The Virginia Quarterly Review posts some editorial comments from its pile of rejected submissions: “I can’t enumerate all the ways in which this is horrible.”
- The emotional problems of clipping fingernails. Actually the best of his submissions.
- A bawdy limerick? Really?
And yes, these blunt, in-house editorial comments do get transmitted to rejected authors, but “presented in a considerably kinder light.”
“Planet of the Apes fan-fiction! Have we no standards?” might become “we encourage you to read a few issues of VQR to get a better sense for the sort of work that we publish.”
(Via Bookninja.)
2 responses so far ↓
C.D. Reimer // May 1, 2008 at 3:31 pm
I submitted a short story that was a series of email exchanges at a dysfunctional video game company to a literary magazine. (Having worked in the video game industry for six years, I’m qualified to write the story–and soon to be novel.) The editor rejected the story by describing how wonderful it would be to work at Google based on what he read. Needless to say, having worked at Google for eight months, I’m well aware how wonderful working at Google can be. (I got a short story on the back burner about Google that involves pissed off squirrels, which can be worst than pissed off system admins.) I’m just clueless as to how this rationale applies to my story.
Another editor rejected the story by writing, “This is too much like my job.”
paisleyandplaid // May 2, 2008 at 7:23 pm
I have a post on famous authors and their rejections at http://www.paisleyandplaid.wordpress.com that you might enjoy.
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