Alexander Chee Trusted His Gut

Traditional publishing is a frustrating industry whose workers are under-resourced and often mandated to chase metrics like authors' audience size and nascent trends based on "data," "vibes," and "TikTok." If, in the years-long dark period when I had an agent but not yet a book deal, an editor had told me exactly what I needed to change about my project to get them to buy it, I would have jumped at the chance. Especially if what they wanted was a book I already had in the works—it just wasn't the one I wanted to publish first. This is what happened to Alexander Chee in the years after he graduated from his MFA. He had been working on two novel concepts, and editors vastly preferred one over the other. But he had a strong preference that one come first, his "shitty autobiographical novel" that would eventually become Edinburgh. The second novel, which would be The Queen of the Night, eventually did get published, but that was 15 years after Edinburgh.

Read it at Defector ↗

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