Secrets of maintaining a long-term agent-author relationship.
IN 1992 George Saunders was still working full-time at an engineering firm when, after some successes with smaller publications, he had his first story accepted by the New Yorker. What Saunders didn’t know was that just before “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” an unsettling little tale set in a failing virtual-reality hologram shop, was published, longtime New Yorker editor Daniel Menaker tipped off literary agent Esther Newberg that she might want to read the work of a promising new author debuting in the magazine that week.
Twenty-six years later, Saunders, now a Booker Prize–winning novelist, and Newberg, co-head of the publishing division at ICM Patners, are on the phone arguing about how she first contacted him: by phone or by mail.
“I remember it being a hard-copy letter,” Saunders says. “It was one of the reasons I fell in love with her. It was a really charming letter.”
“I think you’re making that up, George,” Newberg chimes in.
“No, I still have it,” Saunders says. “Because it has in there the line, which I hope you won’t quote: ‘You had me at “violated prom queen.” In the story there’s a holographic module about violated prom queens. So thought we were on the same wavelength.”
The long-forgotten line, which Saunders later approves for print, sends Newberg into gales of laughter.
If Saunders and Newberg sound like an old married couple still laughing at each other’s jokes after a quarter century, that’s because, in a professional sense, they are one. Unlike so many other author-agent relationships torn apart by disputes over money and artistic vision, theirs has stood the test of time.
Esta historia es de la edición July - August 2018 de Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Esta historia es de la edición July - August 2018 de Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
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SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
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MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
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AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
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