A few weeks ago, Bookninja pointed to this thing, a humorous ranking of American authors, starting with the self-published "Centipede in the Darkness," moving up through "Three for a dollar feeder fish" to "9.98 PETCO Gerbil" and on up:

"$9.98 PETCO GERBIL: Anne Tyler/Carol Shields/Jane Smiley

Have won the Pulitzer Prize and other major awards but are thought of by most critics, writers, and journalists to be primarily romance authors or perhaps 'self-help' authors, partly because all their books are bestsellers but mostly because they are women who write about human relationships and are not from a foreign country. Make enough money to not have blogs, MySpace pages, or their e-mail addresses on the internet. Will never be written about in Review of Contemporary Fiction. Secretly considered 'unseemly in a wholesome way somehow' by serious literary critics; 'I don't know, is it okay to read these people?' by MFA students at Iowa Writers' Workshop; and 'I really, really want to stay away from those people and their books' by people who like Thomas Pynchon a lot."

The writer makes some astute points, such as women rarely achieve the "F-14 FIGHTER PLANE SHOOTING MISSILES AT CACTI IN NEVADA" success of Pynchon and Delillo, and that Philip Roth is "shit talked only by $9.98 Petco Gerbils or lower."