If you're anything like the writers I meet at conferences and MFA programs, the word sweet probably isn't the first adjective that comes to mind when you think of the head of a major New York publishing house. I hear a lot of other words (many of them unprintable in a wholesome writer's magazine), but the takeaway is often the same: They are snakes in suits whose only loyalty is to the bottom line. While it's true that such creatures exist—I could tell you stories—they are far less common than you might think.

Take the case of Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who got where he is, in part, by being one of the most gentlemanly editors in the business. Born in Seattle and raised in small-town Massachusetts, Galassi grew up surrounded by books and was, by his own admission, a "typical geeky kid." At thirteen he went away to boarding school and fell in love with poetry and languages; he discovered the thrill of editing other people's work when he got the opportunity to publish a friend's short story in the school literary magazine. At Harvard he studied with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. In 1973, after two years in England on a Marshall Scholarship, he moved back to the States and took an internship at Houghton Mifflin. Before long he earned a reputation as an adroit literary editor and was appointed head of the company's New York office. One early acquisition was Alice McDermott's debut novel, A Bigamist's Daughter, which he took with him when he moved to Random House in 1981. As it turned out, the publication of McDermott's novel was a rare bright spot in an otherwise dismal tenure. At Random House, Galassi's books won critical acclaim but sold modestly, and in 1986, after five years with the company, he was fired.

Redemption was both swift and satisfying. Within months of accepting a job at FSG, an independent house that specialized in the kind of serious work he loved, Galassi surprised everyone by taking on a thriller by a Chicago attorney named Scott Turow. The novel, Presumed Innocent, became a runaway best-seller that propelled Galassi up the editorial ranks and ultimately positioned him as the heir to FSG's founder, Roger Straus. In his spare time, Galassi published two volumes of his own poetry, translated the work of Italian modernist Eugenio Montale, and spent a decade as poetry editor of the Paris Review. He also accumulated every major editing award in existence.

Today Galassi says his job is to ensure that FSG stays true to its mission of publishing important voices as effectively as possible. When I asked him what he'd change about his job if he could, he lamented that he doesn't have as much time to read as he used to; he also wishes he had "more of that immediate engagement with new authors." Note to readers: If you can find a way to make Galassi's wishes come true, yours might not be far behind either.

I don't want to bore you with a lot of questions about your childhood but I am curious if there were any books that had a big impact on you at an early age.
I was a big reader as a kid. I used to go to the little library in the town where we lived in Massachusetts and read voraciously. I read everything. I was in the Weekly Reader children's book club and I remember loving The Wind in the Willows and Johnny Tremain and books like that. My grandmother was a big reader. She lived in Boston and would come down and bring books like The Alexandria Quartet or The Fall or Passage to India. I remember the romance and the exotic quality of those books. I remember what they looked like, what they felt like. Eventually all of my grandparents' books ended up in our house, so there were a lot of old books around. It wasn't that I would sit and read them all. It was more that I would pore over them and feel the textures of them. My grandfather was Italian, so there were all these books about Italy, and I would pore through them and look at the pictures of the different places. I was just very absorbed by books as a way of escape and as something to escape into.

But there was no particular book that altered the direction of your life?
I don't think I can point to any one book. But I was bookish. I was very unathletic. I had bad eyesight. I was a typical geeky kid. I remember reading The Count of Monte Cristo when I had the mumps or something and just being overwhelmed by the romance of the story. I loved stories that had a medieval or foreign feel. I loved The Golden Warrior and books about the ancient world. I loved all of that stuff. And then I went away to school when I was thirteen and got very interested in languages and poetry. In high school I got interested in everything that I'm interested in now. That's where I started to write and edit. I was an editor of the school literary magazine. I remember the experience of working with my friends on their writing and how exciting that was to me, and how rewarding it was, even more than my own writing. I felt a real sense of connection to them, and a certain effectiveness. That was a powerful experience. I remember that my best friend, who wasn't a particularly literary guy—he was a jock, really—wrote a short story that ended up being the best story published in the magazine in our time. I was blown away by the intensity and the power of that story. I got a real thrill out of being present at the creation of somebody else's work.

Do you think your work as a poet and translator informs your work as an editor and publisher?
That has always been secondary to my work as an editor. I mean, maybe it wasn't always secondary in my deepest heart, but when I started to work in publishing I decided that I was going to put editing first. And I've never had regrets about it. I guess I think of those things as flowing into and out of each other.

When I started writing I didn't have much confidence in my own powers, but I think over time I've become more comfortable with what I can do as a writer. That came through working on translation. I was translating Montale, which was a deep interest that went on for many, many years. That taught me a lot about writing. And obviously I've also learned a lot from working with writers over the years. But I've never felt any ambivalence about being a publisher as opposed to being a writer.

But is there anything in your experience as a poet and translator that informs how you go about the business of being an editor?
Perhaps I don't think of authors as different animals. I can give authors a sense of realism about what can be done in the world with their work. I would never want to put myself on the same plane as the writers I work with, but because I know what it is to write, I think I can empathize with their desires and frustrations. There are some publishers who think of the work as something for them to mold, and I don't think of it quite that way. But I wouldn't want to convey the impression that I'm a writer who's also a publisher. I'm a publisher who's also a writer. And as a rule I don't talk about my own writing with my authors, unless they bring it up. Because I'm here to work for them.

Did you teach yourself how to edit?
I guess so. My first job was as an intern in the editorial department at Houghton Mifflin in Boston in 1973. They just sort of threw you into it. Nobody was sitting there and teaching you how to do it. I think you learn it by watching how the people around you work with authors, and it happens almost by osmosis. There are many different styles of editing, too. It's an apprenticeship. There are courses you can take to learn the mechanics of the business, like the Radcliffe course, but I don't think they teach you how to edit. Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved. One thing I have noticed is that when you're a younger editor, you're more intense about it. As you go along, you relax a little. More and more, I feel that the book is the author's. You give the author your thoughts and it's up to him or her to decide what to do. One time [Jonathan] Franzen made fun of me about that. He didn't take some suggestion I had made and I said, "Well, it's your book," and he sort of mocked me for that. [Laughter.] But that's what I really believe. I believe it with poetry, too. The texts are so personal. Yes, there are times when I've worked with poets to edit their work, but usually you either buy into what they're doing or you don't. If you don't, you shouldn't be working with them, and if you do, you realize that they know what they're doing.

What were the hardest lessons for you to learn when you were a younger editor?
One of the really hard lessons was realizing how much of a crapshoot publishing is—how you can love something and do everything you can for it, and yet fail at connecting it to an audience. Maybe you misjudged it. Maybe it didn't get the right breaks. One of the hardest things to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There's luck in publishing, just like in any human activity. And if you don't get the right luck—if Mitchi [Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times] writes an uncomprehending review, or if you don't get the right reviews, or if books aren't in stores when the reviews come, or whatever the hell it is—it may not happen. That was one of the hardest lessons: how difficult it is to actually be effective.

Another really hard thing is that, as a young editor, each book is like your baby. I remember wanting to publish Peter Schjeldahl's biography of Frank O'Hara so desperately. I lost it to some other editor who paid more money, and I was melancholy about it for months. Of course the book ended up never being written. [Laughter.] But at the time I felt like a piece of me had somehow been sawn off. I wanted to pour myself into that project so much, and it takes time for that sense of wanting, and identification—which is what publishers live on, really—to relax a little. I see my young editors going through that and I empathize so much. But you have to learn to let go of things. That was a very painful lesson.

But when I was young I had so much reverence for writing. Elizabeth Bishop was my teacher in college—she was my favorite teacher, and I revered her work, and I loved her as a person very, very much—and I remember that when she would invite us over for dinner I would get almost physically ill. It was this combination of conflicting feelings: excitement, discomfort, a sense of unworthiness. It mattered so deeply that it made me almost physically ill. Caring that much was painful. I don't know if that's a lesson but it was certainly something where the intensity of my devotion was overwhelming.

How did you end up in New York?
I started in Boston in 1973, and in 1975 they sent me down here. I wanted to be in New York. After college I'd gone to England for a couple of years on a fellowship. I was in Cambridge, but I spent a lot of time in London, and I realized that I wanted to live in a metropolis. So I came down here. But I was working for Houghton Mifflin, which was a Boston company that had very conflicted feelings about New York. I was very interested in publishing young writers, and I felt that Houghton was kind of stick-in-the-mud-ish and that a place like Knopf or Random House would do that better. It was sort of callow of me because Houghton had been very good to me. They had let me start a poetry series, they had let me publish first novels. And I learned so much there.

But I was a young man in a hurry and eventually I was offered a job at Random House. Jason [Epstein] was the one who hired me. And that didn't go well. There were a number of reasons, some of which were my fault. Jason had a sort of sink-or-swim approach, which was fine, but he was also not terribly interested in what other people were doing. I was used to being the kid who got to do what he wanted. But I wasn't a kid anymore and there was a lot of internal competition and I just didn't respond well to that. I didn't do well. And Random House had Knopf next door, where Bob Gottlieb was at the apogee of his effectiveness. He was a terrific publisher. Random House was always sort of vying to live up to that. The books I was doing were Knopf-y, within Random House, and I just didn't know how to make that work. Someone else could have, I think.

What did you take away from those years at Random House?
I learned a huge amount. Not all of it was pleasant. I learned a lot about competition and how literary life really worked, because Houghton Mifflin was a little bit off to the side. Random House had a kind of glossiness to it that wasn't really me, even though they were a very effective publisher. In the Bennett Cerf days, Random House had been in some ways an ideal publisher because they were what I would call a "best of breed" publisher. They could publish Gertrude Stein, and Faulkner, and O'Neill, but also a lot of very commercial books. And they all sat next to each other comfortably. By the time I got there that had dissipated and there were all sorts of other pressures. But they were a much more confident publisher than Houghton Mifflin.

Knopf was also there, and you saw that it was about a sort of consistency of commitment. They knew how to publish literary books. They published one after another, and some of them would work and some of them wouldn't, and they had a system that was very well oiled. They had a place in the publishing universe, so a lot of their work was already done for them. If they committed to publishing an author, you knew that the Times Book Review was going to pay attention, and this, that, and the other thing were going to happen. That's what that little machine existed for, and they ran it very well.

I actually think that when Bob left publishing, to go to the New Yorker, everything changed in my business. Bob was such a dominant figure in literary publishing that he kind of controlled prices. A lot of people would go to him to be published without auctions because they wanted to be with him. He sort of set the prices in the sense that he wouldn't participate in auctions. It wasn't that he was unfair—he was fair and generous. But he was reasonable. When he left, that was over. Auctions became much more a part of how most books were sold, and the prices went up, and the whole game became more about money. This was in the mid-eighties, and it was a watershed moment in publishing.

I learned some other lessons that were not so nice. It wasn't a collegial place. People really didn't wish each other well, which I wasn't used to. But looking back on it I think it was a difficult situation that I could have responded to differently. I think I grew up a lot during that time.

How did you get from there to FSG?
After I was fired, Roger [Straus] gave me a job. FSG was pretty far down at that point. Roger's son, Rog, had come back to the company and I think they were trying to revivify it. Luckily, they hired me. And the minute I got there, things clicked and I felt like I was totally at home.

This was a real turning point for you.
It was. Basically the first book I signed up was Presumed Innocent, which was a huge best-seller. It was a first for FSG, and it was exactly the kind of book I was supposed to have been publishing at Random House. Of course there was great joy in Mudville about that. [Laughter.] But you have to remember that when I was in college, Lowell and Bishop were my teachers, and both of them were published by FSG. So FSG books had an aura of sanctity. To come and work here was amazing. I just felt like FSG was good at doing the kinds of books I wanted to do. It was still the old days then—it was still a small independent publisher and that was still a viable thing. But it had taken me a long time to get going as an editor. I'd been in publishing for over ten years before I got to FSG and it all came together.

Tell me a little about the atmosphere of the place.
Did you ever visit the old offices? When I came we were on the fourth floor of 19 Union Square West. Calvin Trillin said it looked like a branch office of a failing insurance company. It looked like something out of a porn magazine. It was dirty linoleum and cockroaches and just really, really gross. When we moved up to the old Atlantic Monthly Press office on the eleventh floor, my health improved.

What about the personalities?
In those days Roger was there, of course. Pat [Strachan] was there. Bob Giroux was still around. Michael di Capua. Aaron Asher was gone, but David Reiff was working there as an editor. Rog was there. It was a very personality-filled company with a lot of smart people who were very dedicated. But they never took themselves too seriously. That's one thing I've always loved about FSG. With Knopf I always felt that there was a snootiness—they would look down their noses. That was never true at FSG. It was scrappy; it was irreverent. I mean, they took literature extremely seriously, but they never took themselves seriously. It was a very good-natured place where people wished each other well. I think people felt like they were doing something good. The pay was terrible, and the conditions were terrible, but everybody knew why they were there. And we all felt like it was a privilege to work there. I think both Roger and Bob were responsible for that in different ways. Roger loved the game of publishing. He loved competing. He loved having enemies, being outrageous, swearing, making nasty comments. That was fun for him. Bob was more bankerly and serious, but literature had an unquestioned importance for him. It was a part of life that really mattered. I wouldn't say that that doesn't exist in publishing today, but it does feel different today. At that time books had a cultural primacy that they don't quite have now. Books have been sort of moved to the side by other media. It's not that people don't read books. But books are one among a smorgasbord of options. Whereas in those days books were still where cultural life was centered. People were decrying the influence of television, but books were still more at the center.

A couple years after that you became editor in chief. Was there any friction between you and Roger?
Not a lot. I think I was lucky that I came along at the moment in his life when I did. He and Rog loved each other, but they were not natural business partners. I was able to be a kind of business son in a way that his real son couldn't. We had some set-tos, but not a lot. He was much mellower and less threatened in his later years. There had been a time when a number of really talented editors didn't survive at FSG.

What would you and Roger argue about?
Well, he didn't always like what I liked, but he was pretty tolerant. There would be issues involving money and how much we could pay for things. Roger loved to fight with people. I always thought that wasn't good business practice. I thought it was better to get along with people so you could have another deal with them down the line. I remember one time when I said, "Don't you think we should make up with so-and-so?" He said, "Don't give me any of that Christian stuff, Galassi. I'm a vindictive Jew." [Laughter.] He enjoyed having enemies. But all in all we had fun together, and he was like a father to me in a lot of ways.

Tell me about the transition from editor in chief to publisher.
That was a little difficult in the sense that it had to do with Roger's mortality. When he sold the company in 1994, the deal was that he would run it as long as he could. He did, and he continued to act like an independent for many years. But he slowed down eventually. One of the difficulties I had was that there was a lot of deferred maintenance. In other words, things kept going in a certain way longer than maybe they should have in some areas. The company remained a very personal fiefdom of Roger's even after it had been owned by someone else for a long time. And with that goes what I would call deferred maintenance. The biggest and most significant change I made was bringing in Andrew Mandel to be the deputy publisher. He helped organize and rationalize our practices in a lot of ways. It's still an editorially driven house—the editors still decide what we're going to publish—but the business aspects are a little less seat-of-the-pants and a little more planned out and fiscally responsible. The other thing is that I wasn't editor in chief anymore. I do fewer books and have a lot of other responsibilities. I usually have another editor work with me on projects. I've had to step back from some things. I can't edit these thousand-page books with the kind of assiduity that I used to. I'm still editing a lot of books, but there are just more other things I have to do. It's like how I said earlier that the book is your baby—now the company becomes your baby. You're thinking about ways to strategize for the future. You're thinking about, "How is FSG going to continue to be a literary publisher?" It's more about the organism as a whole and less about any single book. You're asking yourself, "How can we maximize the lives of all the books we do, both in the current environment and in the future?"

What are you looking at when you're thinking about those things?
I'm thinking about the proportions of what we publish, for example. Another one of the things I've been excited about recently is bringing Mitzi Angel here to run Faber. Stephen Page and I decided to take Faber and make it a bigger player in the conspectus of American publishing. That's a really exciting thing and I think Mitzi's doing a fabulous job. So we're trying to expand our bouquet. We also have people like Lorin [Stein] and Courtney [Hodell] coming along who are doing really fresh publishing, and we're trying to give them the support they need. We're also trying to expand our nonfiction publishing to balance the literary publishing because a lot of serious readers read nonfiction and we want those readers too.

Tell me about some of the high moments in your life as a publisher.
One of my happy moments has to do with Denis Johnson. We published two books by Denis in the early nineties: Jesus' Son, which was one of the best books I ever published, and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, which was also a wonderful book. But then Denis left. He went to Robert Jones at Harper. He was dissatisfied. He didn't think that we were doing enough for his books. But he came back to us for Tree of Smoke and it became a New York Times best-seller and won the National Book Award. So there was a great sense of happiness and accomplishment that we came back together and were able to help him achieve so much.

What are some other great moments like that?
When the manuscript of [Marilynne Robinson's] Gilead came in. This is a book that had been under contract for so many years that...it wasn't that we forgot about it, but we didn't know if or when it would appear. And then it came in. It was perfect. Almost nothing was done to it. It was one of those experiences of spiritual uplift. To come across a book that you knew was a great book? And you were reading it first!

The second great moment is when it actually becomes a book—a physical thing. I always feel that when you put a book into proofs it gets better just by virtue of being set in print. I know a lot of writers feel that way too. It takes on a kind of permanence. And then it's even more satisfying when it becomes an actual book.

How did you meet Alice McDermott?
Alice was sent to me by Harriet Wasserman, who was a very important person in the beginning of my publishing life. Her office at Russell & Volkening was in the same building as Houghton Mifflin's New York office. I got to know her and eventually became very close to her. We did a number of really interesting projects together and Alice was one of the first. She gave me these pages from this book about a young woman working at a vanity press, and that was the beginning of A Bigamist's Daughter. She was such an assured writer. She had such definition and wit and this very subtle, cool, deadpan humor. She's one of the most amazing stylists I know. And she's such a modest and well-spoken and well-behaved person. I took that project with me from Houghton Mifflin to Random House, and I remember that, after she turned it in, several weeks went by and somehow it came out that I hadn't paid her the advance that was due on delivery. I said, "Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you ask for it?" She was too well-behaved to ask. [Laughter.] She's someone who didn't write just one wonderful book—she's produced a lot of them. Her methods of writing are very original. She's always writing two books at once, and she ends up choosing one. The other one goes in a drawer somewhere. Which means there are all these incredible, unrealized books by Alice McDermott somewhere. But she uses one to bring out the other. I think it's a very interesting psychological thing. It's like she's always having twins. One twin comes to life and the other twin is still gestating somewhere.

One thing that always fascinates me is how people view their jobs and their various responsibilities. Give me a sense of how you view yours.
I think my responsibility—my task and my joy—is to try to make FSG as effective an instrument for publishing as possible. To make it strong and to help it make a difference in the publishing business. FSG is a lot different than it was when I came here. But what I don't think is different is the attitude about what's important to publish. That is my biggest responsibility—to make sure that that stays at the center of what we're doing. And that we believe literature is important and that our mission is to enhance the dissemination of it. So while everything has changed around the core of FSG, I don't think the core has changed at all.

And if you had to articulate that core and what's important to publish?
I think it's about the voices of writers. FSG really became FSG when Bob [Giroux] came and brought people like Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Those writers, who were all very distinctive and idiosyncratic, contributed to the essence of American literature in their time. And our desire is to continue to be a place where people like that feel at home and feel that we're doing the best we can for their work—and the public feels that the books we publish have value. It's a business, and I love the fact that it's a business. I really think it's much better for publishing to be a commercial enterprise. But it's not just a business. It's about selling something that you believe in.

What houses do you feel competitive with?
I feel very competitive with Knopf. But I feel competitive—and when I say "competitive" I also mean that I feel collegial—with people all over. You and Morgan [Entrekin]. New Directions, who I love. Penguin Press, both in America and in the UK, is a really fabulous publishing house. I think Cape is great. I think Chatto is great.

Who do you feel the most competitive with?
I guess we still think of Knopf as the big giant. We're the we-try-harder. But we're not really like Knopf. We're different. We're smaller. But I think they do a really good job with a lot of great books.

When you suspect you're going up against them for a book, what's your pitch?
My answer to that is that it only makes sense for authors to be published here who want to be published here. In other words, if they buy into our approach and feel that we will do well by their work, that works. If it's about money alone we're not going to tend to win those contests. Someone else can always come up with more money. So what we have to offer is ourselves, and our approach, and what I would do to compete is just tell the author what we think about the book, ask him what he wants from a publisher, and show him how we've done other books in the past. What else can I do?

What's the biggest practical difference, in your mind, between FSG and Knopf?
We're smaller, and that means we can give more attention to each project. We have a very good publishing team. Jeff Seroy is a brilliant publicity and marketing guy. Spencer Lee, our sales guy, is terrific. And there's a cohesiveness to what we do.

It can be difficult to articulate what exactly you're looking for as an editor, but tell me about something recently that captivated you for whatever reason, and talk about why.
The book that we're doing now that comes to mind is All the Living by C. E. Morgan. It's a first novel by a young woman and it's about Kentucky. It was sent to me by Ellen Levine, who is Marilynne Robinson's agent. We publish Marilynne, and this author admires her a lot. I think it was offered to other publishers too, and I don't know if we offered the most money, but we certainly paid a serious advance for it. What I felt was so unusual about it was the voice and the consistency of her approach. She's created a sort of small myth. It's concise. It's intense. It's very different from most other fiction we see in that it's so much about the place. It's very American in that way. It's not ironic. It's not disabused. It's very American in its romance about place and about death and love. I found it very primal and beautiful in a restrained way.

But right now we're also publishing John Wray's book, Lowboy, which Eric's doing. Courtney's doing the Wells Tower book [Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned]. Lorin's about to publish Clancy Martin's book, How to Sell. All of these books are different in terms of their angles of attack, but they're all very strong voices. And they don't sound like anyone else. I think the voice is the most important thing—and then the shape.

One thing that I don't see a lot of today, and that I used to be very taken with, is the bigger kind of novel. Social novels, even. I think of The Twenty-seventh City. That was a first novel that just blew me away. On the one hand there was The Twenty-seventh City and on the other hand was The Virgin Suicides.

Another book that I'm really excited about is Amy Waldman's first novel, The Submission, which is a social novel. It's a fictional account of the attempt to build the World Trade Center memorial. It's a fantastic book about politics, art, religion, and all the different issues there. I very seldom see novels that have that kind of social reach.

What else are you looking for when you're evaluating a piece of fiction? Are you looking for a certain kind of sensibility or anything like that?
I think that would fall under voice. I remember when I read [Roberto] Bolaño's Savage Detectives. I read an Italian version and just thought it had so much verve and humor. It was so sexy. It had a kind of buoyancy and it was so alive. Voice is one way of looking at it but aliveness is another way. And I think voice is kind of being killed in a lot of writing today. When you look at the New Yorker, the voices are much less idiosyncratic than they used to be. It's being edited in a different way than it used to be.

Why do you think that is?
I don't know. They used to publish a lot of long pieces and it may have something to do with readers' attention spans being different. We published a very good book last year, the autobiography of the composer John Adams. The New Yorker ran a piece of it and the author told me that they tried to iron out the idiosyncrasies of his style. He gave them a fight. He was very bemused by why they would try to change his little quirks.

One of the books that I was most proud of publishing last year was the Lowell-Bishop correspondence. The thing that makes that book so wonderful is the idiosyncrasy of the way they write.

I have a quote for you: "Most words put down on paper are not interesting, or don't make sense, or are stilted. You can tell within two pages that something is not going to work." That's you, twelve years ago. I completely agree and I'm curious what common problems you notice in the work of beginning writers.
I used to be kind of uptight about writing-school writing—it can be hard to emerge with your own voice—but I'm less aware of that now. I think a lot of people learn to write by imitating and that's perfectly legitimate. That's how poets learn to write. I remember that Elizabeth Bishop used to make us write imitations of other writers. But if you want to publish your work, you better have moved beyond that. Only a few people in the world are meant to be writers. And those are people who really can't say things the way other people would. It's involuntary. Milosz had this great line that poetry should only be written under unbearable pressure and in the hope that good spirits, not evil, choose us for their instrument. The idea is that the people who should write are the people who can't not write. I think there are a lot of people who want to write, and who want to say something, but a lot of them don't have anything to say.

What will make you want to throw a first novel across the room?
Pretentiousness. When the writer is trying to be cool, or ironic, or when the work just isn't genuine. It's like what [U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Potter Stewart said about pornography: You know it when you see it. You can tell when you're reading something genuine. You feel it. There are writers whose voices are quite self-conscious and who I think are great. André Aciman, for example. I'm working on his new novel right now. His writing is about self-consciousness. It's about questioning what you just said, revising what you just said. It's very Proustian in that way. And I love it. It's very genuine. That's just the way his mind works.

What is it about the work of a debut poet that will make it stand out from the others enough that you want to take it on? Is it different than with fiction?
It's not really different. It's the voice and the angle and the attitude. We don't take on very many debut poets because we have so many ongoing writers. I miss that. I read that piece in the New Yorker about the Dickman brothers and felt a little out of it.

Is there a debut poet you've taken on recently who you could talk about?
Maureen McLane is an example. I knew Maureen as a critic before I read her poetry. She's a brilliant critic of contemporary poetry. And then I read her poems, which have a kind of freshness that takes you back to the modernism of H. D. and Pound. It's very classical in its directness. I thought, "This is totally outside the lingo of most poets." It's pure and in touch with tradition in a very direct way. I felt the same way about Eliza Griswold's book, which we did a couple of years ago and which won the Rome Prize. Both of those poets write in ways that are outside of the lingo of the various schools of poetry. They're different. You can't tell who their teachers were.

You've lamented the blockbuster mentality that's arisen in publishing, where it's become easier for a publisher to sell a first novel and harder for an author to build a career over a number of books that sell modestly. Can you speak to that for writers?
Suppose I had written a first novel that five publishers wanted to publish and the range of offers was from fifty thousand dollars to four hundred thousand. I probably wouldn't go with the fifty-thousand-dollar offer, and I might well go with the four-hundred-thousand-dollar offer. But I hope that I would think through how the publisher was going to try to make that money back. What's the publisher's idea of what to do with my book? Of course if you're a young person who has never made a penny and all of a sudden somebody offers you a lot of money, you're going to take it. You need it. But I don't think that's necessarily the right thing to do.

Why?
Because if your book doesn't do well and earn that money back, or make a credible showing, you're going to have a harder time the next time. That's why I think the old system was better. Forty years ago, your agent would likely have sent your book to editors one at a time, but even if it was done as a multiple submission, the differential between the offers would not have been as great. The choice would be made on other bases. I know that this may sound self-serving, but I do think that real careers are built stepwise. I still believe that. And I haven't seen a lot of careers built the other way. I think a lot of agents, especially younger ones, feel that the commitment the big advance represents is what's going to bring the author success. But I don't think that's true.

That's the Andrew Wylie philosophy. You have said that FSG is a living contradiction to that model, where more money is perceived as meaning more oomph.
I think that a really good agent should be able to get the right publisher, which the agent has already figured out, get as much money as she can from that publisher, and make a deal, rather than have the amount of money determine the sale. That's what the best agents do. They may solicit a lot of action, but they know where they want to place the author. They may use competition to jack up their preferred publisher as high as they will go, and there may be times when the differential is so big that they aren't going to be able to go with that target publisher, but I think that's the right way to do it: for the agent to work the process so that the author ends up with the right publisher paying as much as they comfortably can. There's an edge of commitment that makes the publisher feel they have to be alert, but they haven't gone beyond their zone of comfort for the book.

But Andrew might say that they should be pushed beyond their comfort zone. Is there any chance he's right?
I haven't seen that here. We don't sit around and say, "Well, we paid x for this book so we'd better do something special." Everyone knows what the situation is. But even if you'd better do it doesn't mean that it's going to work.

But we know that there are different levels of effort.
Sure.

That's why I sometimes wonder if there's any chance he's right. I mean, I'm with you. I work at Grove, for God's sake.
Part of what I'm talking about is the agent using the process to push the publisher to the point where it's costing them something to acquire the book. They're not just picking up the book for nothing and throwing it against the wall and hoping it sticks. They're going to have to think and be creative in publishing it. You can blame Andrew all you want, but the people who are responsible for the overpayments in publishing are publishers, not agents or authors. The publishers are the ones who agree to do it, and they're the only ones who can be blamed for it. We walk away from books that we'd like to publish every day because they're out of our comfort zone—out of our rational calculation of what we think we should be risking on them. Very good agents, who I have a lot of respect for, have said to me, "If I were you I wouldn't be paying big advances." I think that if we could inject some of that realism into the process we'd have a healthier business.

They say that to you kind of off the record?
Yeah. I'm not going to say who they are, but yes, very good agents have said that to me. Because I think they understand that if the publishers kill themselves off, the agents aren't going to have people to publish their authors' work. It's not that I don't want authors to make money. I do. I want them to get rich, because then their publishers will be doing well too. But I don't want them to get rich at the expense of the larger institution. That's no help to them. It will weaken the publishers, and then we won't be effective.

Are there any other insights you can offer writers about agents?
I think the ideal publishing experience is when the agent and the publisher can work together to promote the career of the author. Yes, the agent sometimes barks at the publisher about something, but basically they all feel that they're on the same team. That's how really good agents operate. Really good agents are also just as devoted to the work as you and I are. It's the same profession from a different angle. As I said, authors should want an agent who knows where to place them—not someone who's throwing a ball up in the air and seeing who jumps highest.

But if you're a writer, and you don't work in publishing, it can be hard to figure out which agents do that.
But what you can tell is how they react to your work. You can listen to what they say about it editorially and aesthetically. That's the first thing you would want: someone who understands what you're doing and is not trying to make you into something you aren't.

But once the agent has cleared that hurdle in your mind, as a writer, how do you figure out the other stuff? How do you know how good they actually are at placing your work at the right house?
I think it's like picking a dentist—you go by recommendation and word of mouth and looking at who else the agent represents. What's happened to those other writers? I think that's how agents get their clients.

With nonfiction, agenting has evolved to the point where agents have become very involved in the proposals.
Sometimes they write them.

Exactly. Do you think it's ethical for agents to work very heavily on a proposal without disclosing that to prospective editors?
We often talk about this. I think that a good agent is an editor, but at the same time it's not ethical for an agent to write a proposal for an author. The author needs to write it. The agent can criticize it and suggest improvements—and should—but sometimes we wonder who actually wrote the proposal. You can usually get a feel for that. But I don't think it's ethical for an agent to do more than make suggestions to the author. They have to write it themselves.

How do you feel about the new primacy that agents have assumed in the lives of writers? Editors and publishers have been displaced to some extent. Are you okay with that?
What I don't like is when an agent tries to interpose his or her body between you and the author—when the agent is proprietary and everything needs to be communicated through them and they don't want you to have your own relationship with the author. I find that very frustrating and alienating and counter to the idea I was just talking about where it's a collaboration between the agent and the publisher and the author. I think you're right in that over time the agent has become more important in the author's life, partly because authors move around more than they used to. But when you've worked with an author over many years, you do develop a really close relationship. The agent has his or her own relationship with the author, and a good agent wants you to be close with the author.

What do you find most frustrating about agents?
I have a certain sympathy for agents on the money thing. They're getting pressure from their authors. Just the way that you and I feel like, "Well, if we don't come up with x amount of money, Ann Godoff will," they feel that too. They may lose their author if they can't deliver what the author needs. I empathize with that. But I think a strong agent is confident enough and knowledgeable enough about the business, and about history, and about how careers work in the long term, that she can say to her author, "Look, this is what's in your interest. It may not seem to be in the short term, but it is in the long term." And that's coming from the seat of experience. I'm close to a number of agents, personally, and I have a lot of respect for their contribution to our business. And yes, we argue. We don't always agree. I sometimes feel that they're trying to take advantage. But all in all, it's just like how I said it only makes sense for authors to be here who want to be here: The agents who we work with best are the ones who get why FSG is good for their authors. It's a collaborative process and doesn't need to be hostile. A really good agent is your ally as well as your adversary at times.

On the flip side of the world of huge advances is the midlist writer, who is really struggling today because of the computer and the sales track. Put yourself in that person's shoes and, knowing what you know, tell me what you'd do to try to change your fate.
Most books have to be midlist because only a few can be best-sellers. If you're a serious writer, you should be writing the books you're going to write.

But what if you have some ambition, as all writers do, and really want a readership and think that you deserve one?
If they deserve one, they'll get one. I believe that. I believe that eventually they will get their readership. Now, I also think there are way more people writing books than are going to get a readership. But I think that the books that really make a difference are going to have a readership. It may not be immediate. There are many examples of writers who have labored in relative obscurity for a long time until their ship came in. Look at Bolaño. His great success is posthumous and not even in his own country.

Writing is its own reward. It has to be. I really believe that. This is a part of publishing that's really hard to come to grips with. But publishers can't make culture happen the way they want it to happen. They can stand up for what they believe in, and they can work to have an impact, but in the end it's like the brilliant thing that Helen Vendler said about poets. She was asked, "What's the canon?" and she said something like, "The poets are going to decide what the canon is. The poets who poets read are the canon." I think that, in the end, that's true about all literature. The books that people read over time, and keep reading, are the books that matter. We can huff and puff and pay money and advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don't come, we can't do anything about it.

Twenty years ago you called writing "a very cruel sport." Has it gotten more or less cruel since then?
I think it's probably gotten more cruel because there's more competition for people's time as readers. But all sports are cruel. Golfing is a cruel sport because only a few people are going to play on the PGA Tour. Poetry is a good bellwether because there are only a few poets who matter in the end. Even a lot of the poets who win honors are going to be filtered out in the end. It doesn't mean they aren't good. It is cruel. It's Darwinian. So if you're going to be a writer, you'd better take rewards from it over and above the public recognition. I remember something Montale said to the effect that even being a minor poet is an honorable thing. Being a novelist or a poet whose books aren't popular is a wonderful accomplishment.

In talking about book promotion you once said something interesting about believing that authors should focus on their work and leave the promotion to others. Some people would disagree with that.
Unfortunately publishers need authors to do some of that. We need authors to be able to go on Charlie Rose and the Today show and All Things Considered. We're dying for them to do those things. We're selling authors, not books. We're selling people the illusion of an experience with an author. They want to know what the author looks like, what he smells like. They want the full experience. In the old days it was "Read John Updike's new book." Now it's "Meet John Updike" or "Listen to John Updike on the audio version" or "Watch John Updike give a reading." All of that can be very distracting for writers. Certain writers aren't any good at it. If you think about it, if a writer has forty good writing years, and he publishes a book every two years, does he want to spend a third year of that cycle on selling his book, in the United States and in Europe and everywhere else? That's a big chunk out of his working life. Even though it can make things hard for us, I'm very sympathetic to authors who don't want to do that. It's not what they're best at. Their real talent is writing.

What drives you crazy about authors?
It's hard for them to drive me crazy. I actually really empathize with authors. Of course there are certain authors who are so obsessive about every little thing, and sometimes I have to deal with those things. But I can usually say to them, almost as a joke, "You're the most obsessive person I've ever worked with!" But their perfectionism is what makes them that way, and of course that's something I value in their work. And then there are authors who are just very, very selfish—just like there are people who are very selfish. You can't admire that. They can be mean, sometimes. I don't like authors who aren't appreciative of the people who help them publish their work. Some of our most famous authors are among our nicest, and then there are others who have been among our most disliked. They can earn the love or the contempt of the people who work for them. But by and large I feel that their problems are very human problems. I think authors are heroic, so I tend to think that their narcissism is justified. And let's face it: The authors you are working with are ones who you've decided are important, so you've already bought into them.

You have lamented how the role of the editor has changed over the years—that it used to be more about the text and now it's more about promotion.
I remember being so impressed by something I was once told by Bob Loomis, who's still going strong in his eighties and is one of the great editors at Random House. This is someone who has published so many award winners and best-sellers of all different kinds. He once said to me, "I really just work on getting the books into the best shape possible and I don't worry that much about the selling and so forth. That's other people's jobs." I thought, "Wow. That's the opposite of what everyone says you should be doing." In a way, maybe he didn't have to worry about it because he has such credibility—people believe what he says about a book and go to work. I actually think that's how it works in publishing: Once you've done it successfully a few times, it gets a lot easier. People pull with you instead of you feeling that you have to pull them along. It's true that the editor today should have ideas—he should be market-wise in acquiring books and have ideas about how to sell them. But it all starts with the book. I think the editor's principal job is to identify books and to help them be the best they can, and then to work with the rest of the company to get them across. I think Bob was absolutely right about the primary contribution an editor can make.

But that is changing, wouldn't you say?
I guess it is. I hear a lot of stuff about how editors behave and how they're playing hopscotch and how they don't really care how much they pay for books because they know they won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. I just haven't seen that. Maybe I'm working in a bit of a bubble because we're a little different than some of the other houses. I hear stories about editors who are competitive with other editors within their publishing house. I think that's very counterproductive and kind of takes the fun out of it. It's a collegial business. You're on a team together and not trying to best each other. But I see people like you and Lorin and Eric coming along who have the same sort of idealism about it that people in my generation had. I mean, why else would you do it? If you wanted to make a killing, you wouldn't go into publishing. You have to be doing it out of love.

Speaking of Eric, would you take us inside the FSG editorial meeting? What's it like?
When I first got here I wasn't very happy with the FSG editorial meeting. I remember Bob Giroux saying, "The editorial meeting is a disaster. Roger has everyone report on what they're doing, and Roger has to be in the meeting. He's too dominant." That was very indicative of the struggles between them and their differences in personalities. It was true, though. There was something about our editorial meeting that didn't allow for the kind of free-flowing quality that you want, where you bat around ideas and talk about the competition and so on. I don't think I was ever very good at that—I hate meetings—but Eric runs the meeting now and he is good at it. He's much more relaxed. We go around and talk about various projects, but there's also some general discussion. We don't use the editorial meeting to acquire books. We use it to talk about what's being considered and what we might think about doing. Even in a small house like this, we don't really know what's been submitted to everyone else. There are ways of solving that but they're quite laborious. Sometimes I hear about books that were sold and think, "Why didn't we get to see that?" Of course we did get to see it, but I didn't know about it. There are so many books out there that I wish we could have published. But as one of my bosses once said, "Don't worry about the ones that got away. Worry about the ones you're stuck with." [Laughter.] There's another line that was said by Ferris Greenslet, who was a famous editor at Houghton Mifflin in the twenties. One of his little nostrums that was quoted at us was "When in doubt, decline."

Talk to me a little about publishing in translation, which is one of the things that FSG is known for. This year you've had amazing success with Bolaño. Do you feel that it's getting easier?
I think we're getting better at it. I don't know if I've talked about my current little buzzword that I'm thinking about a lot: essentialism. We should only be doing things that are essential. I think that's a good way to approach doing translations. I myself have been guilty of not always following that rule. But Bolaño is essential. And Gomorrah, by [Roberto] Saviano, is one of the most important European books of the last five years. We're just being more selective. Another book we just bought that I'm wild about is Roberto Calasso's La Folie Baudelaire. It's about Baudelaire's Paris. He's been published by Knopf until recently but for some reason they were in doubt and declined, and we picked it up.

In a way, the market in translation is an interesting microcosm of publishing in general. You have to approach it in the same way that you do as a publisher, where you're out selling books to the world that you're saying are important. But you know that some of them will turn out to be important and a lot of them won't. You can't just go for the books that all of your foreign colleagues tell you are their important books—they have their reasons for telling you that—but the few books that are actually going to have an impact in your market. You have to look for exactly what you're looking for as a reader. And that's not always the big books. It's not always the books that are part of the big commerce of publishing and that you hear about on the fast track. Sometimes it's books that are published by small publishers and sort of come in from the side. On the other hand of that you have Gomorrah, which was the biggest book in Italian publishing in many years and which we did hear about on the fast track.

What's your favorite way to hear about an international book?
From a friend. I actually have a scout in Italy. It's the only country where we have a scout. She's a really smart woman named Caterina Zaccaroni. I don't necessarily hear about the books from her, but I'll say to her, "What about this one? What about that one?" and she has opinions about them. She saves me a lot of work. And she has books that she pushes on me herself—books that she has decided are important. There's one book that she's been trying to get me to publish for several years now, and I may just cave in and do it because she's so passionate about it. But one of the ways that FSG became an important publisher was because Roger had these people in Europe who would recommend books to him. He published all of these books in translation that other people hadn't picked up. Italian in particular was important for the early FSG. But it's hard to be confronted with the number of so-called "important" foreign books and then to figure out which few are right to publish.

Do you enjoy the international book fairs?
I love Frankfurt. Roger loved it and I inherited that love from him. I love the rituals of Frankfurt. You basically have the same appointments every year. You see the same people. You see them age and think, "Oh, if they're aging, I must be aging." [Laughter.] It's more about relationships than doing business. We try not to buy books at Frankfurt, but renewing our ties is very important. And Frankfurt is one place where American publishing doesn't dominate as much, which is nice to see. A lot of American publishers don't really get Frankfurt, and don't enjoy it, because they don't engage with the foreign publishers as much. But that's the fun part.

What disturbs you most about the way the industry has changed?
What disturbs me most about publishing today, or the reading world, is that readers aren't loyal. You can't count on continuity. There's still a certain base of readers for an author, but it's much lower than it used to be. Readers don't stick with authors. I think that's partly because readers are more occasional now, and they don't come to books on their own as much as they're told by somebody. They're told by Oprah. They're told by their book club. So they may read another book, but the next book is the next book they're told they should read. It's not that they read Anna Karenina and then go out and read War and Peace. They're less informed and less knowledgeable. They need help. I love book clubs, but I think they're indicative of the fact that reading is now an occasional entertainment for a lot of people and not the kind of obsessive devotion that it used to be. It feels like a lot more people used to read every novel by John Updike, for example, and I don't think those kind of readers are as present as they used to be.

Should publishers be doing anything to try to reverse that trend?
I don't know the answer to that. I always feels sort of ham-fisted when the ABA or AAP does those "Get caught reading" campaigns. That's not what's going to change people's reading habits. I think what publishers should do is try to publish books as well as possible and try to reach their readers in as innovative ways as possible. We have these terrible problems—that book reviews don't matter anymore, that there are fewer of them all the time. And what is taking their place? How do you reach your readers? I guess you have to do it through the Web, but I don't know if I'm buying any books because of Internet marketing. I just wonder how we're going to find the readers. The readers are there. Look, we've sold a hundred thousand copies of 2666. Somehow, people learned about that book and wanted to read it. That shows you that the readers are there. It's just getting harder to get their attention and to get them interested.

What is your take on the current retail landscape?
Bad. Actually, at our sales conference yesterday, some of the salesmen were saying that neighborhood bookstores are doing better in the economic crisis because people are more interested in buying locally and supporting small businesses. I think this crisis could have a lot of good effects for the culture. It's slowing things down—slowing down the pace of change—and making people aware of what's important in life. It's not just more, more, more. But I think all of the traditional bookstore chains are in trouble. Amazon is very, very effective. But I think Amazon is a potential...it's a frenemy. It's not just interested in being a bookstore. So I think we have to sell our own books to people.

Are you guys doing that?
We do it. We don't want to muscle out the retailers. But I think that in the conspectus of the different players in the publishing business, the bookstores are the weakest link in the chain. It's just like with music. There are always going to be bookstores, but I don't think that's where the future of bookselling is.