WHEN I finished writing my debut novel, I did what I understood every writer who wants to publish a novel must do: I started submitting it to agents. Some years earlier I had worked with an agent on a novel that didn’t sell, but I chalked up that experience to simple bad luck and set about querying agents for the new book. Ten months and more than sixty query letters later, I had a small stack of glowing reader reports and reluctant passes, but no offers of representation.
The universe, it seemed, was once again politely but firmly saying no. But as I read the responses I was getting from agents, something bothered me. They seemed to genuinely like the book. They just couldn’t figure out how to sell it. They wanted me to amp up the story, worrying that it was “too quiet,” which I read as agent-speak for a book driven more by character development than plot. They also feared that women, who read more fiction than men, studies consistently find, might not gravitate toward a love story told from the perspective of a man in the grip of his addictions—in other words, a character who isn’t always sympathetic.
On a purely commercial level I could see their point, but every time I considered rewriting the novel in the ways they suggested, instead of feeling amped I just felt tired. The book they seemed to be asking for wasn’t the book I’d set out to write. And based on what I was hearing from agents and from other writers who had read it, I believed strongly that the book—my book, as I had envisioned it— would find an audience.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July - August 2022-Ausgabe von Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July - August 2022-Ausgabe von Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
The Fine Print
HOW TO READ YOUR BOOK CONTRACT
First
GINA CHUNG'S SEA CHANGE
Blooming how she must
WITH ROOTS IN NATURE WRITING, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMILLE T. DUNGY'S NEW BOOK, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, DELVES INTO THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACT OF CULTIVATING AND DIVERSIFYING A GARDEN OF HERBS, VEGETABLES, FLOWERS, AND OTHER PLANTS IN THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COMMUNITY OF FORT COLLINS, COLORADO.
