Standing The Test Of Time

Secrets of maintaining a long-term agent-author relationship.

- Michael Bourne

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.