Worth reposting 7 years later

Damn, I've been blogging a long time!

Sunday, April 27, 2003  

Today's rotten reviews
What some critics have said about some of my favorite works.

• Chekhov's Uncle Vanya: "If you were to ask me what Uncle Vanya is about, I would say about as much as I can take." Journal American
• Hart Crane's The Bridge: "A form of hysteria." Poetry
• Dos Passos' The 42nd Parallel: "[Dos Passos] 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." The Spectator
• James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: "There are many objectionable passages and references."Library Journal
• Faulkner's Light In August: "...what he is actually offering us is a flight from reality." The Bookman
• Fitsgerald's The Great Gatsby:
  
  • "...a book of the season only." New York Herald Tribune
  • "an absurd story" Saturday Review of Literature
• Flaubert's Madame Bovary: "Mons. Flaubert is not a writer." Le Figaro
• Heller's Catch-22: "gasps for want of craft and sensibility" New York Times Book Review
• Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: "His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions..." The Dial
• Huxley's Brave New World: "A lugubrious and heavy-handed piece of propaganda." New York Herald Tribune
• Jones' From Here to Eternity: "Certainly America has something better to offer the world..." Christian Science Monitor
• Joyce's Ulysses: "a misfire" Virginia Woolf
• Malamud's The Assistant: "too grim a picture to have wide appeal" Kirkus Reviews
• O'Connor's Wise Blood: "Neither satire nor humor is achieved." Saturday Review of Literature
• O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra: "a symptom of a lack of knowledge of the novelist's real art."Saturday Review of Literature