by Chasya
Oh, snap! Straight to you via the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog is this amazing Examiner article listing fifty of the best insults flung at our beloved literary greats by their peers. Don’t get me wrong, I respect these writers just like the next guy, but I do also love a good insult. My favorite? Mark Twain commenting thusly on Jane Austen: “Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
What’s yours?
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I posted this one on my FB fan page yesterday! Great stuff. My favorite is "I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up." LOL
ReplyDeleteWhat Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac's work: "That's not writing, it's typing."
ReplyDeleteGotta love #30. "Not much of Dickens will live, because it has so little correspondence to life..." Really? How many plot variations have been done of The Christmas Carol?
ReplyDeleteGotta love it when Mark Twain is called a hack - thanks for a fun read!
ReplyDeleteThis one makes me giggle: I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.
ReplyDeleteI guess Twain's a hack and Austen needs a whack.
ReplyDeleteI love #10, Noel Coward's put-down of Oscar Wilde. Simple and to the point, and the lack of flowery description or waxing on about why Wilde sucks makes it all the more humorous.
ReplyDelete(Not that I necessarily agree with his opinion, of course.)
I thought Noel Coward's comment about Oscar Wilde was funny. Sounds like he was tweeting, too!
ReplyDelete"Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod."
These are great-- thanks for linking!
ReplyDeleteIt makes me wonder why Twain apparently continue to revisit a novel he so disliked.
ReplyDelete*continued
ReplyDeleteI'm a Hemingway fan (except for the bulls), so I was amused by Nabokov saying, "I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it." Then I saw that Papa H criticized Faulkner for drinking (projection?) and suggested that James Jones kill himself (horrible foreshadowing?).
ReplyDeleteTwain was certainly snarky wasn't he? He showed up several times on the list.
ReplyDelete