Hasta La Gadget!

Though readers are well-advised to give all classics a proper chance rather than tossing aside Pride and Prejudice or The Scarlet Letter after a few boring pages, we can rest assured that even if we never come to appreciate Austen or Hawthorne, we would be in exalted company. The most celebrated of authors have long come in for their share of high-profile criticism, even from each other.

Great authors have always been subject to rivalries and artistic differences just like the rest of us — except that when they resort to disparaging each other’s work, their insults are no ordinary insults. When these wordsmiths turn their talents to literary burns, the results can be truly lyrical.

We’ve compiled 19 author-on-author zingers that are as well-crafted as they are cutting:

Henry James, according to H.G. Wells:
“His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle … And all for tales of nothingness … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.”

Aldous Huxley, according to Virginia Woolf:
“I am reading [Point Counter Point]. Not a good novel. All raw, uncooked, protesting.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.”

Bret Easton Ellis, according to David Foster Wallace:
“[American Psycho] panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.”

David Foster Wallace, according to Bret Easton Ellis:
“I continue to find David Foster Wallace the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation.”

Ezra Pound, according to Gertrude Stein:
“A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”

George Bernard Shaw, according to H.G. Wells:
“All through the war we shall have this Shavian accompaniment going on like an idiot child screaming in a hospital, discrediting, confusing. He is at present… an almost unendurable nuisance.”

James Baldwin, according to Norman Mailer:
“James Baldwin is too charming a writer to be major. If in Notes of a Native Son he has a sense of moral nuance which is one of the few modern guides to the sophistications of the ethos, even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume.”

Crime novelist James M. Cain, according to Raymond Chandler:
“Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.”

Langston Hughes, according to James Baldwin:
“Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts–and depressed that he has done so little with them.”

William Wordsworth, according to Dylan Thomas:
“Wordsworth was a tea-time bore, the great Frost of literature, the verbose, the humourless, the platitudinary reporter of Nature in her dullest moods. Open him at any page: and there lies the English language not, as George Moore said of Pater, in a glass coffin, but in a large, sultry, and unhygienic box. Degutted and desouled.”

Marcel Proust, according to Evelyn Waugh:
“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”

Richard Wright, according to James Baldwin:
“Below the surface of [Native Son] there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy.”

Honoré de Balzac, according to Gustave Flaubert:
“What a man he would have been had he known how to write!”

Walt Whitman, according to D.H. Lawrence:
“The awful Whitman. This post-mortem poet. This poet with the private soul leaking out of him all the time. All his privacy leaking out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the universe.”

Charlotte Brontë, according to George Eliot:
“I only wish the characters [of Jane Eyre] would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports.”

Bertolt Brecht according to Tom Stoppard:
“Personally, I would rather have written Winnie the Pooh than the collected works of Brecht.”

Jane Austen, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“Miss Austen’s novels… seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe, according to James Baldwin:
“She was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer.”

GENEVA (AP) — The Syrian government has likely used chlorine gas to attack civilians while the Islamic State group has committed crimes against humanity with attacks on civilians in two provinces in the country, an independent U.N. commission said Wednesday.

The report from the commission, which has been tasked to investigate potential war crimes in the country, marks the first time the United Nations has assigned blame for the use of the chemical agent. Specifically, the commission said “reasonable grounds exist to believe” that government forces loyal to President Bashar Assad unleashed a chemical agent, likely chlorine, on civilians in northern Syrian villages eight times in April. According to the report, victims and medical personnel described symptoms caused by exposure to chemicals and witnesses told of a chlorine-like smell immediately after seeing government helicopters drop barrel bombs on the civilian-inhabited areas in Idlib and Hama provinces eight times between the 11th and 29th of April.

The commission also noted widespread and systematic civilian killings by Islamic State, which now controls a swath of north and eastern Syria. It said attacks have taken place in the northern province of Aleppo and in the northeastern region of Raqqa, a stronghold of the group. The findings mean that U.N. officials now believe Islamic State has committed crimes against humanity in Syria and Iraq, the two countries in which the group has carved out a self-styled caliphate.

“This is a continuation — and a geographic expansion — of the widespread and systematic attack on the civilian population,” according to the report by the four-member commission chaired by Brazilian diplomat and scholar Paulo Sergio Pinheiro.

The group’s gruesome beheading of an American journalist and its declaration of a state governed by a harsh interpretation of Islamic law across Iraq and Syria have inserted a new dynamic into the international standoff over the Syrian war.

The latest report, based on 480 interviews and documentary material, cited dozens of documented public executions in Aleppo and Raqqa during the bloody and complex Syrian civil war that the United Nations says has killed more than 190,000 people.

Crowds of people including children have reportedly watched as the group’s fighters pronounce mostly adult men guilty of violating religious laws, and then behead them or shoot them in the head at close range. The purpose, according to the commission, is “to instill terror among the population, ensuring submission to its authority.”

Photos posted online Wednesday show the aftermath of the Islamic State group’s takeover of the Tabqa air base in Raqqa province. In one photo, masked gunmen can be seen shooting seven men kneeling on the ground in front of them.

The photos correspond to other reporting by The Associated Press of the airfield’s fall to the extremist militants.

But the commission also emphasized that Assad’s government forces continue to perpetrate crimes against humanity — the most serious and systematic type of widespread crime against civilians— through massacres and systematic murder, torture, rape and disappearances. And it said other factions fighting Assad’s government are also committing massacres and war crimes.

On Monday, U..N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said the Islamic State fighters reportedly killed up to 670 prisoners in the Iraqi city of Mosul and committed other horrific abuses that amount to crimes against humanity.

Pillay said the Islamic State group and other fighters allied with it are daily committing “grave, horrific human rights violations” in Iraq such as targeted killings, abductions, trafficking, slavery and sexual abuse in an aggressive push to gain a firm grip on Iraq’s northern and eastern provinces.

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