Tag Archives: literary oddities

Rotten Rejections: Julia Child, et al

Rotten Rejections: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle.

“What we envisage as saleable…is perhaps a series of small books devoted to particular portions of the meal…. We also feel that such a series should meet a rigorous standard of simplicity and compactness, certainly less elaborate than your present volumes, which, although we are sure are foolproof, are undeniably demanding in the time and focus of the cook, who is so apt to be a mother, nurse, chauffeur, and cleaner as well.”

“…It is a big, expensive cookbook of elaborate information and might well prove formidable to the American housewife. She might easily clip one of these recipes but be frightened by the book as a whole.”

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

Lord Acton on Governance

“The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.”

Lord Acton

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

Rotten Reviews: Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Mr. Waugh displays none of the elan that distinguishes the true satirist from the caricaturist. For all its brilliance the writing lacks vitality. The invention is tired, and effects are too often got by recourse to the devices of slapstick exaggeration.”

Dudley Fitts, The Nation

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

Pretty Much, Yeah

“If you attack stupidity you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life, and you will make small progress against it.”

Samuel Marchbanks

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

The Devil’s Dictionary: Fanatic

“Fanatic, n. One who overestimates the importance of convictions and undervalues the comfort of an existence free from the impact of addled eggs and dead cats upon the human periphery.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

Rotten Rejections: Samuel Beckett

Rotten Rejections, Samuel Beckett I: Dream of Fair-to-Middling Women

“I wouldn’t touch this with a barge-pole. Beckett’s probably a clever fellow, but here he has elaborated a slavish and rather incoherent imitation of Joyce, most eccentric in language and full of disgustingly affected passages—also indecent: the book is damned—and you wouldn’t sell the book even on its title.”

Rotten Rejections, Samuel Beckett II: Molloy and Malone Dies

“I couldn’t read either book—that is, my eye refused to sit on the page and absorb meanings, or whatever substitutes for meaning in this kind of thing…. This doesn’t make sense and it isn’t funny…. I suspect that the real fault in these novels, if I cared to read them carefully, would be simply dullness. There’s no sense considering them for publication here; the bad taste of the American public does not yet coincide with the bad taste of the French avant-garde.”

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

Rotten Reviews: Ernest Hemingway on Gertrude Stein

“It’s a shame you never knew her before she went to pot. You know a funny thing, she never could write dialogue. It was terrible. She learned how to do it from my stuff… She never could forgive learning that and she was afraid people would notice it, where she’d learned it, so she had to attack me. It’s a funny racket, really. But I swear she was damned nice before she got ambitious.”

Ernest Hemingway, in Green Hills of Africa, 1935

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

The Devil’s Dictionary: Abasement

“Abasement, n. A decent and customary mental attitude in the presence of wealth or power. Peculiarly appropriate in an employee when addressing an employer.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000

Rotten Reviews: George Bernard Shaw Assesses Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

“To say that there is plenty of bogus characterization in it…is merely to say that it is by Shakespeare.”

George Bernard Shaw, Saturday Review 1897

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

Robert Frost on Our Financial Institutions

“A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back again when it begins to rain.”

Robert Frost

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