Views and Reviews
1) Which female novelist got in trouble for saying, in a 2003 New York Times article, that Harry Potter was written “for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the
exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip” ?2) Which book was Oscar Wilde talking about when he said: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
3) Which significant, and very long, 1922 novel did Virginia Woolf dismiss as the work of a “queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
4) Which ex-soap actress published her debut novel The Mistress this year, described in The Guardian as ‘arguably one of the most baffling publishing decisions since Headline paid more than minus 37p for Ashley Cole's emetic memoir My Defence’?
5) Which American author's writing, from his novel's first word 'Renowned' onwards, did linguist
Geoffrey Pullum describe as “not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad”?6) What is the title of the novel, all of which takes place on February 15th 2003, which John Banville described as “a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set.”
7) Who was Mark Twain talking about when he said that, every time he read her most famous book, ‘I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone’?
8) Which poet’s Endymion was dismissed by a contemporary reviewer as “imperturbable drivelling idiocy”?
9) It was recently revealed that the BBC had a ban on dramatisi
ng a certain children’s author’s books, from the 1930s to the 1950s, describing the author as a ‘tenacious second-rater’ who wrote ‘stilted and longwinded’ books. Who is the author in question?10) Which celebrity ‘novelist,’ whose 2007 book outside the Booker shortlist, did Lynda La Plante call ‘a terrible thing for young girls who just want pink welly boots.’
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