What a Hoot: In the the NY Post, Jared Paul Stern shares "Just Call Them Lousy Writers":

Rick Moody, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy and most of the other sacred cows of contemporary American letters are boring hacks who use complicated writing to conceal the fact that they have nothing to say, a controversial new book charges.

In "A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose" (Melville House), one-time Atlantic Monthly writer B.R. Myers claims that a vast conspiracy between corporate publishing houses, mediocre writers and mindless reviewers has robbed the nation of good, meaningful books.

Morrison's Nobel Prize in literature, for instance, doesn't impress Myers, who relates an incident in which Oprah Winfrey called Morrison "to say she had had to puzzle repeatedly over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was, ‘That, my dear, is called reading.' Sorry, my dear Toni," Myers declares, "but it's actually called bad writing."

More hilarity in the article. Is there any current author more overrated than Toni Morrison? (Not counting the upcoming fiction from Bubba and Bubbette.)