Literary Rejects
JA
August 13
This literary rejection surfaced on the Rumpus blog just last week. Mark Trainer, a US writer, received this note from a ‘respected literary agent’:
‘I have no confidence in being able to place a collection at this time in the world of publishing. Publishers don’t like to publish short story collections in general unless they are VERY high concept or by someone very strange or very famous or Indian. In the current climate, it is harder to publish even those. Some of the authors I represent have story collections I have not been able to talk their loyal publishers into publishing. I can’t in good conscience encourage you to send them to me. It will just make both of us feel bad. I am very sorry. If you write another novel, I will gladly read it.’
One wonders if this agent has heard of Nam Le, or for the matter Wells Tower or Aleksandar Hemon, all of whom have published brilliant short story collections in the past year.
Trainer, however, should take heart – many famous novelists encountered dismissals (and snarky notes to boot) at one point or another. Here are a few, care of the Examiner:
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (which went on to win the Hugo and Nebula Awards)
‘The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace, that whatever drama and excitement the novel might have had is entirely dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the time, to be extraneous material. My thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. The manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is returned herewith.’
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
‘…overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian…the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream…I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.’
George Orwell, Animal Farm
‘It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.’
Sylvia Plath, poetry
‘There certainly isn't enough genuine talent for us to take notice.’
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
‘His frenetic and scrambled prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don't think so.’
Jorge Luis Borges, poetry
His work, according to one publisher, was ‘utterly untranslatable’.
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
The manuscript was rejected by 20 publishers, because it was ‘an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.’
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
'I haven’t the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say…Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level.'
Richard Adams, Watership Down
'Older children wouldn’t like it because its language was too difficult.'
Update: I've also just come across this blog Literary Rejections on Display: A Vast Public Collection of Real-Life Rejection. Self explanatory really, worth a gander if you have a spare few minutes (or if you want to share your letters).
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Comments
13 Aug 09 at 9:29
My favourite is: George Orwell, Animal Farm ‘It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.’
Gives us all hope!
...13 Aug 09 at 9:57
Perhaps I've been in the industry too long, but I thought the letter from the 'respected literary agent' seemed perfectly reasonable.
...13 Aug 09 at 10:50
Sophie, so did I. The thing about the collections JA cites is precisely that they are brilliant -- so brilliant as to overcome the prejudice. But as some of us know, what goes around comes around, so if you've got a short story collection you can't get published, just wait five years or so and suddenly publishers will be begging you for it.
Well, almost.
...13 Aug 09 at 12:58
Kerouac - certainly my favourite. If this were about 'Hippos died in their tanks', i would have agreed. But 'On the Road'... sheesh.
...13 Aug 09 at 13:45
The "unless they are VERY high concept or by someone very strange or very famous or Indian" part made me laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
...13 Aug 09 at 13:50
Even if the agent's off the mark (and I suspect he's not), it's quite a nice rejection. Instead of a dull form letter, it reads as honest and encouraging.
(Of course, he might just have a wonderfully varied selection of form letters.)
...13 Aug 09 at 16:47
Of course just because those books went on to become published and famous doesn't mean the poor schlubs who are the brunt of all this retrospective ridicule were necessarily wrong. Strangely enough, it is permissible to think a literary classic is a load of crap. Is Borges translatable? I'd say the jury is still out. As for Lolita, even if you think it is brilliant, those comments are still quite apt. And I am unanimous in that.
...14 Aug 09 at 10:53
Good publishers aren't in it for the glory (though they'll take it where they can get it) or the money (let's face it, garbos eat 'em for breakfast); what floats their boats are great stories and their tellers. They can be sparse, dense, short, or long; funny, serious, rude or scary. They just gotta be great.
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