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You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett. One of our

occasional guilty pleasures here to Way With Words is the website called

Slushpile Hell. This is where a grumpy literary agent lets off steam about the bad manuscripts and the awful query letters that he receives

each week.

And Grant, you know what a slush pile is?

Yeah, slush pile is when you work in book publishing, you get a lot of unsolicited manuscripts

either if you're a publisher or a literary agent and somebody has to go through them

because there might be a genius in there. There usually isn't a genius but

there might be so you have to give everything a try.

Right. And Slushpile Hell is this weird mixture of sort of shodenfroyda and eye-rolling and snark.

And it's also evidence that an amazing number of people have what you might call a wildly

over-inflated view of their writing ability. Let me give you just one example.

Here's the letter that came to this agent. Have you ever wished that you had represented the author of the Holy

Bible and placed it with a publisher? With the Bible being the best-selling book

ever written over the last 2,000 years, the revenue it would have generated for your agency and

...