From the pens of critics who are not afraid to speak freely:

• “This is not a novel to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force.” — Dorothy Parker
• “I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.” — Max Reger
• “There is probably no hell for authors in the next world – they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this one.” — Christian N. Bovée
• “Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.” — Samuel Johnson
• “A mere ulcer; a sore from head to foot; a poor devil so completely flayed that there is not a square inch of healthy flesh on his carcass; an overgrown pimple, sore to the touch.” — The Quarterly Review on William Hazlitt in 1817
• “Of Dicken’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical and created by himself in defiance of rules … No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.” — Anthony Trollope on Charles Dickens
• “I have two recommenda­tions. First, don’t buy this book. Second, if you buy this book, don’t drop it on your foot.” — The New Yorker on Chesapeake by James Michener
• “It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.” — Dorothy Parker on Service of the King by Aimee Semple McPherson
• “Never have I read such tosh. As for the first two chapters, we will let them pass, but the third, the fourth the fifth the sixth – merely the scratchings of pimples on the body of the boot-boy at Claridges.” — Virginia Woolf on James Joyce’s Ulysses
• “This is easily one of the worst books I’ve ever read. And bear in mind that I’ve read John Grisham.” — Susan Cohen on Stieg Larsson’s The Girls With That Dragon Tattoo
• “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.” — The Examiner on Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

“Bloom County” by Berkeley Breathed, syndicated by Washington Post Writers Group