The Spring 2008 issue of The Paris Review includes an interview with Leonard Michaels conducted back in 1986. Michaels died in 2003, and this marks the interview’s first publication.

Michaels was the author of (among other things) the short story collection I Would Have Saved Them If I Could and the novel The Men’s Club.

He had this to share about his reaction to feedback on an early novel:

Was it at Michigan that you wrote a novel in a month?

I wrote the novel in New York. One editor read it and took me to dinner at the Yale Club. I was dying to hear what he thought of my novel He said that from his office window he could see into another office, across the avenue, where every night a man laid his secretary on his desk. Then he said, Your novel should be published, but not by me. I dropped all the copies into the incinerator chute of my parent’s apartment building.