StepsbyJerzy Kosinski

Steps (1968) is novel by Jerzy Kosinski. The sequel to The Painted Bird (1965) shows the unnamed boy of the earlier novel becoming an adult; his youthful suffering makes him unable to conform to accepted social norms. It is a novel comprising scores of loosely connected vignettes and became a subject of a experiment by a writer Chuck Ross on how difficult it is to get the book published if you are an unknown writer. The book won the National Book Award in 1969.

Kosinski also wrote a essay The Art of the Self: Essays à propos Steps onthe book in the same year.

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Experiment by Chuck Ross
In 1975, Chuck Ross, a Los Angeles freelance writer, conducted an experiment with Steps by sending 21 pages of the book to four publishers under the pseudonym Erik Demos. The book was turned down by all of them, including Random House (which originally published Steps) and Houghton Mifflin (which published three of Kosiński’s other novels). Ross revealed his findings in New West magazine four years later. His article includes Kosiński's advice that next time he should offer the entire text. Ross repeated his experiment by submitting the entire text of Steps to literary agents in 1981, with equally dismal results. American novelist David Foster Wallace described Steps as a "collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that's like nothing else anywhere ever". Foster Wallace continued in praise: "Only Kafka's fragments get anywhere close to where Kosiński goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined."  Samuel Coale, in a 1974 discussion of Kosiński's fiction, wrote that "the narrator of Steps for instance, seems to be nothing more than a disembodied voice howling in some surrealistic wilderness."

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Synopsis
Jerzy Kosinski's vision of moral and sexual estrangement captures the disturbing undercurrents of modern politics and culture. In this novel, distinctions are eroded between oppressor and oppressed, perpetrator and victim, narcissism and anonymity. Kosinski portrays men and women both aroused and desensitized by an environment that disdains the individual and seeks control over the imagination in this provocative work.