Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck

Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. THANKS AND SORRY AND GOOD LUCK compiles a dozen years of disappointment transmitted via e-mail from a single editor to hundreds of writers around the world. Performative and funny one minute, respectful and constructive the next, these rejections both serve as entertaining writing tips (suitable for use in today's more adventuresome creative writing classrooms) and suggest a skewed story about a boy and his seminal literary website, Eyeshot.net, which Lee Klein founded in 1999. What started as a lark—sending playful rejection notes to writers who'd submitted work for the site—over ten years took on a life of its own, becoming an outlet for Klein to meditate on his aesthetic preferences, the purpose of literature, and the space between the ideal and the real.