Episode 19: Rejection is Good! And you never read alone

So your manuscript was rejected by another publisher. Will you revise your work to meet the shifting whims of the marketplace, or hold steady to your uncompromising vision, bragging all the while about the rejections you’ve accumulated like tumbleweeds tangled in a barbed wire fence?

Meanwhile, we also wonder if one can ever truly read a book alone, or if the various social contexts are inextricable from that experience, like tumbleweeds tangled in a barbed wire fence.

Works cited this episode:

“Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with reframing rejection?” Brittany Allen, LitHub
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
“Host,” David Foster Wallace, The Atlantic
“In Defense of the Traditional Review,” Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Sundial, Catriona Ward
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
She’s Come Undone, Wally Lamb
I’m Losing You, Bruce Wagner
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
“The Couch,” Seinfeld, created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld
Beloved, Toni Morrison