The query letter

Dear ________:

I would like to submit my manuscript to you because you have an interest in fiction that explores diverse cultures and viewpoints. Also, as a former editor it seems clear that you work closely with your writers. 

Thirty-Seven, a collection of seven stories linked by the significant year in which they occur: 1937. Life's struggles abound, whether in an upscale restaurant on Chicago's Gold Coast, near windswept sky-burial grounds on the Tibetan high plateau, or in a remote hut in uncharted Papua New Guinea. Diverse cultures. Distant locations. Different yet universal challenges. Thirty-Seven explores the question: How can events in one year sum up the whole of the human condition?

At 16, Tashi Yexe becomes the youngest member of the first official Tibetan soccer team. His hopes are dashed when religious clerics, on high alert, join forces with the cabinet ministers to ban his beloved sport. In order to play soccer, Tashi must leave his small village and trek across the Himalayas towards India, his snow-white mastiff as his only companion.

Across the globe, 6-year-old Teo Scarpa is a new immigrant to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His Sicilian family has fled fascism and is trying to assimilate. Barely managing to survive, the Scarpas rely on bread lines and union meetings. They do not understand Teo’s odd behaviors, that he is a savant, a rare synesthete, who hears words in colors, and who paints with extraordinary technique and fantastical insight.

As Palestine comes under the British Mandate, bonds stronger than the two of them test the childhood friendship for Muslim Asim and Jewish Channah. Amidst riots and revolts, centuries of hatred and alliances challenge their two families to maintain the love and trust they have developed, despite the cultural divide.

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, illiterate Jimmy Manning struggles to help his family make ends meet. Seventy years later, Emma Giroux leaves her abusive foster home, and, on a stone bridge high in the Green Mountains of Vermont, this unlikely pair cross paths, and find their way together.

On one side of the world, Hitler wants to end the Jewish bloodline. On the other side of the world, a different dictator invites Jews to come find refuge on his island. Trujillo wants them to interbreed with his people, to lighten the dark, black bloodlines he so abhors. At 101 years old, Don Luis Hess recounts his true tale of leaving Germany, and of settling the first Jewish farm collective on the shores of the Dominican Republic. His is an intimate love story set against the global backdrop of hatred and intolerance.
 
My 61,000-word short-story collection is my first fiction submission. I have three published works of nonfiction and several award-winning video scripts and screenplays.

Thank you for considering my submission. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

[Name withheld]