vintageanchor:

1.Of Henry James, Mark Twain said, “Once you’ve put one of his books down, you simply can’t pick it up again.”

2. In response to reading Benito Mussolini’s “The Cardinal’s Mistress”, Dorothy Parker said, “this is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

3. Of George Meredith, Oscar Wilde said, “as a writer he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist he can do everything except tell a story; as an artist he is everything except articulate­.”

4. “Moby Dick” was largely a dud when it was published, and most of the critics were scathing. One reviewer dismissed Melville’s magnum opus as “sheer moonstruck lunacy.”

5. “Wuthering Heights” was universally panned, and Emily Brontë read every single review before her untimely death prevented her from knowing that the book would someday be considered a masterpiece. The first review published in January 1848 by the Atlas calls it a “strange, inartistic story…[that] is inexpressibly painful.” The reviewer describes every character in the book as “hateful or thoroughly contemptible.” The Examiner dismissed it as “strange” as well as “wild, confused; disjointed, and improbable.” But Graham’s Lady Magazine really dug in: “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.”

6. Gore Vidal said of Hemingway, “What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?”

7. Randall Jarrell’s one sentence review of a forgettable book of poetry: “This reads like it was written on a typewriter­—by a typewriter­.”

8. H.L. Mencken managed to pan one of his closest friends, Theodore Dreiser: “An Indiana peasant, snuffling absurdly over imbecile sentimenta­lities, giving a grave ear to quackeries­, snorting and eye-rollin­g with the best of them.” He called The Great Gatsby a “glorified anecdote.”

9. At more than 2,000 pages, here’s what The New Yorker had to say about James Michner’s CHESAPEAKE: “I have two recommendations. First, don’t buy this book. Second, if you buy this book, don’t drop it on your foot.”

10. Edmund Wilson wrote: “Mr. Nabokov is in the habit of introducin­g any job of this kind which he undertakes by the announceme­nt that he is unique and incomparab­le and that everybody else who has attempted it is an oaf and ignoramus, usually with the implicatio­n that he is also a lo-class person and a ridiculous personalit­y.”

11. A favorite from Norman Mailer on J.D. Salinger’s FRANNY & ZOOEY: “The greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.”

12. Alexander Woollcott once reviewed a self-published book of poetry called “And I Shall Make Music” with: “Not on my carpet, lady.”

…having laughed aloud at #s 7 and 9.  Heaven forbid I ever read a review of my own work, if I am ever published.

(via jphtumb)