The most honest rejection letter I ever received for a piece of writing was from Oregon Coast Magazine, to which I had sent a piece that was half bucolic travelogue and half blistering attack on the tendencies of hamlets along the coast to seek the ugliest and most lurid neon signage for their bumper-car emporia, myrtlewood lawn-ornament shops, used-car lots, auto-wrecking concerns, terra-cotta nightmares, and sad moist flyblown restaurants.
“Thanks for your submission,” came the handwritten reply from the managing editor. “But if we published it we would be sued by half our advertisers.”
This was a straightforward remark and I admire it, partly for its honesty, a rare shout in a world of whispers, and partly because I have, in thirty years as a writer and editor, become a close student of the rejection note. The shape, the color, the prose, the tone, the subtext, the speed or lack thereof with which it arrives, even the typeface or scrawl used to stomp gently on the writer’s heart—of these things I sing.
Two big questions arise for users and compilers of these books: should they be arranged topically or by source? If you want quotations about the subject of research, would you rather have them all in one place under R, or spread throughout the book under the names of the people who uttered the statements? My own preference has always been for the former: show me all the research quotations together. Or honesty. Or marriage. Or wit.
But the most authoritative quotation books have always been the other way: author by author, not topic by topic. That’s how John Bartlett did it in 1855 when he first assembled what, in later versions, became Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The idea is to have, tucked in the back matter, elaborate indexes that allow users to find whatever topic they’re looking for — by flipping pages back and forth. Perhaps hyperlinked electronic versions will soon make things easier.
“I know I’m in serious trouble when Sammo calls me by my real name: It’s like, ‘Choo Kheng! Choo Kheng!”’ she recalls. “And I looked up and there was Ann Hui. She was right next to the boxes. And she was looking at me with tears just rolling down her face.” Yeoh worked to calm herself, concentrating on the fact that she could still feel her hands, as members of the crew placed the mattress (with her still on it) in a van, and drove her straight to the hospital, where she was placed in a body cast and treated for several cracked ribs.
The accident illustrated the special risks involved in moving between different modes of filmmaking, from the slapdash and high-energy environment of Hong Kong action movies — often shot without a script and choreographed on set — to more staid, introspective films that prioritize psychological depth. Yeoh was being asked to consolidate all that she knew about falling into a character who knew much less — and bridging the difference required a new sort of agility.
Set in 1975 during a particularly low point in the comics industry, Alex Segura’s “Secret Identity” is the genre-defying story of Carmen Valdez, a 20-something comic book fan from Miami who comes into her power, both on and off the page, through the Legendary Lynx, the superhero comic she creates at a New York City comic book company.
Budding authors are often advised to write the book only they can write. It’s one of those truisms that is so much easier said than done, but in Segura’s case, at this point in his singular career, it is most certainly true.
The Swimmers is a slim brilliant novel about the value and beauty of mundane routines that shape our days and identities; or, maybe it's a novel about the cracks that, inevitably, will one day appear to undermine our own bodies and minds; and — who knows? — it could also be read as a grand parable about the crack in the world wrought by this pandemic.
In an apocalypse where a virus turns anyone with enough testosterone into a feral, cannibalistic beast, who survives?
In Gretchen Felker-Martin's electric debut novel Manhunt, the book's nightmare world is populated with everyone left — mostly cisgender women, but there are also plenty of non-binary people, transgender men, and transgender women. Oh, plus a faction of authoritarian trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) slowly taking over the Eastern seaboard, killing trans people just as quickly as the infected beasts will. Told from a trans perspective, Manhunt is a fresh, stomach-turning take on gendered apocalypse.
In Emily Berry’s third collection, Unexhausted Time, nothing is off limits and limits themselves are consciously defied: the membrane between waking and dreaming is semi-permeable, the boundary between past and present is blurred: “How is it the things that happen to us seem to have happened already,” she asks in one unsettled and untitled poem (titles are rarities here). In another, she blends with the weather as if her body were unconfinable: “Prolonged heat made me feel smudged./It was not a bad feeling…/to be a smear on a windowpane…” Her metaphors are prone to melting too or, at least, not allowed a final say.
A dozen pages into reading “The Fruit Thief: Or, One-Way Journey Into the Interior,” which was first published in German in 2017 and now appears in a translation by Krishna Winston, I had the not unexciting realization that, if nothing else, for the next 300 pages I was in for an experience of unadulterated literature: that is, a work that would pay not the slightest heed to genre conventions, commercial imperatives or even — this I was less enthusiastic about — the reader’s timid expectation that he might be shown a good time. I was also reminded that I was dealing here with a very slippery fish.
“True Biz” is moving, fast-paced and spirited — we have vivid access to all of the main characters’ points of view — but also skillfully educational: The lessons Charlie learns about A.S.L. and deaf culture are interspersed in the text and illustrated by Brittany Castle. Novic, who is deaf and spent time at deaf schools researching the novel, makes an urgent and heartfelt case for the schools’ importance in providing language access, and in nurturing community and a sense of self. Great stories create empathy and awareness more effectively than facts do, and this important novel should — true biz — change minds and transform the conversation.