The Collective by Don Lee

Author:Don Lee [Lee, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

12

Everything changed the following week. Paviromo accepted an excerpt from Joshua’s novel-in-progress for the special Fiction Discoveries issue of Palaver, which he was now planning to publish in June. Then he shocked me by finally, after three years of toying intimations and broken pledges, taking my story “The Unrequited” for the issue as well. I didn’t know what to make of the offer at first. I was, in fact, initially torn about it.

“Did you have something to do with this?” I asked Joshua.

“I might have impressed upon him the obvious grandeur of your story, which he’s been a blinkered arse and bloody ninny to overlook all this time.”

“I can’t have a story in a magazine where I’m the managing editor,” I said. “Everyone will say the only reason I got in was nepotism. No one would count it as a real publication.”

“Look, you and I both know the story stands up, that it’s had to undergo quadruple the scrutiny of anything that’s ever come over the transom at Palaver. Am I right?”

“It didn’t pass the scrutiny of all those other journals I sent it to.”

“Mandarins and halfwits, those editors.”

“Maybe I should withdraw it,” I said.

“Are you fucking kidding me? So what if a few curmudgeons chirp about it? Fuck ’em! You deserve this, man. More than anyone else, you deserve this. I’ll never forgive you if you withdraw it. It’d be such a fucking loony act of career self-sabotage to pull it right when you’re on the cusp. I’m telling you, once people actually read the goddamn story, there’ll be no question that you belong.”

I deliberated for a few days, and even though I still had reservations, I signed the publication contract (which I had had to draw up myself), and let Joshua take Jessica and me out for a congratulatory dinner at Rialto in the Charles Hotel—a threefold celebration, since Jessica had received some good news herself. Her application to the Cambridge Arts Council for an exhibition had been approved.

“This is going to be our year, man,” Joshua said. “1999 will be when everything comes together for us.”

I believed everything just might. I began dreaming. Dreaming that our stories would be selected for prize anthologies, and agents and editors would come clamoring. That we’d get book contracts and fulfill our vow to each publish a book before we turned thirty. That Jessica’s exhibition would be a smash and lead to her signing with a dealer in Boston and another in New York. That Vanity Fair would ask to do a two-page photo spread of the 3AC, but only of the three of us, Joshua, Jessica, and me, because we were the founders, the core, the real fin de sičcle noisemakers who were heralding the arrival of Asian American artists in the new millennium, the ones who had everything before them, a future that promised to be bright and glamorous and extraordinary.

I began writing again—not just revising old stuff but embarking on something brand-new, a novella to round out the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.