Panamerica Rides Hard for American Storytelling

Lee Clay Johnson, a young author of Southern Gothic fiction, was having a tough time getting his second novel picked up. Johnson’s agent shopped it for about two years, to every publishing house she could think of. It was roundly rejected with the common refrain, It’s not the right time. Late in 2024, Johnson lost his identical twin brother, Evan David Johnson, a carpenter and fiddle player. “Two weeks after his death,” Johnson recalls, “after I had built his casket with a construction buddy and buried him, [my agent] reached out and told me that she’d hesitated to pile on difficult news at a terrible time but the final publishing option had rejected my novel.”