A letter from Dan Halpern at Ecco Press
Nothing Doing is a terrific piece of writing, Thomas - experimental in the ways we used to admire, smart, challenging. You gotta love George the psychiatrist with his suitcase of ties. And a nice touch, the footnote introducing a new character… It seems to me that you’re pursuing some serious insights about life, about the nature of immigration, s subtle book, layered, demanding, moving – the character who can’t read poetry in English, despite his fluency, because he can’t feel in English. Wonder where that came from.
It’s good, but I don’t think it fits on our list – we don’t publish this kind of fiction – and our salespeople don’t know how to sell it. Aside from the fact the fiction market is shit right now, I’d be doing you a disservice having our group attempt to sell this worthy book. I understand this isn’t the kind of response that interests you, but it’s what I’ve inherited here. I wish we could jump in and try to do something with what you’ve accomplished on the page.
I wish you luck finding an editor and publisher who knows how to make magic out of the magic you’ve spun here.
RESPONSE
AND another manuscript to put in the pile for the children or widow to dispose of...
I have in the past had this experience. Richard Seaver wrote pretty much the same thing about the previous mansucript and some guys at Dalkey Archive wrote in the same vein.
I send a manuscript to one or two editors. That is it. And then later there is always the accident and I forget what it really feels like to wait and again I send out a new manuscript...
Where is the persistence, you might ask?
6 comments:
What about New Directions? Melville House? Akashic? I don't understand why you sent it to Ecco. Dalkey makes perfect sense, but I guess that didn't work out.
Maybe you should consider publishing these manuscripts online, either here or on Scribd. At least they'd be out there....
New Directions and Melville House want foreign books or ethnic based American writers... Akashic's books are quite traditional or seem to be but I have no real sense of them (if I was writing in a language other than English ND might be interested... Dalkey requires subsidies as you note from WITZ.
I thought of self-publishing but they have then no chance at all of ever being read in anything but English
Total rejection, me too. Try to let even a few people find you, though.
Have you tried Graywolf Press? They have a good catalogue, and their books are distributed by FS&G.
Just die already. Maybe, then, Dalkey will publish the rest of your oeuvre. Though, I'm still waiting for 'Zettels Traum'.
Shame on them for not sticking with you.
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