The following was excerpted from a personal email I received:

“The thing you most need to read and love is Donald Barthelme 60 Stories. Buy it and then I’ll tell you 20 stories to start with and you will love it. He’s ...amazing. A genius, funny, most of McSweeney’s is an attempt to steal from him. It’s all shadows, though. Like listening to Marilyn Manson and not Bowie — you have to go to the source to see how silly the shadow is. But but but”

Coldbacon cannot confirm nor deny this assertion.

Interviewer: Do you read many new novels? Why do you laugh?

Nabokov: I laugh because well-meaning publishers keep sending me—with "hope-you-will-like-it-as-much-as-we-do" letters—only one kind of fiction: novels truffled with obscenities, fancy words, and would-be-weird incidents. They seem to be all by one and the same writer—who is not even the shadow of my shadow.

• Great shit rejected by McSweeney’s