The New Yorker Didn’t Want You to Read These: [Mostly] Work Rejected by “Shouts & Murmurs”

by Donald N.S. Unger

The New Yorker is one of those, writerly, Holy Grail kind of markets. When “ideas” blossom in the heads of we-the-mentally-ill (if I could stop writing or find some other way to clear my head, I would), when we commit them to paper or, more accurately—really for most of my life at this point—put-fingers-to-keyboard it is one of the main targets: try The New Yorker first; when you fail, go regional; if that fails, go local; after that it’s just . . . some personal archive or other.

Which is what the thirty+ pieces here mostly are: personal archive, almost all of them rejected by The New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” column—although, at this point, about two thirds of them published online.

The final, five-piece, section is comprised of work that was done when I was maintaining my Hydrocarbonaholics Anonymous blog (or fever dream). A more comprehensive explanation precedes those essays.

Good stuff?

Bad stuff?

You be the judge.

138 pages, Paperback

Published October 28, 2017

About the author

Assembling something of a hodge podge here, I guess:

"Scholarly" Book on Gender & Fathering

Self-Published:

Collected Humor Pieces
Collected Short Fiction
Collected Essays on Sustainability Issues

A "Pulp" Trilogy

Reviews

[Mellissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm actually loving these short workings, I'm still reading it and take it with me to work and pick it up every now and then. I feel like I connect with the writer, his head is a beautiful mess and draws you in. Quite a few that have cracked me up for no reason that I can put my finger on. I don't know why, but I have a weird sense of humor so it's not surprising. I think the author's head works a little like mine. It's actually pretty cool to read some of his stuff that didn't take off right away, and I'm glad to know most all of them did well somewhere else.