Anis Shivani recently interviewed Adam Langer for the Huffington Post. (A review of Langer’s new novel, The Thieves of Manhattan, is up in the Circulating section.) Many of Shivani’s questions take the form of interpretations of the novel that Langer doesn’t agree with. But these two consecutive questions elicit entertaining answers:

Shivani: Do you have any particularly traumatic experiences with the publishing industry that you’d like to share?

Langer: Oh yes, over the course of my career as journalist and novelist, I’ve been blown off by E. L. Doctorow, condescended to by Harold Bloom, and been subjected to hissy fits by literary agents who, thankfully, never represented me. Along the way, I’ve been treated to lousy herring by Gary Shteyngart, regaled with unprintable, really yucky stories by Jonathan Safran Foer, upbraided for a really dumb reason by Jeffrey Eugenides, and had my debut novel rejected as “unsaleable” by an agent about a year after it had already been sold. Which should have made me feel smug, but that still sort of pisses me off.

Shivani: Did you meet with early success, in terms of getting your first novel accepted for publication, or was it a long, hard road for you?

Langer: If I pretended that my first published novel, Crossing California, was actually the first novel I wrote, I’d say that it was easy. I’d say, yup, I finished the book, got an agent, got a contract, and started work on Book #2. But in saying that, I’d be ignoring the fact that my first novel, Making Tracks, a teen detective story written when I was in high school, is still in a drawer. And so is my second novel, It Takes All Kinds, a 300-page long screed about my first week at Vassar. Also, my third novel, A Rogue in the Limelight, a picaresque journey modeled on Huck Finn and The Confederacy of Dunces, never found the right agent, even though some people (well, my mother) have called it my best novel. One of my earliest agents said that my fourth novel, Indie Jones, a slacker comedy set in Chicago’s independent film world, would easily find a home at Doubleday, but that didn’t happen. And I stopped looking for an agent for my fifth novel, an existential thriller called American Soil, when I realized there was too much personal shit in it and I really didn’t want to deal with having it published. But yeah, once I finished Book #6, it was smooth sailing.