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I don't want discussions and interpretations integrated! At least, if they're there, they need to be trivially disposable, such that only those who actually want to see them do so.

I say this because I have never in my life been rendered so furious by the action of a literary editor as to have Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle completely ruined for me by some importunate jackass who insisted upon putting a long, discursive deconstruction of the entire novel into a preface of an edition I incautiously happened to choose. By the time I realized what I was reading, it was too late, and I found myself unable to appreciate the actual story at all, having had it helpfully predigested for me by this ham-handed oaf who so highly valued his unique and precious insight into what Jackson was really trying to say that he put it first in the book, where it lay in the path of the not perfectly cautious reader as a beartrap in that of a cheerful weekend rambler.

I should like any such initiative as that you describe to take as axiomatic it's worth not doing that kind of thing, is what I'm trying to get across here.



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