Before today I'd never heard of Sloane Crosley. I had no preconceptions about her either one way or the other. Then I read this:
Sloane Crosley's books, although different in tone to those of Gould and Daum – she self-mockingly writes of her own comic misadventures in a manner heavily influenced by David Sedaris – share a similar aspiration. "I think different essays of mine have different points to them and are crafted in different ways, which is why I hate Jane Austen," says Crosley, who lives in New York and works as a publicist for Random House, where she represents authors including Dave Eggers, Toni Morrison and Jay McInerney. "Has anyone noticed that she's just changed the names in Emma and turned it into Sense and Sensibility? It's just the same story.
"You want to say something larger, to say something cohesive, to impart a truth in a way that is beautiful..."
OK, so one half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other, and Crosley is observing crassly, as others before her, that Jane Austen is pretty much just girl-gets-boy. But to compare yourself to advantage with Austen in the matter of imparting truth and beauty is beyond grotesque.