Tag Archives: literary oddities

Ambrose Bierce on Learning from Experience

Posted on June 19, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Experience n. The wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.”

Ambrose Bierce

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

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Rotten Reviews: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Posted on June 16, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews, John Dos Passos I: The 42nd Parallel

Posted on June 15, 2017 | Leave a comment

“…he is like a man who is trying to run in a dozen directions at once, succeeding thereby merely in standing still and making a noise. Sometimes it is amusing noise and alive; often monotonous.”

V.S. Pritchett, The Spectator

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, John Dos Passos II: The Big Money

Posted on June 15, 2017 | Leave a comment

“I found the novel tiresome because people never seemed to matter in the least; they would have gone down under any system, so why blame capitalism for their complete and appalling lack of character? Mr. Dos Passos’ America seems to me a figment of his own imagination, and I doubt the value of his reportage of our period.”

Herschel Bricknell, Review of Reviews

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: John Donne

Posted on June 14, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Of his earlier poems, many are very licentious; the later are chiefly devout. Few are good for much.”

Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe 1837

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: An American Tragedy

Posted on June 12, 2017 | Leave a comment

“The commonplaceness of the story is not alleviated in the slightest degree by any glimmer of imaginative insight on the part of the novelist. A skillful writer would be able to arouse an emotional reaction in the reader but at no moment does he leave him otherwise than cold and unresponsive. One feature of the novel stands out above all–the figure of Clyde Griffiths. If the novel were great, he would be a great character. As it is, he is certainly one of the most despicable creations of humanity that ever emerged from a novelist’s brain. Last of all, it may be said that Mr. Dreiser is a fearsome manipulator of the English language. His style, if style it may be called, is offensively colloquial, commonplace, and vulgar.”

Boston Evening Transcript

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: Middlemarch

Posted on June 9, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Middlemarch is a treasure house of details, but it is an indifferent whole.”

Henry James, Galaxy

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: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Posted on June 9, 2017 | Leave a comment

“A hoary-headed and toothless baboon.”

Thomas Carlyle, Collected Works 1871

“Belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatever–the mystics for mysticism’s sake. The best answer to his twaddle is cui bono?–a very little Latin phrase very generally mistranslated and misunderstood–cui bono? to whom is it a benefit. If not to Mr. Emerson generally, then surely to no man.

Edgar Allan Poe, in a chapter of autobiography 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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Rotten Reviews: Euripides

Posted on June 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

“A cliche anthologist…and maker of ragamuffin manikins.”

Aristophanes, The Thesmophoriazausae 411 B.C.

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: The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell

Posted on June 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Unfortunately, the author’s interest in attempting to shock his readers appears to be greater than his interest in an accurate characterization of the young men around whom this story is developed.”

American Journal of Sociology

“A case history, true for this boy Studs Lonigan, but not completely valid as the recreation of a social stratum which it also would seem to aim at being.”

New York Times Book Review

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

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