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- Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola Reviewed By Phillip Good Of Bookpleasures.com
Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola Reviewed By Phillip Good Of Bookpleasures.com
- By Phillip Good
- Published August 29, 2009
- General Non-Fiction ,
Phillip Good
Reviewer Phillip Good: Phillip has taught anatomy, biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics and physics at the college level. He has published in American Laboratory, Contemporary Clinical Trials, Computer Architecture News, Hustler Fantasies, Mechanisms of Aging and Development, Moxie, Volleyball Monthly, and Worm Runners Digest and is the author of seven statistics textbooks and 21 novels.
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Edited by Gary Dexter and Francis Lincoln:
London
ISBN 978-0-7112-2929-7
Click Here To Purchae Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola
When reviewing
a book, it's best to quote from it liberally, thereby revealing
either the author's strengths or her weaknesses. But how is
one
to choose from literary invective authored by Aristophanes,
Parker, Schiller, and Waugh, with targets ranging from Aristotle
(by Martin Luther)
to Rowling (by Harold Bloom)? O.K.,
here's one(no three):
(Gore Vidal on Solzhenitsyn) "He is
a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great
popularity in the US."
(Kingsley Amis on Vidal)
".he seems to me to suffer from American cleverness: the fear of
being though stupid, or dull, or behind the times."
(Philip
Larkin on Amis) "The only reason I hope I predecease him is that
I'd find it next to impossible to say anything nice about him at the
funeral service." [Larkin did]
Dexter's collection of
diatribes begins with de Quincy's (early 18th century A.D.) critique
of Homer (9th century B.C.), runs quickly but feelingly through the
early Greeks, Cicero, Chaucer, Dante, Cervantes, and the major
British authors of the first 17 centuries, followed by the Augustans,
the Romantics, the Victorians on both sides of the Channel and both
sides of the Atlantic, and onto the truly vicious infighting of the
20th Century.
One may object to the exclusion of obvious
targets like Amy Tan or the later Pynchon and the inclusion of
favorite authors such as Faulkner, Rowling and Solzhenitsyn, the
latter, "a bad man but a great wizard." Dexter's
cultural bias is evident: Great Canadian, contemporary French, and
African authors truly deserving of ridicule are excluded. The
contents of Poisoned Pens are restricted to writers on writers-no
critics capable only of criticism allowed. I would encourage
readers to supplement this collection with critic Dwight MacDonald's
Against the American Grain.
If you are a writer-and
who isn't these days with the ready availability of word processing
software, spelling checker, and on-line thesaurus-Poisoned Pens is a
must purchase along with Rotten Rejections: The Letters That
Publishers Wish They'd Never Sent, The New York Times Manual of
Style and Usage and Lukeman's The First Five Pages.