Tag Archives: literary oddities

“A novel by Charles Dickens (1812-70), published in 1860-1. The ‘expectations’ are those of the central character, Pip, who starts as a simple country boy. As he grows older he receives money and hints that he might expect much more; he sets himself up as a gentleman and disowns his humble beginnings. He believes the elderly Miss Havisham is his benefactor, but it turns out to be Magwitch, the convict he helped to escape as a child. He is spoilt by his expectations, but when penury strikes he returns to a life of honest toil.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

“At a conservative estimate, one million dollars will be spent by American readers for this book. They will get for their money 34 pages of permanent value. These 34 pages tell of a massacre happening in a little Spanish town in the early days of the Civil War…Mr. Hemingway: please publish the massacre scene separately, and then forget For Whom the Bell Tolls; please leave stories of the Spanish Civil War to Malraux…”

Commonweal

“This book offers not pleasure but mounting pain; as literature it lacks the reserve that steadies genius and that lack not only dims its brilliance but makes it dangerous in its influence.”

Catholic World

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

[After viewing the film “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” in middle school, I became fascinated with Ambrose Bierce, and have been ever since. Regular readers of this blog will know that I often excerpt from The Devil’s Dictionary. The squib below is from a rejection  of Bierce’s collection of short stories, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, which the Grolier Club named “one of the 100 most influential books printed before 1900….”]

“…uniformly horrible and revolting. Told with some power, and now and then with strokes of wonderfully vivid description, with plots ingenious in their terror and photographic in their sickening details, we must pronounce the book too brutal to be either good art or good literature. It is the triumph of realism–realism without power or symbolism.”

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