The editor who turned down John Kennedy Toole might seem myopic in hindsight, but some of his questions about the novel remain hard to answer
Humility is something you learn quickly as an editor. If you have the good fortune to find and publish excellent novels, you are sure to miss plenty of fine work. As a co-founder and editor at independent press Galley Beggar, I wake up in sweats with the certain knowledge that somewhere in my email inbox lies a stone cold classic. Perhaps I won't even find the time to read it, let alone mistakenly turn it down. I've had to refuse perfectly good books in the past and will do it again. The hard truth is that you can't publish everything - and that every publisher is human and correspondingly flawed.