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Oct 3, 2018 13 tweets 6 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
For some aspiring writers a rejection letter from a publisher is crushing; for others it just spurs them on. So if you've been knocked down recently don't worry, you're in good company - as I'll show you in this thread of famous rejections...
“This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.” 

#RejectionLetterQuote for Crash, a novel by J.G. Ballard.
“An endless nightmare. I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book.'”

#RejectionLetterQuote for War Of The Worlds, a novel by H.G. Wells.
“I don’t dig this one at all.”

#RejectionLetterQuote for On The Road, a novel by Jack Kerouac.
“Too radical of a departure from traditional juvenile literature.” 

#RejectionLetterQuote for The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, a novel by L. Frank Baum.
“We feel that we don’t know the central character well enough.”

#RejectionLetterQuote for The Catcher In The Rye, a novel by J.D. Salinger.
“Hopelessly bogged down and unreadable.”

#RejectionLetterQuote for The Left Hand Of Darkness, a novel by Ursula K LeGuin.
“An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.”

#RejectionLetterQuote for Lord Of The Flies, a novel by William Golding.
“Apparently the author intends it to be funny - possibly even satire - but it is really not funny on any intellectual level.”

#RejectionLetterQuote for Catch-22, a novel by Joseph Heller.
"Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm.”

#RejectionLetterQuote for Animal Farm, a novel by George Orwell.
"I rack my brains why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.”

#RejectionLetterQuote for In Search Of Lost Time, a novel by Marcel Proust.
"First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?"

#RejectionLetterQuote for Moby Dick, a novel by Herman Melville.
Whatever you do as a writer, stick to it. Success involves knocking on many doors before you decide which one you're gonna kick down...

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More from @PulpLibrarian

Dec 2, 2018
It is the greatest frog-worshiping zombie biker occult horror film ever made. Possibly the only one. It's certainly like no over movie you've ever seen.

Today in pulp, I look back at the 1971 classic Psychomania...
By the early 1970s British horror films were trying to get 'with it' to attract a younger audience. So it wasn't surprising that in 1971 screenwriter Arnaud d'Usseau tried to create a biker horror movie.
d'Usseau had previously written Horror Express, an Anglo-Spanish sci-fi/horror movie loosely based on John W. Campbell's novella Who Goes There. Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas did their best with the material.
Read 18 tweets
Oct 9, 2018
"The gun is good! The Penis is evil!" bellows a huge stone head floating over the Irish countryside. It's quite a strange start to any movie, but it's about to get even stranger...

This is the story of John Boorman's classic 1974 film Zardoz.
In 1970 director John Boorman began work on a Lord Of The Rings film for United Artists. It would be an unusual adaption; The Beatles would be the Hobbits and Kabuki theatre would open the movie . Alas the studio said 'No', but the idea of a fantasy film stuck with Boorman...
So in 1972, following the commercial success of Deliverance, John Boorman started work on Zardoz - a fantasy film into which he would cram many unorthodox ideas. Initially Burt Reynolds was to play the lead role of Zed, but pulled out citing other filming commitments.
Read 13 tweets
Oct 8, 2018
As it's #LibrariesWeek let's look back at Britain's favourite library book*: the 1977 Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World!

(*according to my readers)
Supernatural World was an anthology of three existing Usborne pocketbooks: Vampires, Mysterious Powers and Ghosts. As an Usborne hardback it was deemed perfect for the nation's libraries.
Usborne had previously fascinated and frightened readers with its 1977 World Of The Unknown series: a terrifying triptych of ghosts, monsters and UFOs. Supernatural World would continue in the same vein.
Read 12 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
It was a university course for the price of a packet of cigarettes: Pelican Books! Maybe the blend wasn't to everyone's taste, but there's no denying the addictive nature of the range.

Today in pulp I look back at the autodidact's bible...
In 1937, two years after Allen Lane founded Penguin books, the company decided on a new imprint to provide academic and intellectual non-fiction for the general public. Lane believed there was a market for “intelligent books at a low price” which he was determined to serve
Over its lifetime Pelican sold a quarter of a billion books covering almost 3,000 subjects. Lane apparently came up with the Pelican name when he overheard a woman at King’s Cross railway station mistakenly asking for a Pelican book instead of a Penguin one.
Read 14 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
📩PULP POSTBAG TIME!📩

And today's letter is home computer related...
Mr Derrick Wibley from Penge writes: "Dear PL, I recently invested in a 48k ZX Spectrum to help run my stationery business 'Penge Pens'. However I'm worried it's not powerful enough to meet the needs of my ambitious business expansion programme. What should I do?"
Well Mr Wibley fear not! The ZX Spectrum is a fully-scaleable integrated solution to your business needs - provided you buy the right peripherals!
Read 13 tweets
Oct 6, 2018
The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984: these weren’t the first dystopian novels. There's an interesting history of Victorian and Edwardian literature looking at the impact of modernity on humans and finding it worrying.

Today in pulp I look at some early dystopian books…
Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863, was the second novel penned by Jules Verne. However his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel rejected it as too gloomy. The manuscript was only discovered in 1994 when Verne’s grandson hired a locksmith to break into an old family safe.
The novel, set in 1961, warns of the dangers of a utilitarian culture. Paris has street lights, motor cars and the electric chair but no artists or writers any more. Instead industry and commerce dominate and citizens see themselves as cogs in a great economic machine.
Read 26 tweets

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