Tag Archives: literary oddities

“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.

“We sympathize with Mr. Anderson and with what he is trying to do. He tries to find honest mid-American gods. Yet either he never does quite find them or he can never precisely set forth what he has found. It seems probable that he caricatures even Winesburg, Ohio.”

The Nation

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

“…we should classify Mr. Crane as a rather promising writer of the animalistic school. His types are mainly human beings of the order which makes us regret the power of literature to portray them. Not merely are they low, but there is little that it is interesting in them.”

The Nation

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

“More than any of its predecessors chargeable with not simply faults, but absolute want of construction…meagre and melodramatic.”

George Brimley, The Spectator

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

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

Dorothy Parker

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

“Last winter I forced myself through his Tale of Two Cities. It was a sheer dead pull from start to finish. It all seemed so insincere, such a transparent make-believe, a mere piece of acting.”

John Burroughs, Century Magazine 1897

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