Tag Archives: literary oddities

George Bernard Shaw on the Dismal Science and Its Practitioners

Posted on July 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

“If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.”

George Bernard Shaw

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

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Rotten Reviews: Honore de Balzac

Posted on July 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Little imagination is shown in invention, in the creating of character and plot, or in the delineation of passion… M. de Balzac’s place in French literature will be neither considerable nor high.”

Eugene Poitou, Revue des Deux Mondes 1856

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

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Rotten Reviews: James Russell Lowell Reviews Thoreau’s Walden

Posted on July 2, 2017 | Leave a comment

“I look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more symptom of the general liver complaint…(Thoreau’s) shanty life was a mere impossibility so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. He squatted on another man’s land; he borrows his axe; his boards, his nails, his fish hooks, his plough, his hoe–all turn state’s evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry David Thoreau should exist at all.”

James Russell Lowell, 1865, from Literary Essays, 1890

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

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Joseph Conrad on American Exceptionalism

Posted on July 1, 2017 | Leave a comment

“The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.”

Joseph Conrad

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

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Rotten Reviews: Edmund Wilson on W.H. Auden

Posted on July 1, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Mr. Auden himself has presented the curious case of a poet who writes an original poetic language in the most robust English tradition but how seems to have been arrested in the mentality of an adolescent schoolboy.”

Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light  1952

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

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Rotten Reviews: Charlotte Bronte on Jane Austen

Posted on July 1, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point…I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses…Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant.”

Charlotte Bronte, letter to G.H. Lewes 1848

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

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George Bernard Shaw on Duty

Posted on June 30, 2017 | Leave a comment

“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”

George Bernard Shaw

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

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Rotten Reviews: Francis Bacon

Posted on June 30, 2017 | Leave a comment

“His faults were–we write it with pain–coldness of heart, and meanness of spirit. He seems to have been incapable of feeling strong affection, of facing great dangers, of making great sacrifices. His desires were set on things below, titles, patronage, the mace, the seals, the coronet, large houses, fair gardens, rich manors, many services of pate…”

T.B. Macaulay, Essays 1842

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

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A Rotten Review and Rejection: Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

Posted on June 29, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews: Youth and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Posted on June 27, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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