Hoff in a Huff

Get this: apparently, being a New York Times-bestselling author of only occasionally tropey chicklit (but, to be fair, sometimes really awesome fantastical lit-fic) means that you get to act like an utter jerk on the interwebs!

When Boston Globe critic Roberta Silman dared to say things about Alice Hoffman’s new book, The Story Sisters, such as “this new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work” or “Admittedly, there are some wonderful passages as the book winds to a close” or other, um, burns and, uh, digs?, on par with those, Hoffman did what any self-respecting author angry at her book’s review would do: She turned to Twitter to extract vengeance on the reviewer.

In a series of 20-some-odd tweets, covered in all their stand-alone glory on Gawker, Hoffman became more and more unhinged, finally posting personal contact info for the reviewer at the Globe, and encouraging folks to contact said reviewer to tell her what they “think of snarky critics.”

Snarky critics, it must be said, who include statements in their reviews such as ...”one of my favorite books is her “Illumination Night,’’ which amply displays her gifts of precise prose and the ability to create sympathetic characters.”