Just Got Another Rejection for Second Novel
RANT. they criticize my book as focusing too much on the moment by moment experience of the characters and not enough of the big picture.
well, first of all everything in the novel is clearly contexualized as to the place and time -- Serbia 1999, and why the characters are affected by the war, the current activist movement, the american military, it is all spelled out. so i think what they want--this ALTERNATIVE SMALL PRESS--is for hand-holding of the reader, a very conventional concern. the more i think about their critique, the more I think it ignores all of the advances of modernist literature -- now 100 years-old (!)--joyce, dostoyevsky, woolf, faulkner--ALL clued in very closely, moment by moment to their characters, and let the reader experience reality through their senses, their actions, and through the play of language / i.e. experiments in time and scene-shifting. what does this fucking press want? a nice little novel that will be forgotten in a year or that someone can wipe their ass with in a cabin or burn for fire if needed? what the fuck. i am angry. thanks for listening.