Word: kosinski
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Several of us read your untitled novel here with admiration for writing and style. Jerzy Kosinski comes to mind as a point of comparison when reading the stark, chilly, episodic incidents you have set down. The drawback to the manuscript, as it stands, is that it doesn't add up to a satisfactory whole...
...rejection slips go. Except . . . what Houghton Mifflin, the rejecting publishers, did not know was that they were on the receiving end of a sting. The manuscript they turned down in 1977 was a freshly typed copy of Steps, a Kosinski novel that had won the National Book Award...
Houghton Mifflin is the publisher of three Kosinski novels, including his best known, The Painted Bird. But consider the embarrassment at Random House. They rejected the identical Steps manu script nine years after they had published it. In all 14 publishers and 13 literary agents failed to recognize the book when it was sent unsolicited by an author who called himself Erik Demos. Demos is the nom de hoax chosen by Chuck Ross, a Los Angeles freelance writer out to prove what thousands of aspiring first novelists already know: it is virtually impossible for an unknown author to break into...
...hardly help noticing the typographical error in the paper's logo: Not The New York Times. Exactly who is responsible for this outrageous, cunningly crafted parody? Among those reputed to have laid a pencil to the project are Michael Arlen, Carl Bernstein, Nora Ephron, Frances Fitz-Gerald, Jerzy Kosinski, George and Freddy Plimpton, Terry Southern and about three or four dozen other wordsmiths from leading publishing firms, the unemployment rolls and the Times itself. Observed Calvin Trillin, one of the town's few big-time scribes who declined to participate: "Sounds as if they emptied the back room...
...Polish novelist who became a naturalized American citizen in 1965, Kosinski won the National Book Award in Fiction in 1969 for Steps, and is also the author of The Painted Bird...