Friday, September 07, 2007

Ah, Rejection

No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov - New York Times: "For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. Recently, however, scholars trolling through the Knopf archive have been struck by the number of reader’s reports that badly missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned. The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Ana�s Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”) and Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (too racy) and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (“hopelessly bad”)."

11 comments:

Elizabeth Foxwell said...

My favorite dismissive comment by a publisher is the one that sunk Charlotte Perkins Gilman's only mystery novel, _Unpunished_ (written in 1929):

"I find your characters interesting. That is not necessary in a detective story."

_Unpunished_ was finally published by Feminist Press in 1997.

Anonymous said...

this means that my minimalist novel about deformed cactus apples with a motivation for killing and a bloodlust for human flesh if only they could become detached from the plant and solve the problem of mobility and resolve their inner conflicts regarding murder could still be worthwhile?

mybillcrider said...

The editor of a pen-name horror novel I wrote years ago told me to "get rid of the character development."

Anonymous said...

so you would not agree with the observation that character development is a crutch for people who cant plot?

mybillcrider said...

Well, that editor sure would.

Anonymous said...

somebody's gonna pick up either your ball or my ball on this and run with it. hold on......wait for it.....explosive controversy on bill criders pop culture site is on it's way...

Anonymous said...

KENYON REVIEW ran a selection of these Knopf publisher's readers' comments, pro and con, a few years back, and they were pretty amusing and illuminating. Not sure the NYT-quoted Nin assessment, at least, is wrong.

Clearly, from the comments here as well as in the Knopf archives, some editors (and slush readers) simply resent their tasks, and resent the fictional (or other literary) fields they are busy traducing. But I guess we knew that.

Anonymous said...

we have entered an age when everyone can be his own editor with grand impunity and each let his particular and earth-rattling genius run naked and free to the betterment of mankind. we should know the results soon.

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