The Zone

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Therefore, any resemblance between the characters in this book and living people is intentional and malicious. And all the fictionalizing was unexpected and accidental.

The Author

LETTER TO THE PUBLISHER

February 4, 1982. New York

Dear Igor Markovich!*

I’ll take the risk of presenting you with a delicate proposition. It’s basically as follows.

For three years now I have been trying to publish my prison-camp book, and trying all this time to do it as quickly as possible.

More to the point, it was specifically The Zone that I should have had published before anything else. For it was with this book that my ill-fated writing career began.

It turns out that it’s extremely hard to find a publisher. I, for example, was rejected by several. And I wouldn’t want to hide this.

The reasons for rejection were almost boilerplate. These were the basic arguments, if it’s of any interest:

The prison-camp theme is exhausted. The reader is tired of endless prison memoirs. After Solzhenitsyn, the subject ought to be closed.

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