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ALEKSANDAR HEMON: I used to write a lot for magazines and radio in Sarajevo, which taught me that writing is evanescent: magazines are thrown away, and radio moments exist briefly and then they perish. That experience gave me a different take on rejection, inasmuch as it prevented me from taking my…

RICHARD FORD : I don't usually like stories about other people's early failures and rejections. They all sound so much the dreary same, and of course they weren’t successful failures or we wouldn't be hearing much about them. Bur I do love my own. I like to think back from a point of present calm t…

KlM EDWARDS: I did my graduate work in Iowa City. When l finished, my husband and I left for teaching jobs on the rural east coast of Malaysia, worlds away. Against the dazzling backdrop of the South China Sea, life seemed very quiet-no talk of writing, no other writers, no visible ways in which bo…

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM: My third novel, Flesh and Blood, received a withering, truly venomous review from Michiko Kakucani in the daily New York Times. It was, in a sense, my worst fear come true: a devastating review that was read by millions of people. I'm not prone to vomiting, as Hellman was, thoug…

In the scene he cannot help but re-imagine each day, one of the saleswomen darts after him into the street, calling out, “Hey! Hey!” and he stops, and the young woman points at his abdomen and says to him, “Hey! You didn't pay for that soap!” and Edwin looks at her, his eyes welling up with tears, …