We don’t really know what “Sixteen Metaphors” is even doing in the book at all, except perhaps to bewilderingly underscore the futility of the book’s central metaphor. So we pass over it to conclude at this letter, “Re: Rejection,” a ventriloquist act where you voice your misgivings about the book through a fictional jury of scowling publishers. This to us, for obvious reasons, seemed the most bizarre and pointless flourish of all: arriving shortly after a novella that ends with a metafictional self-commentary implicating the author, we hardly need more of the same. The only thing more boring, exhausted, and self-indulgent than breaking the fourth wall at the end of a story is pointing it out. Even looking past the internet-borne tendency for writers of your generation to ass-cover with tedious disclaimers, the real point, we think, is to foreclose scrutiny, to get ahead of rejection by naming your sins before any reader has a chance to. But this perverse apologizing only feels like you’re cutting and chewing our meat for us, and we reject you (literally) all the harder. What does it matter that we know you saw it coming? Is it high praise to say that a book is conscious of its faults? Given the subject matter, we’d think you might be keen to the futility of writing an unrejectable book; you cannot curb a reader’s reading, nor steer their goodwill, no matter how clean your intentions or nude your soul. To attempt it is to abandon the possibility of an authentic connection with the reader, one in which you put yourself on their level (though, we suppose, at least this way you get to do the rejecting). So this special pleading on your own behalf, by way of adversarial autofiction, is just, well, annoying. And you already did a similar thing in your first book too.