<a href="http://maudnewton.comMaud Newton directs our attention to an email circulating, sent from a book critic to an editor who changed a word in a review. The editor changed a "the" to an "a" in the review of Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea, which is more important than we made it sound, but still not this important.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. How fucking difficult is that?

It's the sentence that bestrides the fucking book I reviewed for you. It is the sentence I wrote first in my fucking review. It is 35 fucking letters long, which is why I wrote that it way. And so some useless cunt sub-editor decides to change it to "jumps over A lazy dog."

Maud Newton doesn't identify the author of the email, but a cursory Google search makes us think it's this guy. (Though that's a guess, we confess.) The full email after the jump—WL

(Update: Most people think it's this. They're probably right. It was a bad guess.)

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. How fucking difficult is that?

It's the sentence that bestrides the fucking book I reviewed for you. It is the sentence I wrote first in my fucking review. It is 35 fucking letters long, which is why I wrote that it way. And so some useless cunt sub-editor decides to change it to "jumps over A lazy dog."

Can you fucking count? Can you see that that makes it a 33 letter sentence? So it looks as if I can't count, and the cunting author of the book, poor Mr Dunn, cannot count. The whole bastard book turns on the sentence being as I fucking wrote it. And that it is exactly 35 letters long. Why do you meddle? What do you think you achieve with that kind of dumb-witted smart-arsery?

Why do you change things you do not understand without consulting? Why do you believe you know best when you know fuck all. Jack shit. That is as bad as editing can be. Fuck, I hope you're proud. It will be small relief for the author that nobody reads your poxy magazine.

Never ever ask me to write something for you. And don't pay me. I'd rather take 400 quid for assassinating a crack whore's only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal — my integrity would be less compromised.

Jesus fucking wept, I don't know what else to say.

"Your Poxy Magazine" [Maud Newton]

Reviews In Brief [San Francisco Chronicle]