anonymous reviews by the authors themselves

The classic example, for me, is Whitman, who decided to write his own review of the 1855 edition of "Leaves of Grass" by saying "FINALLY, AN AMERICAN BARD AT LAST."

He also, of course, published a letter by Emerson -- which was an action Emerson did not approve of, if I remember correctly.

don't contemporary authors do this on amazon all the time?

or do they?

Lovecraft or Poe or something. God, my memory is fuzzy.

Some examples of shit authors self-reviewing pleez.

i can only offer john stamos reviewing a book of poetry by charlie sheen:

Reviewer: john stamos (LACA) - See all my reviews
Charlie is a personal friend of mine, and i have been reading his poetry for years. This collection is the best of the best as far as Chas's art is concerned. When one works on a show like full house, one sees many forms of expression (from "youve got it dude" to "Watch the hair!" [my personal favorite!]). Sheen expresses the overall feeling of the modern man. From our disgust with the system (damn the man) to our love of sheenistry. Not many people realized that i not only function as an actor, but as a producer. How does this relate to Los? one might ask. Well, sheen PRODUCES some pretty good poetry. Ok ok. Some of sheen's poems may be seen as obscene, thats what i hear anyway. Well, thats trash. that is like saying c thomas howell is a bad tennis player. its just flat out not true. Sheen steals part of ourselves and gives us a chunk of humanity and sheenathan. And, everything that is sheentastic. i remember when a young man named carlos estevez came to town and tried to break into the business. After a name change and a little flick named Lucas, the buzz was too loud to ignore. i personally think that the artist formerly known as estevez will be known more for his poetry than for his acting. carlos is of a caliber not normally seen in this lifetime. I know that sheen has given us all something to think about. ok, i know what you are thinking. he is a mysoginist. nope. he is a drug addict/alcoholic. nope. first of all, as sheen once said, "nobody ever told me it wasnt ok to have a good time." ill vouch for that. ive known the man for quite a while, and never, i mean never, during that time did anyone tell the man that it was not ok to have a good time. now, time to get down to the nitty gritty. The poetry. it is outstanding. brilliant. fun. did i say outstanding? yeah. i am going to go out on a limb here. are you ready? sheen has produced the greatest book of all time. did i say the greatest book of all time? yes. the greatest book of poetry of all time? nope. the greatest book of all time. Why? well ill answer that. sheen is willing to take on the greatest of topics. i wont spoil anything, but lets just say he runs the gamut from A to F. F stands for a bad word. now im going to introduce a new word. Sheenastia. verb. - to live life with the greatest of detailed theological reasoning known to the human form. NOUN - a bong. There is one movie that i would like to expound upon. please allow. NO CODE OF CONDUCT is a film not like any other. on the surface, it seems to be the story of a man's struggle to solve a crime. yeah, yeah, but thats not the end of it. It is ultimately an allegory of one man's search for truth. It may have been directed by the greatest new directing talent on the planet. bret michaels. alright, enough. back to my experience as it relates to sheen. sheens and my life have intertwined on not only a physical but a spiritual level. And through sheens words, i have found life. life's name is estevez. the extevez tribe started in spain in the year 4000 bc. when the spanish conquered much of south america, the estevez's moved on to find their fortune in the new world. they made it, but little jose esteves, didnt. this created a long line of disillusionment within the sheen's inner circle. it lasted for generations, and was not truly harnessed in art until young carlos sheen, born 2350 years after jose, gave his artistic gifts to the world. now, we experience a new form of sheen. a new form of expression. i believe that this book will outlast us all, and will be the final testament of a species that never fully grasped their capability. Call me oldfashioned, but that is the way i feel. sheen has given us what we may never repay. now i will get to the real purpose of this review. i, as a spiritual being, believe in my deepest darkest regions, that sheen the publishing of this book breaks the forth seal of the apolcolypse. that being said, i also believe that sheen is not human. allow me to qualify. sheen, the father of modern thought, is supernatural. sure martin claims to be his biological father. but i know this is not the case. the conception of one carlos sheen-estevez was one of divinity. this impregnation parallels that of another great book of poetry. in fact, i'm not convinced that sheen did not write that great book, as either one apostles or the Lord himself. How did this happen, it cant be true you say. permit my clarification. it is not widely known, but this book of poetry was originally written by sheen during a year of isolation and meditation in the mountains. sheen during this binge of spirituality, would go into trances where he would write unconsciously. Big deal, you say. well, did i mention that he wrote it in a dead language known as aremaic. Once this book is broken down, translated back into other languages and then back to native american languages, we will get the true translation, we will see THE BOOK OF SHEEN aka a piece of my mind.

which is really no help at all.

Didn't Orton complain about his books under the name of Edna Welthorpe, Mrs? (Or was that merely an outlet for other disgruntlements?)

Not books, obviously - plays.

The Clockmaker's Outcry is meant to be Sterne doing this I think?

No at all anonymous, but supposedly Anne Rice reviewed her own Memnoch the Devil on Amazon. She gives herself five stars, surprise surprise. It might be a complete hoax, but then again I think Amazon checks their reader reviewers, at least somewhat

The Author Makes a Brief Statement, July 23, 2003
Reviewer: A reader
Be assured, for what it's worth, that this book was written with considerable spiritual ambitions. Lestat is my soul. For me and for him, this quest was inevitable. The Vampire Chronicles are meant to entertain, yes, but they are meant to do a great deal more than that. Does no one want to remark on the fact that in this book Lestat turned his back on a cosmos obsessed with crime and punishment for an experience with the character Dora which affirmed what is often called "the eternal feminine?" Does no one want to connect that experience, in which Lestat drinks the blood of Dora's menses, with the legends surrounding Veronica's veil which figures so prominantly in the novel? I appreciate the thoughtful comments, but wonder if we can raise the level of discourse here for some of the other readers. Let me repeat my assurance: If you took this book seriously, trust me that it was meant seriously. Enough said. Anne Rice, New Orleans, La.

I am almost positive that this review of my former professor's book is by my professor:

Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801-1812 (Literary Studies) (Hardcover)
by William C. Dowling

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A brilliant reinterpretation of early American literature, August 7, 1998
Reviewer: A reader
This book has totally opened my eyes to a new relation between American literature and politics. I'm a grad student working on a dissertation on Emerson, and got hold of page proofs of this book because my advisor had them for review. This book argues that the whole notion of American lit as "a world elsewhere" -- as Richard Poirier called it: a world existing in language apart from politics and history -- lies in the relation between literature and politics during the years of Jefferson's presidency. The argument is immensely complex, but the bottom line is that there were two visions of America competing at around the time of 1800: the Federalist vision of America as an organic community based on civic virtue and mutual obligation, and the Jeffersonian vision based on radical French doctrines of equality, with a basis in radical individualism. Dowling's argument is that Jeffersonian radical individualism won, to the point that it has been our "national ideology" ever since. Not just the glorification of the "free" individual, but a market economy, consumerism, emphasis on consumption and "self-expression" through the market, and a mass democracy based on mass taste (TV, supermarkets, etc). The argument of the book is that Federalists, by the time Jefferson's second term had ended, knew that the vision of a "communitarian America" had vanished forever. So they moved the classical republic vision of the American republic into literature, where it became a mode of expression and moral witness. The process starts in Joseph Dennie's Port Folio magazine -- I never even knew it existed before I read this book -- but then continues through Irving, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry James, and Henry Adams (to name just a few in the tradition of what Dowling calls "literary Federalism." So American literature becomes "America in exile" -- a vision of America vanished from the realm of politics and taking up a new home inside language and the literary imagination. This is a really exciting book. After reading 200 books about gender and identity politics and "the postcolonial other" and similar exercises in empty trendiness, it hit me like a revelation. I've thrown out the whole earlier draft of my Emerson dissertation and am starting all over again.

Oh yeah, and also this one:

The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory (Paperback)
by William C. Dowling

Amazing argument for "the literary study of literature", April 6, 1999
Reviewer: A reader
I picked up this book expecting to skim it. Our professors in graduate school taught us that "the literary study of literature" was a formalist slogan from the 1950s used to justify escaping from politics into "aestheticism." I bought the book because an ad said it gives an introduction to Chomsky's linguistic theory, which I always wanted to know about. I thought I could skip the other parts and just pick up some linguistic theory.

Now I've read the book -- so have two friends of mine: we stayed up all night talking about it -- and my sense is that there is some kind of big change going on in English departments that we didn't know about. The book turns out not just to give you Chomsky's theory -- I actually understand generative grammar now -- it gives you almost a whole course in modern philosophy of language, incredibly clearly explained. You feel like you actually understand all the issues and the philosophers (Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine, Kripke, Grice, et al.) in non-oversimplified terms, but also without pain. The effect is like a bucket of ice water. My friends and I have agreed -- two of us have, anyway -- that the "theory" we learned in grad school was a giant fraud. The last chapter of this book talks about how what English departments count as "theory" is an intellectual embarrassment. When I ran across that sentence while leafing through right after I bought it, it made me really mad. By the time I'd read through the whole thing and got to the same sentence, it just seemed like plain truth. It is an eye-opener.

The demolition job on "political" criticism and "poststructuralist" criticism (Carey and Dougherty) in chapter one is sort of bloody to watch: when you're reading it, it seems like Sherman's march to the sea -- scorched earth, nothing left standing. But the "positive" parts of the same chapter -- where the book takes you inside a classroom where "close reading" is being taught and shows you how it works, lets you see it from the students' point of view -- are exhilarating. So you come out feeling pretty good. Then the rest of the book, that takes you through a whole stretch of modern philosophy of language and lets you understand it, is amazing. Five stars.

But then I guess no one else would find that as exciting as I do.