There’s something about the web that brings out the worst in authors, whether it’s Alain de Botton’s in response to a bad review (“I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make”) or, more recently, the teddy-bear detective affair (check the comments).

But the latest internet author meltdown comes courtesy of Ayelet Waldman, esteemed American novelist, author of the recent novel Love and Treasure, and the writer who brought down an avalanche of criticism when she admitted she loved her husband more than her children. The New York Times said that, in Love and Treasure, she “sustains her multiple plot lines with breathless confidence and descriptive panache, fashioning complex personalities caught up in an inexorable series of events”; the Wall Street Journal that the novel was “thoughtful, expansive”.

Why, then, asked Waldman in a rage on Twitter, was the title not included on the New York Times’s list of “100 notable books of 2014”? Actually, she didn’t put it quite like that. The Daily Dot has rounded up her series of tweets, and they are … cross.

“I am really not dealing well with having failed to make the @nytimes notable book list. Love & Treasure is a fucking great novel IISSM,” she begins. “I never complain about this shit, but there are MANY books on that notable list with reviews that were NOWHERE near as good as mine. What do they mean by ‘Notable?’ How does a book that got a decidedly mediocre review count as ‘notable’ when one with a good one doesn’t?”

And: “It’s just so fucking demoralizing. You pour your heart into your work, you get awesome reviews, and then someone decides it’s not “notable.” I mean. Why do I bother? I could write a fucking journal.”

“Fuck the fucking NY Times,” she concludes, after urging followers to buy a copy of the paperback to make her feel better, promising that “For every preorder I’ll donate $1 to http://www.scholarmatch.com”.

Her comments have been received with a mix of hilarity and incredulity. “Not even a nod to Love and Treasure in a Washington Post list of the year’s top 50 fiction books, acknowledged with a brusque sense of entitlement, could allay Waldman’s existential despair,” wrote The Daily Dot’s Miles Klee. “When will literature’s movers and shakers do the right thing and bestow all arbitrary seasonal accolades on well-known writers who truly, madly, deeply feel they deserve them?”

On Twitter itself, eyebrows were being raised and wits sharpened. Amidst cries of “how not to behave”, Joanne Harris mused: “I should have a Nobel Prize by now. And a pastel pony of my very own”, while Patrick Ness joked: “Ayelet Waldman … has written a blog about her disgust at being left out of the new Bond cast. And that it’s not called ‘Ayelet’”.

Waldman herself, though, is as yet … unabashed. She knows what she’s done, and doesn’t appear to be poised on the edge of repenting, or deleting the evidence, as Susanna Scott suggested. “Nah,” Ayelet replied.  “I was honest. Am not ashamed.”