilly, is an overweight, argumentative layabout who interrelates with a cast of equally eccentric and accident-prone characters. The title comes from Jonathan Swift:
‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him.
Swift: Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting (1711)'”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“It contains unpleasant elements.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“It’s polite, literate, plodding, sententious narrative of considerable competence but not a trace of talent or individuality;… Real dull stuff for us Americans. The values in it are so bloody sanctimonious English that I found it hard to take.”
[Rejection of The New Men]
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“Speaking about reviewers who seemed unable to render honest, objective critiques on the works of such writers as had won the Nobel Prize, Miss Ferber described them as ‘awestruck by the Nobelity.'”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Descent, n. Going lower. Popularly used to indicated the existing generation is a peg worse that than which fathered it. Thus one Darwin justly discourses upon the superiority of the ancestral baboon in a melancholy essay, called ‘The Descent of Man.’”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
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