William Deresiewicz’s Your Face Tomorrow Pan
The Undiscovered Country: New Book of Sebald Criticism
Translate Zama!
The Quarterly Conversation Issue 21
More Essays by Milan
Speaking of Distraction
It’s amazing what you can learn when you look at the referring links to your personal website. On Friday those very links helped me discover that Helen DeWitt took notice that we’re reading her book this fall, and I further learned that DeWitt is a prolific blogger.
And then I saw this post about two stories that DeWitt was assured would be published in Harper’s.
A long time ago I was invited to submit some short stories to Harper’s. The editor who wrote to me loved the 2 stories I sent in. She said the committee thought one was opaque but liked the other (Harley), though John Sullivan had one minor editorial comment.
She then wrote explaining that she was leaving Harper’s to concentrate on her own writing, but Sullivan would birddog the story. New verb to me, but OK.
Time passed. No word. I wrote. . . .
Sullivan explained that the story had been looked over by the committee who did not think it was right for Harper’s.
If you read on you’ll find that DeWitt was eventually told by Wyatt Mason that she was naive to think she’d land a story in Harper’s without an agent. Presumably an agent is something that Heidi Julavits has in spades, as her nonsense has landed in the August issue of Harper’s.
Occasionally Harper’s will publish a decent work of fiction from a worthy author (in the past year they’ve had Diane Williams and John Edgar Wideman), but for the most part the fiction in Harper’s is not that good. This helps explain why.
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Er, I don’t think Wyatt meant that you had to have an agent to get published in Harper’s; I think his point was that you could not count on people to be efficient without an agent to chase them. That does often seem to be the case, though Deb Treisman at the New Yorker has always been a miracle of efficiency and I’ve never dealt with her through an agent.
That kind of reminds of the Paris Review controversy. Where someone’s work is accepted, only for a new editor to nix it.
I enjoyed Coover’s short story from a month ago, but overall I agree with your opinion on Harper’s.
I hope Ms. DeWitt continues to be a presence here, once we start her book!
Harper’s is rife with career, established authors. Robert Coover is a god, but typical of Harper’s choices. The Jualvits piece was a surprise to me, but I liked it, not a usual response from me for her. The larger problem lies in the limited choices of major journals/magazines that publish short stories – Harper’s, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, maybe Playboy. What else? A sad state of affairs for writers in the market.