So, what are you looking for when you read the slush pile?

That’s just it, I’m not looking for anything, I’m just trying to respond to each manuscript on its own merits.

In my first reading, I simply pluck out the stuff I think might be of some interest. This is what grad students/editorial assistants/ interns do at most litmags. I read everything I’m sent, primarily because that’s my way of discovering, but also because I regard it as a moral obligation. It’s what I should do. I should not slough off the dirty work onto somebody else. I should be out there saying, I’m here, show it to me and I will respond.

Maybe seven or eight out of a hundred will make the first cut; I’ll put them aside in a bin, and anybody who’s in the office—the managing editor, the volunteers—can read them, to see if they can discover a masterpiece. I encourage them to leap up and shout if they do find something they like. But they never do; I don’t know why—shyness, perhaps, an unwillingness to be embarrassed by having made a dumb choice. Maybe they’re just deferring to my ultimate judgment, but I’d love to have someone leap up and shout.

Later, comparatively at my leisure, I read the survivors carefully. Several times. Of the original hundred, I might buy one. That’s a fairly standard percentage. The merest fraction. Still, I really do discover things in the slush pile. It’s truly tedious most of the time, but when you do find a needle in the haystack, it’s a thrill.

What I don’t do is read cover letters. I have my helpers remove them when opening the envelopes for me. I want to spend my time on the script itself, not on credits and ingratiating pleas.

Then it doesn’t help if a cover letter contains a recommendation by a teacher or by a writer you admire?

Probably the reverse. I almost never like the stuff that gets recommended. I don’t know if that’s because I’m perverse and don’t like to be told what I should like, or whether it’s because the recommenders haven’t a clue.

Do you get more submissions now than ever, or has it leveled off?

It’s been fairly constant for a long, long time. We log them in and count them, so I know exactly how many, month by month. It’s more or less a hundred a week.

How long does it take you to go through a hundred submissions?

A hundred is too many to read at one time—if you had to slog through that many, you’d get really depressed—so I try to read them as they come in, two or three times a week. An hour or so at a time, but not much longer. Most submissions are terrible.

You can tell instantly?

Not quite instantly. Not just by smelling them. But you can judge them the way you size up someone you meet at a party. If there’s chemistry, you know right away. Sometimes you’re wrong. You get tricked by a trendy haircut or a dazzling smile. Some people take a long time to get to know. Some people may be noble, honest, hardworking, decent, whatever, but not your type.

What you want in a manuscript, in any case, is not something that’s just nice, not something merely competent, but something that makes you gasp. You’re looking for a one-night stand, not a lifetime commitment, and you know you don’t want to—you can’t— go home alone, because you have an issue to fill.

In the first screening I look for a reason to stop reading. As soon as I’m turned off, I walk away: her breath smells; he wears a polka-dot bow tie....

But it’s easy to make mistakes. And I get tired. I get distracted. If I’m just waiting to get an issue back from the printer, I don’t read the slush pile with the same voraciousness as when I desperately need to fill a gap in the next issue....