The Plot (The Book Series, #1)

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

the students who self-identified as poets

In his experience, poets often read fiction, but fiction writers who said they read poetry with any regularity were liars),

Some of these samples had no particular pretensions to literature, and would be easy enough to deal with—nailing down the plot and red-penciling the prose into basic subservience would be enough to justify his paycheck and honor his professional responsibilities—but the more self-consciously “literary” writing samples (some of them, ironically, among the worst written) were going to suck his soul.

He saw, to his sadness but not his surprise, that the name “Maxwell Perkins” was not familiar to them.

At none of these places had Jake ever been asked for a dime of his own money,

Ragdale does

Anyone could be an idiot or a jerk, separately, but the combination of ignorance and mean-spiritedness—that was special.

Old family around here. They used to own the quarry in West Rutland. Hundred and fifty years to get from a mansion to a needle in the arm. That’s Vermont, I guess.”