Tag Archives: literary oddities

“The style is unattractive if apt, being the oblique and stilted flow of a man working his way around to asking for a loan. There is a good deal of jaded Bohemian rot about the bourgeoisie being worse than professional criminals (are we not all guilty, etc.) and outbursts of cynical anguish about platitudes. e.g. ‘don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them.’ One might define stupidity as the state of needing to be told this.”

Anthony Quinton, New Statesman

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

“His reasoning is so false, his disregard of human nature so naive, his statement of facts so biased, his conclusions so perverted, that the effect can be only to disgust many honest, sensible folk with the very terms he uses so glibly.”

The Bookman

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

“As a humorist, Mr. Lewis makes valiant attempts to be funny; he merely succeeds in being silly. In fact, it is as yellow a novel as novel can be.”

Boston Evening Transcript

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