Poisoned Pens by Gary Dexter - Review

Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola
by Gary Dexter
Publisher: Frances Lincoln (reprint)
Publication Date: Aug 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0711231627
240 Pages
Nonfiction


Product Description:

Poisoned Pens is the tasty compendium of well read feuds, slights, spleen, as well as venom, drawn from The Guardian journal mainstay Writers on Writers. From what Byron unequivocally suspicion of Keats to Salman Rushdie's savage put-down of John Le Carre, from Cocteau's damning view of Victor Hugo to Edith Sitwell's derogatory outline of D. H. Lawrence, here, complied by the bard of Why Not Catch 21? is an anthology of writers on writers, eloquently giving opening to their slightest charitable feelings in outbursts of petulance, denunciations, abuse, mockery, as well as more.


My Opinion:

Poisoned Pens is the book of quotes by authors about alternative famous writers. Some have been funny, the little witty, the little rather dry, though pointed nonetheless.

Some have been droll even yet we have no clue who they have been referring to, such as Virginia Woolf's perspective of Arnold Bennett's writing:
I dined with Arnold Bennett the alternative night. Do you know him? He is the kind old walrus, who unexpected shuts his eye like the passed fish as well as waits three minutes before he can finish his sentence. He makes huge sums of money; though has horrible dinners. . . . He says which good artists need all the comfort they can get. But is he the good artist? we rebuff all novels, so we can't say. Page 159As the outcome of my failure to read (or understand) Ulysses by James Joyce, we took good joy in reading the insults as well as criticisms about his writing. Ezra Pound had this to contend about Finnegan's Wake in the minute he sent to James Joyce:
I will have an additional go at it, thou! gh up to present we have zero of it whatever. Nothing so distant as we have out, zero short of divine vision or the new cure for the clap can possibly be value all the circumambient peripherization. Page 174
And we can't assistance though allude to Virginia Woolf again. She positively had an perspective as well as wasn't hesitant to put into difference what she unequivocally suspicion of someone. She writes:
I finished Ulysses, & cruise it the misfire. Genius it has we think; though of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the viewable sense, though in the well read sense. A initial rate writer, we mean, respects essay too most to be tricky; startling; doing stunts. . . Page 175The book is orderly chronologically, starting with classic authors as well as relocating by complicated day writers. we have to confess which we enjoyed the second half of the book distant more than the first, though which unequivocally makes clarity when you cruise which we am more informed with the works of complicated authors.

This book should interest to bibliophiles, generally those with the asocial clarity of humor.

Rating: 4/5





*I received the giveaway duplicate of this book for review.
Living & Leisure Buzz