Dear Miss Dressner,

Re: WARD 402 by Ronald Glasser

I’m sorry to be a few days late on this, the more so since it is with a finally negative response.

I’ve put the book through our French “mill” here since I wrote you last and have come up with a verdict favorable to the book’s intrinsic value (for which you scarcely need us) but dubius about is chances in translation. The feeling is, on the one hand, that the hospital-from-the-inside-out subject matter is not new but on the other that the attitude-cum-coral, while new and different, are simply too downbeat and depressing to attract the French reader. True or not? Who’s to say? I know that in French – with a French hospital and a French (and therefore promotable_ author – I wouldn’t be giving up so easily, but given the risks, as well as extra cost, of translation, I don’t feel I can defend that book down to the last bullet.
May someone else prove us wrong!

Many thanks, in any case, for giving us the change, and I hope this won’t dissuade you from coming back in the future. (Tell George, if you would, that I’m assured first change at your Tristan here but that the script still hasn’t made its way across the Channel. No extra manuscript, I gather, though it might also be perfidious Albion.)

With every good wish,

Sincerely yours,
Peter Israel