Rejected Authors: Background information when reading Rejection

Rejected Authors

This article relates to Rejection

The final, titular story of Tony Tulathimutte's collection Rejection is styled as a letter from a publisher explaining to the author why they will not be publishing the book. This form is used as a means of exploring the stories within from the perspective of a potential critic, and is used to humorous effect as the author considers his own biases and motivations for writing what he did.

Virtually every author has dealt with rejection from a publisher. Famously, it takes a long time to find the right home for a book, and that path is frequently paved with "no"s. But rejection is often less about a piece of writing not being good enough and more about an individual publisher or editor's particular taste and needs.

In a 2019 article, LitHub presents a roundup of rejection letters to very famous authors, including a response to Ursula K. Le Guin's agent from an editor for The Left Hand of Darkness: "The book is so endlessly complicated...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." The Left Hand of Darkness won the science fiction Nebula and Hugo Awards and went on to sell over a million copies in English. The list also includes this gem written to Marcel Proust in response to Swann's Way: "My dear fellow, I may perhaps be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed. I clutched my head."

The American Writers Museum has their own collection of quotes from rejection letters to authors ranging from Julia Child to Herman Melville. In the case of the former, the publisher felt it likely that the American housewife would be "frightened" by Child's recipe repertoire; in the latter, Moby Dick was adroitly deemed a little too gay. The editor responding to Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead accurately predicted that the author's "enormous bitterness" might be grating to readers, while the editor writing to Hart Crane regarding White Buildings kindly suggested that it was not Crane's work that was the problem, but merely his own inferior intellect which prevented him from understanding the book's "most perplexing kind of poetry."

In Tulathimutte's story "Rejection," the editor tells the author that rather than submit to another publisher, he should simply give up: "It hurts to be read. When people don't like it, that's terrible and nothing can be done. And even when they do, they usually do so for the wrong reasons, project what isn't there, draw the wrong conclusions, form the wrong idea about why it was written, which is just as disheartening and alienating as any rejection." In its cruelty, the story captures how brutal a rejection of one's creative output can feel. The silver lining is that a writer's ideal reader may be just over the horizon.

In an article on this subject for The Cut, author Alexander Chee explains the attitude he takes toward rejection: "You have to let go of what your ego wants and understand what you're looking for, the readers who understand you and get excited about the work. That's where any momentum for a career comes from: finding those people." Emma Straub makes a similar point: "I don't take things too personally if they're about my book. But especially now, after running the bookstore for three years, I understand more than ever that every book is not for every person — and that every person is not for every book." Rachel Khong agrees: "But that's always been a reassurance to me — that there will hopefully be one person who gets it, one editor who really gets it, and that's all you need."

Pen and crumpled paper
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This article relates to Rejection. It first ran in the September 18, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.