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A hilarious selection of reviews highlighting scathing attacks on authors and on works that became classics. In this collection of acerbic, mistaken judgements, Albert Camus' great work The Fall is deemed by the New Statesman, 'a good deal of jaded Bohemian roc'. Jane Austen is dismissed as a "husband-hunting butterfly" and Emily Dickinson is 'an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse'. On the publication of Madame Bovary, Le Figaro declared 'Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer.' E. M. Forster's classic A Passage to India is 'spiritually lacking in insight' and Anna Karenina is 'sentimental rubbish'. George Bernard Shaw found A Midsummer Night's Dream, 'the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life." Robert Garland, reviewing Chekhov's latest play commented, "If you were to ask me what Uncle Vanya is about, I would say about as much as I can take." Any writer who has ever received a rotten review will find consolation in this book. Here are excerpts from 175 withering notices which will entertain and enlighten all readers, writers and reviewers.