Unfortunately, life made Gilbert Sorrentino an expert on the letdowns, rejections, and deceptions inherent in the writing life; fortunately, he turned his disappointments into satire, as a satirist does. Here are some excerpts from "Sea of Rains," a chapter in his very funny parody of the arty and literary worlds, Lunar Follies (Coffee House Press, 2005), in which imaginary but all-too-real rejection letters pour from various publishers onto the desk of the agent of a writer known only as "B."        

         I've always admired B's work, as you know, but this handcart doesn't look as if it's going to make us any lettuce, not, as you know, that General Motors Xerox Publishing Group Ltd pits lettuce above good, fresh art.

         I doubt if I could make this wholly unreadable slag–save, of course, for its marvelous descriptions of things–a success.

         B, as you know, can only, alas, be marketed as a good soldier, not, alas, as the perfect stunner of a planet that readers, alas, demand today.

         B's new novel is compellingly urgent, but it is not intriguingly powerful or astonishingly compelling. Sorry.

         I know how highly regarded B is among literary circles, but I'm afraid that his sometimes difficult work is just not right for Shit House at the present time.

         I read B.'s sickeningly erotic book with as much lust as I could muster, but I doubt that I am the right whore to do right by it. Best of luck to B.

         The pages, one by one, are fine pages, as are the words, one by one, but I feel that the pages and the words together don't make me ant to put my shoulder to the wheel for B.'s fine new novel.

         Fine plumbing, as is all of B's work, yet unrelentingly odious and morbidly attentive to gross details of things.

         I admit that I pissed my designer pants reading this one, but after the laughter, there was nothing much to "dig" into.

         This schlub of a book, bright in spots, of course, doesn't fit our grandiose fictional plans as of now.

         As you well know, I lack the brains and finely honed reading skills required to publish B's book with the care it deserves, since I am currently sort of really fucked up with a monster coke habit.

         It gives me, as you may know, a big hard-on to regularly read your better authors, like B, and as regularly reject them.

         In order to do right by B's ludicrous yet oddly disturbing new sally into the perverse, I'd have to feel, on every page, the excitement of being humped on my desk by the spick mail boy, and I just don't.

         B's new book, we all agreed here, has three pages, two paragraphs, one clause, seven and a half phrases, thirty-seven sentences, and four hundred and sixty-five words of keen, knee-weakening majesty, but the rest of the book is kind of blah, so we figured, "oh, fuck it," alas.