Literary Rejections: The Ultimate Quiz

Written By DPA Quiz

If you write, you must be able to tolerate rejection. Even the greatest of writers are sometimes told “No.” See if you can match the rejection with its subject. For the answers, send us a check for $100*. 

1. “The story is characterized by the customary brilliance of your writing, but to our way of thinking, its resolution does not quite sweep the reader into acceptance of your daring and beautiful concept.”

  1. J.M. Coetzee

  2. Toni Morrison

  3. Philip Roth

  4. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2. “I rack my brains as to why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.” 

  1. Karl Ove Knausgaard

  2. Marcel Proust

  3. David Foster Wallace

  4. Robert Musil

3. “Utterly untranslatable.” 

  1. Nikolai Gogol 

  2. Franz Kafka

  3. Michel Houllebeq

  4. Jorge Luis Borges 

4.“I got a rejection letter from an editor at HarperCollins, who included a report from his professional reader. This report shredded my first-born novel, laughed at my phrasing, twirled my lacy pretensions around and gobbed into the seething mosh pit of my stolen clichés. As I read the report, the world became very quiet and stopped rotating. What poisoned me was the fact that the report’s criticisms were all absolutely true. “

  1. Jennifer Egan

  2. Zadie Smith

  3. Roberto Bolano

  4. David Mitchell

5. “Frenetic and scrambled prose.” 

  1.  Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

  2. The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett

  3. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

  4. On The Road by Jack Kerouac

6. “Unsaleable and unpublishable.” 

  1. Autumn by Ali Smith

  2. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

  3. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

  4. The Fountainhead Ayn Rand

    7. “An irresponsible holiday story that will never sell.” 

  1. The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry

  2. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

  3. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

  4. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

8. “An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.” 

  1. Dune by Frank Herbert

  2.  A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

  3. The Parable of the Sower by Olivia Butler

  4. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

9. "If I may be frank — you certainly are in your prose — I found your efforts to be both tedious and offensive. You really are a man’s man, aren’t you? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you had penned this entire story locked up at the club, ink in one hand, brandy in the other. Your bombastic, dipsomaniac, where-to-now characters had me reaching for my own glass of brandy."

  1. Kingsley Amis

  2. Edward St. Aubyn

  3. Jonathan Franzen

  4. Ernest Hemingway

10. “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.”

  1. Aldous Huxley

  2. Thomas Pynchon

  3. Ursula k. Leguin

  4. Stephen King

11. “Reject recommended: I’m not sure what Heinemann sees in this first novel unless it is a kind of youthful American female brashness. But there certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.”

  1. Edith Wharton

  2. Donna Tartt 

  3. Dorothy Parker

  4. Sylvia Plath

12. “We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skillfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane—and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver. On the other hand, we have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time. “

  1. Catch 22

  2. Farhenheit 451

  3. Watership Down

  4. Animal Farm

13. “You have buried your novel underneath a heap of details which are well done but utterly superfluous; they hide the essentials, and must be removed.”

1. Anthony Trollope

2. George Eliot

3. Charles Dickens

4. Gustave Flaubert

14. “Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.” 

  1. Judy Blume

  2. J.K. Rowling

  3. Phillip Pullman

  4. Dr. Seuss

15. “I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”

  1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

  2. Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce

  3. American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis

  4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

    16. "The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.”

  1. My Antonia by Willa Cather

  2. The Lover by Marguerite Duras

  3. Country Girls by Edna O’brien

  4. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

*- Ha ha. Just kidding. The correct answer is always 4, except for the 2nd question, where it is 2.

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