You have to complete a literary quiz. New York City’s Strand Book Store wants their employees to know something about books, so they ask job applicants who out of ten names wrote Infinite Jest or The Sound and the Fury.
Fred Bass, who with his daughter, Nancy Bass Wyden, owns the Strand, called the quiz “a very good way to find good employees,” regardless of their duties.
“Without good people,” Mr. Bass said, “you don’t have anything going.”
Author Marlon James, who won this year’s Man Booker award for his work A Brief History of Seven Killings, said his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was rejected seventy-eight times before being published in 2005.
“There was a time I actually thought I was writing the kind of stories people didn’t want to read,” he said.
The Guardian states many critically acclaimed books were rejected at one time or another and not just by mothers who won’t surrender their children to state-issued mind-control agents. Here’s a quiz on “great rejected books.”