Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox

by Lee Klein

Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox compiles a dozen years of disappointment transmitted via e-mail from a single editor to hundreds of writers around the world. Performative and funny one minute, respectful and constructive the next, these rejections both serve as entertaining writing tips (suitable for use in today’s more adventuresome creative writing classrooms) and suggest a skewed story about a boy and his seminal semi-literary website, Eyeshot.net, which Lee Klein founded in 1999.

What started as a lark -- sending playful rejection notes to writers who’d submitted work for the site -- over ten years took on a life of its own, becoming an outlet for Klein to meditate on his aesthetic preferences, the purpose of literature, and the space between the ideal and the real.

Praise for Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck

"These tiny, tight bursts of writing hummed with energy that hopscotched among comical, cruel, warm, demented, high level and nitpicky. Send him a piece of your soul on Microsoft Word, Klein seemed to believe, and you deserved a piece of his soul right back. An amazing little act of generosity, considering the number of terrible pieces of writing out there. (Klein estimates that he has tapped out more than a thousand original rejections.)"

-- Jamie Allen in Paste Magazine

"Somewhere on the brutal truth continuum between Bill Hicks and Mussolini, Lee Klein’s rejection letters are mini-masterpieces of literary criticism disguised as no-thank-yous from Writer’s Hell. And yet, in each, a little lesson; a steadfast faith that says 'I took the time to read what you created and this is exactly what I thought.' They should be passing these things out under the pillows at MFA camp; we’d all be better off."

–- Blake Butler, author of "There Is No Year" and "Sky Saw"

"Sometimes writers who succeed against the odds brag about the number of rejections they’ve accumulated. A rejection from Eyeshot’s Lee Klein is a whole different badge of honor. Like a letter from a serial killer on death row, your Tea Party inlaws, or the Pope, they’re suitable for framing and brilliantly repugnant. I kind of want to send him a really shitty story just so I can get one of these in return."

-– Ryan Boudinot, author of "Blueprints of the Afterlife"

"To 'decide' is to 'cut,' and Lee Klein in the highly honed collection of rejections, Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck, wields a drawer full of gleaming cutlery, edgy edged instruments of decision. Surely, he holds his pen like a surgeon holds the scalpel. These serrated graphs of glee and screed are incisive incisions—katana, rattled sabers, sharp-tongued stilettos of the split-lipped kiss-off."

-– Michael Martone, author of "Michael Martone" and "Four for a Quarter"

"Lee Klein made me cry. He was the only editor ever to make me. This was back in 2002. I wish I still had the email. I remember it going something like, 'whenever you have the instinct to write a line like that, delete it immediately, without prejudice.' I hated him for a while. I pictured him looking like the guy in that 90’s movie Heavy (the one with Liv Tyler), except housebound and with no redeemable qualities. Then, somewhere around 2004, I met him 'IRL' and he was soft-spoken and sweet. It was harder to hate him after that. Reading all of these rejection letters here in this book made me finally fall a little in love with him, I think. I think if I had had access to (and disassociation from) these letters then, I might have fallen in love with him then. This is the funniest book I have read in a long time. It is also the smartest. I feel confused now, like I’m unsure whether to love or hate Lee Klein. But both of us are married now so it doesn’t really matter."

–- Elizabeth Ellen, author of "Fast Machine

"I was reluctant to start reading the book because it begins around 2001 and at that time you weren't mentally or physically or fiscally at your strongest. There's a manic quality to some of the rejections, and the way you build up momentum in your responses is kind of funny, almost the way Belushi used to work himself up and then throw himself to the floor. I like the sub-story that's your life that's happening. You're funny and weird and sometimes I flinch for the recipient of your rejections, other times you seem like a sweet snark. I have a distinct memory of meeting you for lunch after you were rejected from a job interview or something and I was brutally rejected by a curator of the Drawing Center. You looked very pale and the surface of your skin was oddly moist, like you were really sick. I was worried. It was after 9/11 and all the rest. You led a very unhealthy life in those days, way too ...

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2014

About the author

Lee Klein is the author of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), JRZDVLZ, The Shimmering Go-Between, Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox, and Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World. His translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya's Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award and was recognized by the New Yorker's James Wood as one of four favorites of 2016. From 1999 to 2014 he edited Eyeshot.net, one of the first weird little lit sites, and in May 2007 he started using Goodreads. He lives in the Philadelphia area with his daughter and wife.

Reviews

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is juvenile. No.

The above is not my comment on the book under review!

I’m pretty sure the above is the shortest rejection letter (email) contained in this book of Lee Klein’s rejections sent to submitters for his lit site Eyeshot.net. (http://www.eyeshot.net/ for the latest posting.)

I found the book at least mildly amusing, a couple laugh-out-loud moments perhaps? These rejection letters aren't really meant to be amusing of course. When they were written each had an intended audience of one - who certainly wasn't going to be amused by a rejection. So don’t make the mistake of thinking the book a collection of rejections which are outrageous put-downs, making fun of the submitters. Klein seems to be someone who (mostly, at least at this stage of his life) has left that sort of thing behind, if it were ever something that tagged along with him. The only exceptions are mild, off-hand “No”s such as the above.

So if these rejections are not about guffaws at the submitters’ expense, why read it? Surely a rejection letter (email) can’t be very interesting, if it lacks such juvenile putdownedness?

The shorter ones of a sentence or two reveal tidbits about Lee Klein himself. He is polite, he throws in an off-lit remark that might be interesting to the submitter, he’s mildly encouraging, maybe a brief suggestion.

When I see something involving the third grade, my eyes glaze over – I swear it! It’s not your fault, nor mine – but my damned eyes! Send another one!

Then as soon as even forty or fifty words are expended, Klein becomes teacherly, in a good sense. I guess in the editorial sense? Eg

I really like discursive stuff, but this doesn’t seem to have the necessary oomph to pull it off. It was like it all led to the revelation of the dream and once you got there, the dream didn’t seem emphatically worth the wait.

And the over-and-out at the end, usually variations of But thanks again for sending it and sorry. or thanks for sending this though or Sorry. But thanks for submitting and good luck with this elsewhere! or thanks for sending this and good luck with it and send something else whenever or simply Send more?!

I read the book in a couple sittings, which even given the overall notveryhigh word count, is fast for me. I enjoyed paging, and have to say that reading these rejections actually encouraged me to think about writing something and sending it in! Klein is an appealing writer, an appealing “editor”, and seemingly from these writings an appealing person. Compare your books with Lee’s library here .

By the way, Klein's intended response time to submissions (at least in the time period of these reject notices) was almost immediately. I guess he felt that it was lousy to treat submitters as he himself had been treated so many times, by a wait of months before receiving a form letter "sorry". Any delay of more than a day or two is always apologized for at the front of the rejection, with an explanation for said delay.

The review is now probably longer than all but a couple of these pieces, maybe twice as long as almost all. So thanks for reading, good luck with whatever you’re doing, and read another whenever.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Imagine that I had carried out the stunt I had initially intended to carry out. I had the thought that I might write this Review and submit it to eyeshot.net on the off chance that I might receive my very own Lee Klein Brand Rejection Letter with which to authenticate my Review. Naturally I would have run the risk of my Review being accepted. Such an acceptation of said Review would have put everyone involved in rather precarious metaflictual and conflictual positions (and required more work and revision than what is required here on good old goodreads). Like Lee Klein objecting to my use of infelicitous words like “acceptation” and writing this sentence fragment. Also, it would have set an incredibly annoying precedent. Namely, the serial submission of Reviews by readers and reviewers of this wonderful novel. So but I won’t bother to spell out what kind of metaflictual dilemmas would have been spun had I submitted (it had even occurred to me to submit this coverletter itself as a submission in order to help old Lee out of this kind of potential bind). You, I’m sure, are fully acquainted with that old crusty tradition of the writing of metafiction, that technique which has been beaten like a horse’s skeleton for many a decade. And since then we’ve all grown up just a little bit. So bless Lee Klein; I will not submit!

On with the Review.....


Lee Klein’s newest novel (available at Your Better Village Bookshops), Thanks and sorry and thanks and good luck sorry and thanks and good luck sorry and thanks and good luck sorry and good luck: Rejection Letters From The Eyeshot Outbox (T&S&T&GLS&S&T&GLS&T&GLS&GL:RLFTEO for short and for sure) takes the old fashiony epistolary novel and brings it uptodate for the old fashiony email age. Not to worry, his text is not cluttered with the by-now incredibly boring reproduction of email headers and email addresses and email signatures and such ; what he merely bothers with is the body, the meat, of the emails. So much for the materiality of form as it stands on the page (plus plenty of white space for your very own doodles and paratextual art stuff! or perhaps your very own Rejection Letter right back at him!)

Despite its appeal to the reader of postmodernist novels and generally soft, not-overtly self-reflective metafictional kinds of fiction, Klein’s novel remains traditional in the precise sense of John Hawke’s true enemies of fiction, namely, plot, character, setting, themes, etc. We have to go back to basics with this question here because the publisher, Barrelhouse Books, has made what appears to me to be a fundamental marketing mistake, i.e., suggesting that these are somehow ‘real’ rejection letters by the ‘real’ Lee Klein to ‘real’ submitters of fiction to a ‘real’ literary website. Be that all as it may, what the product itself is is in truth a fiction, an artistically crafted whole.

One step further back : a novel is a work in prose, of a certain length, with something wrong with it. To that I must add, being the German Idealist that I am, “which demonstrates within itself a moment of unity of one sort or another.” Prose. Check. A certain length. Check. Something wrong with it? Could you imagine a published anything not having something ‘wrong’ with it? possessing its many very own ‘flaws’? etc? And unity. Quadruple check. Look here :: unity of plot -- think of it as the Bildungsroman of a literary website called eyeshot.net ; unity of character -- our protagonist Lee Klein looms large, uncontrovertibly (and not to miss the more than one hundred minor characters all refracted through a reflection of....etc) ; unity of setting -- almost Aristotelean here, but don’t be fooled by the apparent shift to Iowa, etc, all activity taking place on the Klein computer screen ; unity of theme -- fiction fiction fiction fiction & story story story story! In short, Lee Klein’s novel, in its unpronounceable acronym, will one day be counted among the classics of what Raymond Federman calls Critificiton.


Disclaimer :: Lee Klein once called me out in public for promoting a crusty old book of the 17th century, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, instead of the latest and hippest lit=fic kinds of stuff, ie, putting food into the mouths of living writers. Therefore, I would suggest that everything I have to say about Lee Klein and his book is deeply compromised and should not be trusted. For more on the Klein-Burton-Gaddis Affair, see comment number 4 below.

I should probably also add, in relation to that contentious issue carried within the spoiler alert just above, that living writers will always have to compete with the dead if only for economic reasons. Consider :: I spent 16 USofA dollars on Klein’s book reading it within a day’s time, quasi-bookending my reading approximately 60 pages of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1198 pages!) for which I spent the full sum of USofA$11.50 and the reading of which is engaging me for months. That’s just economic reality and when one considers entertainment hours to dollars spent, well, you see how difficult it is to extract dollars from the pockets of really incredibly cheap people like myself. I mean, keep at it and all, but jeez it must be tough!!

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today is the 10th anniversary of the pub date. Still available from the publisher after all these years.

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Besides being a lot of fun and full of perceptive advice to would-be writers concerning what really matters in art (and, sometimes, in life) this book will definitely cure you of ever wanting a job as a submissions editor anywhere, ever.

[M. Sarki · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/8208209...

In order to be as forthcoming in the following review as possible I have to confess an affinity already acquired for most things Lee Klein. I believe he is a marvelously interesting and talented writer. And because I hold this Mr. Klein in such high esteem I am hesitant to give this book more than the four stars it certainly deserves. If I were rating this particular nonfiction on a typically noncreative site the book would garner a five star review from me because it simply blows most other critical reviews to smithereens. Lately it seems I have been using that word “smithereens” along with the word “delightful” far too often, enough times now that they are both beginning to make me sick of every overused, but perfectly good and appropriate, expression.

I have never submitted any of my own work to Lee Klein’s electronic machine via his Eyeshot website. Lee has also never had the pleasure of rejecting me in his official capacity as editor of his online journal. That is not to say he wouldn’t if given the chance, and that is also not to say that I haven’t already been rejected enough times elsewhere already in my lifetime. But his sometimes verbose rejections I believe are indeed moral. They definitely seem fair. I am of the opinion that he is extremely helpful to anyone reading and listening to what he has to say about improving a particular work. He even comes across as a humane and sensitive teacher of the first rank. But I get the sense that Eyeshot prefers “laugh out loud” stuff more than almost anything else and so I haven’t spent the time I probably should have reading his online journal in case I do ever want to submit my own seriously “unfunny” stuff. I am positive my work would not be what this editor is looking to post online. It seems, at least in reading these rejections, that these people unfortunately did not take the time to read Eyeshot’s Specific Recommendations, Restrictions, and Guidelines. It has several.

I found the entire book enjoyable to read, and I basically slowed myself down as much as I could while reading it to delay its ending for me. In its entirety Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck was certainly pleasurable, and I encourage any and all aspiring writers to read this book first before ever submitting anything you have written to anybody. Obviously if future submitters followed his suggestions it might give the poor guy more time to spend with his kid. This interesting collection of rejections is also a work of art, and I think enough evidence to make a case for a very strong beginning to a literary vocation. Lee Klein is a writer we are going to hear much more about in the coming years.

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hey! I love this book. I read it aloud to my fiction students. My Nico read it aloud to me. It has two arcs: the memoir of a reader (and a damn fine reader) and the business of what makes a good story. I appreciate the way in which audience is privileged w/out making the art of fiction about audience. I love the call to be odder weirder more daring. And then there's this: the mystery of how rejection, even repeated rejection, can be a kind of honor (of the art, of the work, of the mind of the maker). Lee is a true reader, not an MFAland profiteer, not a dork in search of glory, not an internet skimming Netflix watcher who says she writes. Thank goodness for his brain! I'm about to go teach so this is a hasty take but, you know: read this!

[Mark]

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 4:57 PM, Mark McKee wrote:

Dear Eyeshot,

Below, please find my submission, "----." I spent one Friday a couple weeks ago reading all of your archived rejection letters. Not only are they funny as heck, there's a lot of useful advice. I have no schooling to mention, don't care for social media, so I'm boring where those areas are concerned. I don't think I've heard or sat in on any lectures from famous authors, living or dead. None that I remember. I did once find a prehistoric crinoid bulb during a school field trip. That was pretty neat! Of course, all but two of the other folks on the trip found prehistoric crinoid bulbs too.

Thank you for the recent Michael Hemmingson story. I've been following his blog about vintage sleaze paperbacks since 2011. Some fantastic recommendations.

Looking forward to the next batch of stories!

Mark McKee
Dyersburg, TN

[Richard Bon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly unique book (the only compilation of outgoing rejection letters I've read or ever encountered), Lee Klein's email responses to the authors of unaccepted Eyeshot.net submissions is at once educational, provocative, and hilarious. Anyone who's ever submitted fiction to an online or print publication and been rejected via standard form letter, as Klein himself claims in his bio to have done ~500 times, can appreciate and respect why Klein, as Eyeshot's founder/curator/editor, decided to take the opposite approach and tell submitting authors exactly how he felt when passing on their work. Any serious writer who received one of these rejection letters over the years may not have agreed with Klein or at least had surely wished for a different result, but s/he had to appreciate and respect such a detailed response. I used the word "serious" in the previous sentence because the book includes the occasional curt, one or two sentence dismissal presumably (or sometimes clearly) sent to those who wouldn't fit the description, but these are few and far between and effective in mixing things up. The large majority of the book's content are thoughtful missives that open minded recipients should've embraced as constructive teaching tools and bought Klein a beer if they ever ran into him at smoky karaoke (Ray's Happy Birthday Bar gets a mention). Klein's promise is to be honest, however brutal, and the delivery of said honesty often (if not always) depends at least somewhat on his mood/state, and while this may seem to invite rushed or flaky behavior, none of it ever came off that way to me. In fact, I liked the impact of Klein's mood/state for a couple of reasons: 1) online lit journals do not exist in a vacuum - who knows what mood/state any given reader will be in at any given time? and 2) readers get to learn a lot about Klein and what he was up to over the years and the general trajectory of his life. Reason #1 listed above is self explanatory, but I'll add a specific example - Eyeshot will surely have the occasional (if not frequent) hungover and drinking her/his morning coffee reader, so why shouldn't Klein decline a submission when he's hungover drinking his own morning coffee and let the rejected author know it? Mighty kind of him with a humanizing effect, if you ask me. Reason #2 above fascinates me because Klein subtly, presumably unintentionally gives readers an undercurrent of autobiography in this collection as we learn about his moves from Brooklyn to Iowa (for an MFA at the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop) to Philadelphia, where he now lives with his wife and daughter (I don't think the collection includes any mention of his child's birth or any parenting thereafter, but in one letter he mentions that his wife is pregnant when he responds to a story that must've contained something or other about the impending death of a fictional child. Side note: I loved that particular letter because it reminded me of all of my own fear and paranoia when my wife was pregnant with our kids - Klein managed to evoke those emotions in me through a rejection letter ... it's not like I got to read the rejected submission itself).

It's probably clear from what I've written here that this book left quite the impression on me, and I haven't even discussed how it forced me to consider my own writing. I could write more, but I'd like to end this already-too-long review ... I just have to ask one question in a few parts: did Lee Klein really receive as many submissions over the years about dentists and dental work as it seems? If so, why? Forgetting about the fact that he explicitly states in his submission guidelines that he doesn't want to consider any pieces about dentists, why have so many Eyeshot hopefuls sent him stories involving the profession of dentistry? Seems kinda odd to me, but hey, whatever was in all of those rejected submissions, we all just have the privilege of reading the rejections themselves.

[Alyssa Lentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn, this book was jam-packed to read, both as a writer and as someone who reads/curates written submissions. It really drove home the value of honest feedback, and made me think we are often trying too hard to be nice/succinct/polished in ours. Receiving one of these letters would have been so insanely valuable! It's packed with really good writing advice and even a kernel of a story idea every now and then, but more than anything it really encourages you to write things that only YOU can write: weird stuff, dense stuff, experimental stuff. Reading them all like this also just sort of reassuring that more often than not you're not rejected from these places because you're a bad writer but more because you didn't develop something enough, you didn't commit fully, you were trying too hard to hold back or be normal, or even simply that you're just not writing about something the particular editor(s) find interesting. Definitely made me want to browse through the Eyeshot archives and see what did get accepted. I'd recommend this to any aspiring writers for sure.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"OK! Stop a sec. You've submitted eight pieces in one day. And they've all been rejected. How does that make you feel? Maybe you should work a little harder on one or two things. You seem to get an idea and think the idea itself is worthwhile. You should work a little harder. Concentrate. Give the idea a context that makes what's funny about it come to life. Please don't send more of these little jokes and lists. They're not funny. Particularly the spam thing. Not funny at all. Sorry. Also, you shouldn't submit more than one thing at a time. Editors get pissed. I'm hungover and homebound on a beautiful day and there's nothing much else I can do, so it's been a pleasure responding to these as quickly as I can. If I step outside, I bet all of New York is frolicking in the sun, parks are lousy with the semi-exposed limbs of supermodel wannabes from as far away as Metuchen, tourists wearing designer sunglasses have come from all over the world to soak in Ground Zero, yet here I am existentially exposed to the devastation you've wrought upon my poor little defenseless Eyeshot Inbox."

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was leery of the project when Barrelhouse first started discussing it. A book of rejection letters seemed insular at best (in that it would appeal to a specific [and small] group of readers) and mean-spirited at worst (writers spend enough time dealing with rejection; do we really want to rub their noses in it more?). Of course, that was before I read the manuscript. What's amazing about Lee's book is not only how supportive and hopeful it is on almost every page, but also that the arrangement and progression of the letters make "Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck" something close to a page-turner. The evolution of Lee's capacity to entertainingly explain what makes a story a story and what separates a great one from an okay one drives the book as much as the great information on craft.

[Caleb Michael Sarvis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this book for the laughs,
I stayed for the best book on craft I've ever read.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just spilled ketchup all over my pajamas but I don't blame Lee Klein's wonderful book for that. The d on my keyboard doesn't work so I have to copy and paste a single d whenever I need one. But I don't blame Lee Klein's lovely book for that. In all seriousness, I enjoyed the book more than I thought I would. I tend to make assumptions about books but was glad that I look pretty much like a donkey for thinking I'd get no pleasure from this book. This is not a blurb or anything. I just felt like I traveled back in time to my workshop writing days and not many books can claim to do that. As funny as the book is I feel like actual students of writing or graduate programs or whatever the college writer people are doing these days should be required to read this in full to get a sense of what an astute reader takes into account when they take a chance on reading something. Sometimes I feel we all avoid self-critique in order to praise our ability to complete a draft of something. Anyway, highly recommend Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox.

And don't worry: The ketchup problem has been solved and I'm listening to The Cars Candy-O.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ordered the book intending to put it in my bathroom and enjoy a few pages occasionally. It came in today, and I've already finished it. Damn.

Entertaining, pithy, and often insightful.

[Michael B Tager · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this so much. It's non traditional and super weird and also hopeful. It makes me want to fail up and try harder. This is good.

[Craig]

I was reminded that this was hiding behind Today, I Wrote Nothing on our new bookshelf and pulled it down last night, laughing out loud during the first ten pages or so. Seems like an ideal companion for patio black coffees on the weekend.

[Nita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should you need a reminder that being rejected by a school, publication, agent, or editor is at least one part crapshoot ... read this book.