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