I gave Nicholas Sparks a hard time for criticizing Cormac McMarthy, but author-vs.-author smackdowns are nothing new.

Michelle Kerns, The Book Examiner, was kind enough to compile 50 of the best authorial insults. Here are some of my favorites.

Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Navokov:
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

Bells, Balls and Bulls would be an excellent name for an unauthorized Hemingway biography (or, at least, a Hemingway blog.)

William Faulkner, according to Ernest Hemingway:
Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.

Yeah, Hemingway’s one to talk. He wrote with a pencil in one hand and a drink in the other. In fact, new game — read a Hemingway story and try to guess when he passed out on the page.

Voltaire, according to Charles Baudelaire:
I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire...the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.

Baudelaire took the Joakim Noah route and didn’t just diss the man. He dissed the locale. (Personally, I thought Voltaire was clever when I read him in college. Now, I realize how worthless cleverness is.)

John Updike, according to Gore Vidal:
I can’t stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I’m supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him. I’m more popular than he is, and I don’t take him very seriously...oh, he comes on like the worker’s son, like a modern-day D.H. Lawrence, but he’s just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it.

See, Gore, this is why nobody likes you.

Bret Harte, according to Mark Twain:
Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth as carefully as if he considered it a disgrace. How do I know? By the best of all evidence, personal observation.

I am disappointed that Bret Hart never tried to avenge his namesake. Hart v. Twain — the sharpshooter v. the sharp wit — I’d drop $30 on a pay-per-view to watch.

As a final stray link, enjoy some passive-aggressive library signs.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Rabbit is finally at rest.

John Updike, 76, died Tuesday from lung cancer. The man wrote novels, nonfiction, literary critiques and magazine articles. He died with all-star statistics, two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards.

Updike balanced on the thin precipice between commercial and critical success, and he did it by being a working author. He was on the short list of authors from the United States who had a real crack at winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, the bias of the board aside.

Like most prodigious authors, Updike’s output was vast and uneven. (If everything an author puts out is brilliant, then they probably wrote one thing and quit while they were ahead.) Critics occasionally accused him of valuing style over substance, but he tackled subjects—divorce, depression, sex, suburban women dabbling in the arcane—with equal aplomb.

His final novel, “The Widows of Eastwick,” was the sequel to his best-recognized work, the “Witches” from the same place. I say “best recognized” because I have not read all of Updike’s more than 50 books and cannot say it was his best.

He also created Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a character he followed through four books: “Rabbit, Run,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Rabbit is Rich,” and “Rabbit at Rest.” The Rabbit series garnered a pair of Pulitzers and a National Book Award. It also gave readers an icon, a man incapable of accepting his insignificance or, contrarily, accomplishing anything that mattered.

But when I think Updike, I won’t think “Eastwick” or even “Rabbit.” I’ll think of dinosaurs. In 2007, Updike scribed an article about unusual Mesozoic monsters for “The National Geographic.” He wrote about Mononykus’s smug dependence on a single clawed digit and the ungainly long arms of Deinocheirus, as if it were a high school basketball player.

I’d read Updike before, but I read him because I felt I should read him. I read him with the same compulsion with which we read Melville in high school, in case there might be a test. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy him, but it still felt mandatory.

Reading the article, I felt a kinship with Updike. Sure, Updike will probably win his third Pulitzer before I win my first; but this was a man who lived by the pen, not so far removed from blue-collar typists who must write for their supper. Updike wrote, and kept writing, because that was the best way he had to express himself, the best way he had to understand his surroundings.

I understand that.

So I returned to Updike—his reviews for “The New Yorker,” Angstrom, “The Centaur”—this time for me. I got a late start, so my reading may never catch Updike’s writing, but it will be worth the run.

--Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com