What Not To Submit To Esquire

Adrienne Miller, former Esquire literary editor turned debutant novelist, speaks of the submissions she received during her stint at the magazine:

"I did it for eight years. It’s a really long time for a job like that. Each magazine, given its sensibility, has its own house-style short story. We at Esquire tended to get a lot of misogynist stuff. Sort of gritilly realistic, Hemingway-esque type fiction."

But it had its advantages, too:

"It was an amazing experience to work with the caliber of writers with whom I worked. Had I been a book editor, I wouldn’t have gotten to work with Don DeLillo, for instance. That was really great. And as a writer, working with really amazing writers made me really want to achieve something at a very high level—and to really write. Not to write the gritilly realistic short fiction I had been spending my life reading, but to hopefully write something that was matching the couple amazing short stories I would read during the course of a year. Some of my favorite stories were by Richard Russo, Joanna Scott, Nicole Krauss, Heidi Julavits."