Ben George’s arrival in big publishing was more of a vault than a climb, and it surprised him as much as anybody. “Being a New York editor,” he says, “was never something I was aiming toward.” Remarkably, what brought George’s editorial acumen to the attention of Manhattan publishers was a book with a small initial print run and no commercial hook—a singularly unpresuming volume of short stories by a seventy-four-year-old self-professed “amateur.” That author was Edith Pearlman, and the book was a collection of new and previously published stories titled Binocular Vision (2011), which George had solicited and edited as the inaugural title for Lookout Books, the tiny imprint he cofounded while on faculty at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. 

Pearlman was relatively unknown, but she had been writing for forty years and since the 1990s had quietly published three story collections with small presses. Her work was cherished by a coterie of writers who looked to her as an unheralded master. Among them was Ann Patchett, who, in an introduction for Binocular Vision, called Pearlman a national treasure on par with John Updike and Alice Munro. That, says George, “was like catnip for a certain kind of literary reader: ‘What? A seventy-four-year-old master I’ve never heard of being published by a small press I’ve never heard of?’”

Binocular Vision landed on the cover of the January 4, 2011, edition of the New York Times Book Review, a triumph in itself for a writer whose readership, until then, had numbered in the hundreds. But then Binocular Vision went on to collect the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. 

The year after Binocular Vision appeared, George was wooed from Wilmington to New York City to accept a position with Viking Penguin, where he worked with president and publisher Kathryn Court on a list that included new titles by Chris Abani and Richard Rodriguez. Shortly thereafter Reagan Arthur, publisher of Little, Brown, hired George to develop his own list for the storied imprint, a list that now includes writers such as Leslie Jamison, Adam Haslett, Rick Bass, David Bezmozgis, Lauren Slater, James Hannaham, and Luis Alberto Urrea.

Although he seemed to come out of nowhere in his work with Pearlman, George had been editing some of our most distinguished writers for years in the small press world—first at the University of Idaho’s Fugue literary magazine and later at Tin House magazine and the University of North Carolina’s literary journal Ecotone—working with writers such as W. S. Merwin, Denis Johnson, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Lethem, Charles Baxter, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Ann Beattie, and Terry Tempest Williams. “I loved working at the magazines,” says George. “I would’ve happily done it forever if I could have made a living at it.”

While the writers with whom he has worked know George as an extraordinarily gifted and exacting editor—they often effuse in their acknowledgments pages about his skill and care—George keeps a low profile. A soft-spoken Ohio native (“A lot of people seem to identify me as Midwestern in my temperament and phrasings,” he says), George prefers to view his work in book publishing as a privilege. “For you to be able to edit or publish anything, there has to be someone who has faith and believes in you, and I’ve been lucky to have those mentors along the way,” he says, citing Court and Arthur.

George and I spoke last fall at Little, Brown, in the Manhattan offices of the Hachette Book Group.

What was your earliest relationship to books? Do you remember a formative reading experience? 
I always enjoyed reading and was sometimes very affected by books. I remember, when I was about twelve, weeping at Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember finishing the book and coming out of my bedroom distraught and my mom, very concerned, asking me what was the matter and me explaining that it was this book, and her saying, “Oh, honey, it’s just a book,” and me feeling in a very dramatic way like she didn’t get it. It was a sense, even if it was subconscious, that this was how I was supposed to feel—that this was what the book was meant to do to you.

I had a sort of peripatetic reading experience. I veered wildly between, say, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deer Slayer, imagining myself as Natty Bumppo, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or John Grisham. I just went back and forth indiscriminately, I suppose until I got some guidance later, in college, at a small school called Asbury, tucked away amid the horse farms south of Lexington, Kentucky. I had a professor there named Paul Vincent. Always Dr. Vincent to me. An amazing man who probably has no idea how many students he affected in his long tenure there. I read Moby-Dick in his class. Henry James. He introduced me to Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. He had read seemingly every work of American literature and all the secondary material on each one. He would stand at the front of the class and nervously jingle the change in his pocket and hold forth like an Oxford don, referring to a yellow legal pad of notes whose pages he would flip occasionally. I’ve since realized how he was almost an anachronism in his own time. I’ll never forget his lecture on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was in his class that I fell in love with what you could find in writing if you could learn to read from someone as brilliant as he was, who could help you see things in the work. 

You earned an MFA in fiction at the University of Idaho, where you ended up editing Fugue. Soon after that you became an editor for Tin House magazine. What brought about your shift from fiction writing to editing?
Somewhere along the way I realized that I was better at editing and that the world was not going to suffer for lack of my fiction. I had always enjoyed revision more than creation anyway—seeing what you have once it’s down on the page. So I just got to skip a step, not have to worry about the creation, and help other writers hone their stories. In the end what I wanted was a literary life. I think Susan Sontag has a phrase about “wanting to be part of the project” of literature. Editing was how I could be part of the project.

In your term at Fugue you spent some time soliciting writers to contribute to the magazine, even pursuing some high-profile people. Is that right?
I did. And I was surprised by the willingness of even really well-regarded writers to engage with you if you took the time to speak to them specifically about why their work had moved you. The correspondence I cherished most was with W. S. Merwin. In my last issue of the magazine I built a special section around Merwin, and then, during the AWP Conference in Vancouver, I went to his hotel and interviewed him. It was a bit overwhelming to be there in his presence and to think, “This guy had John Berryman as his teacher. This guy hung out with Pound and Eliot.” I was touching history. That was a magical experience. “For the Anniversary of My Death” may well be my favorite American poem, and of course it took on a special new meaning when we lost him in March.

What originally brought you to the job at Tin House magazine?
I enjoyed editing so much that I was desperate to continuing doing it in some form. Around the time I finished the MFA program at Idaho, I heard about an opening at Tin House, so I sent them a letter and my issues of Fugue. They ended up interviewing me, and I think because they liked the Merwin feature a lot they offered me the position of assistant editor. I moved to Portland and was there for three years. It was an amazing experience. I was in charge of the slush pile, as we called it, with a whole host of volunteer readers and interns. And I could also solicit writers and bring their stuff to the meeting too. In fact, in a couple of very happy outcomes, there are two writers, Caitlin Horrocks and Stephanie Soileau, whose stories I encountered in the slush pile and was able to get into the magazine whose books I am now lucky enough to edit all these years later at Little, Brown. 

After your stint at Tin House you were hired by the University of North Carolina in Wilmington to edit the literary journal Ecotone and to launch Lookout Books, a new university imprint. I’ve heard a little about your campus interview for that job. The story goes that you shared your own take on what it must have been like to be at the Partisan Review back in the day.
That’s true. During my interview in Wilmington I told the committee how I imagined being at the Partisan Review in the 1950s and one day opening a manila envelope, pulling out a manuscript, and becoming one of the first people in the world to read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” I get prickly skin just thinking about that. I’ve always felt that if you’re at a literary magazine it’s like being on the frontier of literature—that you get to read the best new work, work that may wind up standing the test of time, before anybody else. 

The first title you published at Lookout Books was Binocular Vision, a big new-and-selected edition of short stories by Edith Pearlman, which was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and went on to win all kinds of awards. You had sought out Pearlman. How did you first discover her work?
I had read her in Best American Short Stories, and she blew me away in terms of the economy with which she could dispatch someone’s whole life. But even though she had, I think, been in Best American a few times, and had won a couple of O. Henry Prizes and Pushcart Prizes, she never seemed to have gotten her due as the true master that she was. When I was at Tin House I just wrote her a mash letter telling her why I thought the stories in How to Fall, her most recent collection at that time, were completely ingenious and original, and saying how much I’d love to try to get her into the magazine. She wrote back a very warm letter, calling me her ideal reader, and it seems our connection was cemented. I didn’t end up getting her into Tin House, but we stayed in touch.

What was the editing process like with Pearlman, as you assembled the new and selected stories?
In putting that book together we were very conscious that, given how most people were going to be introduced to Edith’s stories for the first time, we didn’t want it to be an omnibus. We had to make some tough decisions as we tried to choose not only the best stories but also ones that showed the range of what she could do. It was pure fun to talk about these things with Edith and to give a sense of the evolution of her career over those prior books.

At what point, if any, did you know or begin to suspect the level of attention Binocular Vision would receive?
Never, until the New York Times called us up and said they were going to put it on the cover of the Book Review. But there was a sense of fate around the book because every person, every writer I sent the book to in advance for a quote, loved Edith Pearlman.

How did Pearlman respond to all the new attention? 
She was very pleased, but she’d never been remotely jaded about her status before that. Even though the sales of her books to that time numbered in the hundreds, she’d always felt that she had readers. And she’s always been a proponent of the idea of the writer as amateur, in the same way that Olympic athletes are amateurs. You do the craft, the art, for the love of it. Edith didn’t publish her first book until she was sixty years old, but she’d been writing stories for decades. Her appearance on the cover of the New York Times Book Review happened when she was seventy-four years old. Now, how you think about that—whether it’s inspiring or discouraging—is up to you. In her own view, she was just at her post doing her work all that time, and doing it for the love of the work.

All this was in 2011, and by the following year you’d moved to New York?
In October 2012, a year later, I accepted a job at Penguin.

One can draw a clear line then from Binocular Vision and what happened with that book to your eventually becoming integrated into New York publishing.
Without a doubt. Because of the various awards that Edith was in the running for, I was up in New York on occasion and meeting more and more people in the community here. One of those people was Kathryn Court, the publisher of Penguin, and we hit it off. She remembered me when a spot came open, and it was thrilling to get a job offer from her. I learned an awful lot from her in the time that I was at Penguin. She’s one of the all-time great people in publishing—all-time great people period—and of her numerous claims to fame, one is that she was the first American editor to publish Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. She really made his career here with the publication of Waiting for the Barbarians. The thing is, if you get to do something as an editor, it’s only because someone else has faith in you and is willing to give you a chance. Kathryn, who came from the UK to Penguin in the 1970s, had a wealth of knowledge about publishing, and was ceaselessly generous in dispensing to me what she had learned over her years of working with agents and writers, and in allowing me to edit her books, and in supporting me in things that I wanted to acquire. Once in a while, at the end of the day, she might come in and sit with me in my office, or I would go sit in her office, and we might talk for a half hour. Having never been in New York, I didn’t even realize then how astounding it was for someone as busy as she is to give me that time. I remember a moving tribute that Daniel Halpern, the publisher of Ecco, wrote about Paul Bowles, in which Halpern said, “It matters who comes along.” Bowles had seen something in him and believed in him, helping him start Ecco and the magazine Antaeus. There’s this great tradition that goes so far back, in which knowledge continues to get passed down from one generation of publishers and editors to the next generation. It’s endlessly humbling and inspiring to contemplate.

How did you end up making the transition from Penguin to Little, Brown?
Before I ever came to New York I’d met Reagan Arthur at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference and she said, “You should come to New York. We don’t have enough of your ilk.” I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but I took it as a compliment. She thought I would thrive in New York. I wasn’t sure myself. And I remember, when she did hire me, Reagan jokingly saying, “I play the long game.” We had met almost two years earlier by then, and she had been someone who had helped me out, trying to open doors.

How has your editing process developed over the years?
I wasn’t aware of it consciously at the time, but being a student in the MFA workshop was my editing education. The workshop taught me to try to imagine myself into the writer’s mind. But my editing process, to whatever extent I have one, is just an amalgamation of the habits of a lot of really smart people. I would pick up little gnomic pronouncements. I remember Gary Fisketjon, editor of Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, and so many others, saying that he tried to read the text more closely than any sane person ever would. And I felt, Yes, that’s what’s required.

Was your shift to big publishing at all disorienting, having come from the small press world? 
Well, the excitement was that with the muscle of Viking Penguin, and then Little, Brown, you wouldn’t have to miss out on working on a book just because you couldn’t afford the advance. My first acquisition at Little, Brown was also the first bigger auction I was in. And the submission was from Binky Urban. You have to imagine what that was like after all those years of working at small magazines. Everyone in New York knows Binky’s legendary list of writers. For those outside New York, it includes Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy and Haruki Murakami and a ton of others, including three writers who were—and remain—my earliest heroes: Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. And the writer she was sending me was David Bezmozgis. David had recently been named one of the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” writers, and I had admired him tremendously for his first two books, one of which, Natasha and Other Stories, contains a story—the title story—that has to be one of the best stories written by anybody in the last couple of decades. I couldn’t have dreamed of a more exciting way to start off at Little, Brown than by acquiring his novel The Betrayers. But what was also different about New York, of course, was the pressure that now, without a nonprofit underwriting the endeavor, it wasn’t only about whether a book was of superb quality. It was about whether you could also make money with it. 

Did you have to get used to pitching to the sales department and so on? 
I figured out pretty quickly that I’d be doing my books a disservice if I didn’t learn how to put them across in a concentrated way. With the sales force you have one opportunity, at each season’s launch meeting, to make your book stand out and help the reps instantly grasp its allure, so they’ll be able to communicate that to booksellers and start the whole chain of finding as many readers as you can.

How many books on average do you edit every year at Little, Brown?
Eight or so. There have been times when it was more, but then it gets harder to publish them all with the verve and energy that you want to.

So your process now at Little, Brown is much the same as it’s always been, except you have more books on your plate?
Yes. I do hope I learn something new from every book I work on, something I can bring into future projects. But yes, the work itself remains the same on the page. It doesn’t change.

And do you, like many editors, do most of your editing after hours?
Almost all of the editing happens in the evenings and on weekends. My time in the office is mainly spent on the business of publishing. It’s sending a boatload of e-mails. It’s going to a jacket design meeting. It’s going to a status meeting to see what our initial print run of a book is set to be and how that matches up with what we expected, seeing what plan we have in the works for marketing and publicity. It’s writing letters to booksellers. Going to the editorial meeting, going to the acquisitions meeting. Having lunch with agents to hear what projects they’re excited about that you hope they’ll submit to you. I love the conviviality of the agent lunch, and by now some agents are actual friends as well, which makes it enjoyable. But I think others will know what I mean when I say it can all get a little exhausting sometimes. I remember being slightly jealous when I heard or read that one of Bob Gottlieb’s conditions for taking the job as editor in chief of Knopf back in the day was that he wouldn’t be required to do agent lunches and could just eat a sandwich at his desk and keep working. And these are not the fabled, and maybe apocryphal, three-martini lunches of old, in any case—it’s practically an event if someone has a glass of wine at lunch these days.

What is the editor-bookseller relationship like? Do you find yourself making phone calls or paying in-person visits to booksellers?
Not really phone calls. But I do love meeting booksellers because I view them as the next person in the chain, the person whose passion is the most similar to the editor’s. When booksellers love a book, they press it on people. A lot of times, booksellers make or break a book’s prospects. I pay attention to what certain booksellers love—the books they respond to—and I try not to go to them with a personal letter unless I truly believe they are going to love a book. I enjoy that part of community building in publishing, and I try to find the right readers for each book that I publish.

With a newly acquired writer, how do you assess the level of editorial involvement the writer will need or want?
It always starts with a conversation with the writer before you acquire the book, whether on the phone or in person. If I love a manuscript enough to try to acquire it, there aren’t usually make-or-break editorial points for me. Maybe on rare occasions there’s something essential that I feel would have to be addressed for the book to succeed, and in that case I might want to suss out the writer’s openness to such a change. But in that first conversation I’m mainly trying to communicate my passion for this manuscript that the writer has spent years of her life making and to articulate what I see the work trying to do—so the writer understands how closely I’ve read it and how much I believe in it. That’s crucial because you’re starting this long relationship which, ideally, will be only the beginning of many books to come. So there’s that initial conversation in which you may get into a bit of editorial, but really I tend not to—because at that acquisition stage I’m reading in a white heat, and honestly, if I start reading something and it’s amazing, one of my first thoughts is, “Oh my God, another editor is going to preempt this book before I can make an offer.”

I’m sure that happens to every book editor. What’s that like?
Sadly it’s a primary part of the job—falling in love with a book and getting your heart broken because someone else acquires it yet managing to keep your heart open for the next great book. There are certain editors and houses I hate losing a book to, but it’s because I have enormous respect for them. There’s a kind of old-school collegiality among editors. And thankfully I’ve been lucky enough to win a few of these bruising auctions too. When you do, you realize how much you stand on the shoulders of those who’ve come before you. After the success of The Empathy Exams, for instance, pretty much everyone in town wanted to publish Leslie Jamison’s next books. And part of the reason I won the auction is that Little, Brown is the house of David Foster Wallace, and the publisher of Infinite Jest, and that meant a lot to Leslie.

Once you’ve had the initial editor-author conversation and acquired a book, what’s your next step?
In terms of editing, I try to send a comprehensive letter that says, basically, here are the ways in which the book is bowling me over and the things I see you trying to achieve. And then, within that context, here is where it’s not quite working in the way it appears to want to. 

Is this letter usually big-picture in nature, not necessarily accompanied yet by a manuscript with line-edits?
Usually it’s a big-picture thing first, and later I’ll get a revision, and at that point it’s down to the nitty-gritty and trying to make sure that even if it’s a four- or five-hundred-page book, each line is holding its own. But inevitably the process ends up being slightly different for every book.

What if in the revision the writer doesn’t strengthen the book in the ways you had hoped? Can you maintain your enthusiasm for the book within the company?
I haven’t had an experience where a writer didn’t substantially strengthen the book in the process. A writer wants her book to be as good as it can be before it goes out to what we both hope will be many thousands of readers. But I also don’t think a writer should ever make a change to a book that doesn’t in her gut feel like the right change to make. In an editorial letter from the novelist and New Yorker editor William Maxwell to Eudora Welty, Maxwell once said, simply, “I trust you to be firm about the unhelpful suggestions.” I’ve always remembered that. So I say, “This is my take. Whatever seems useful to you, use. It’s yours, whether it’s a global thing or a line edit. Whatever doesn’t seem useful, well, it’s your book, and I’m going to champion it no matter what.” While an editor can sometimes see something in a manuscript that a writer can’t, the editor is never as smart as the writer about her own book. Often you’ll make a suggestion that the writer doesn’t implement, but the writer says, “Oh, I see what you mean,” and comes up with something better. That’s because the book has been living in the writer’s subconscious for years. I’m a big believer in those intuitions, which I’ve seen lead to remarkable new writing in a book even in the late stages. The editor may just ask a question, or make a ghostly kind of suggestion: “I feel like there’s something about this character that needs to come back around at the end of the novel.” And the writer’s subconscious goes to work on it, and they find the connection that was hidden in plain sight all along.

When it comes down to line edits, what’s the most important consideration for you?
My goal is to sink into the book in the same way that the writer did when writing it. If I’m suggesting edits—and especially line edits—I’m trying to ventriloquize. I want to hear the book’s music and voice. Sometimes that voice is far away from my own, which can be both challenging and fun. A significant chunk of James Hannaham’s novel Delicious Foods, a tour de force in the true sense of that overused descriptor, is narrated by a drug—namely, crack cocaine. Trying to inhabit the voice of a drug in the editorial process was a first! I do my best to take each book on its own terms, and yet I’m aware that I can’t get rid of my biases entirely.

Biases about technical things?
Sure. Dialogue, in particular—demands for how I want it to function, how I think it can be torqued to greatest effect. How a scene should be assembled without losing its tautness. Or the way characters seem to smile or nod or shrug a lot more often during the dialogue of American fiction than they do in the actual living of American life, which was something Margot Livesey once pointed out and I never forgot. And then bigger things, about how storylines or conflicts or questions or mysteries should be…not necessarily answered for the reader, but resolved, according to whatever unique rules the book has established for itself. Basically, if I think something is crucial to a book’s effect, I’ll press my case. But all of these decisions, big and small, are always left up to the writer. Adam Haslett tells me that with his novel Imagine Me Gone, we talked on the phone for nearly an hour about a paragraph. Even I’m not usually that insane, but it was such an important passage that Adam ended up rewriting that section multiple times to get it exactly right.

When you’re having an hour-long conversation about a paragraph, is the writer saying, “Well, how about a line like this” and bouncing things off of you? Or was it, in this case, more broadly philosophical?
It was both philosophical and fine-grained. It was a question about the character’s brother’s death and a turning point for this character—how much he was going to be blamed, or blame himself, for that death. I felt Adam was being too hard on that character. As he has discussed, the novel is based on his family, and that character was the closest, in biography, to Adam. I felt that the writer was judging himself too harshly through this character. I was trying to step in and say, “This is how I, your most sympathetic reader, see this character, and I think he needs to be viewed here with the same empathy and nuance that you’re granting him everywhere else.” It’s probably the most important scene in the novel. And of course the book has to work entirely as fiction, regardless of what may have happened in life.

So the process can get extremely penetrating both personally and artistically.
Yeah. Maybe the stakes aren’t always as high as that example, but in any editing experience you have to make the art the most important consideration, even as you keep the artist’s personal feelings in mind while you’re doing that. This is why I feel so privileged. As the editor, I’m being invited into the workshop, where there’s sawdust on the floor and half-finished things. It’s a delicate space for the writer. You’re being trusted, and you need to acquit yourself well. 

One occasion when I was most nervous about this was with Luis Urrea’s last novel, The House of Broken Angels. That novel poured out of him in the months after his brother died. Some of it was so intense, he said, that he couldn’t write it and instead dictated it to his wife. The whole first draft that I read was amazing, but clearly it also wasn’t yet complete, and he needed to dig deeper and go further. My role was to be a cheerleader, to persuade Luis after this cathartic outpouring that what he’d done was remarkable but that the book had a chance to become one of the all-time great American immigrant novels and that in order to do so it would have to be grander and make full use of all the family lore he was drawing on. I think he probably hated me for a couple of days, but he said, “Okay, yes,” and he rolled up his sleeves and ended up adding another 150 marvelous pages to the draft I first read. 

In addition to Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering, your list includes nonfiction by Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams, and Doug Bock Clark, The Last Whalers. Can you talk about the differences between editing fiction and nonfiction? What qualities are you looking for in each?
Even when it’s topical, the writing itself is the most important quality of the work. In that way I think it shares a lot with what you need to accomplish in a novel. When is the right time to deploy certain information? How long should you pause to explain something before you get back to the main story? It’s still sentence by sentence, in the same way that a novel or collection of stories is. 

So you’re always looking for a certain dynamic quality of voice?
Right. A voice and a sensibility. Louis Menand says the definition of great writing is when it’s more painful for the reader to stop reading than to continue. You want to be carried along. But I suppose if there’s one quality a nonfiction writer must have, it’s obsession. Leslie, Lauren, Doug—they all have in common a tireless obsession with their subject that makes it impossible for the reader not to become invested too.

The nonfiction writer’s credentials are important, I’m sure, but can credentials be trumped by supreme narrative control?
I find that a writer’s prose either has authority or doesn’t. He either convinces you or not. Credentials can help get attention during the publication of a book, but they don’t guarantee a good proposal. I published Benjamin Rachlin’s extraordinary book about wrongful conviction, Ghost of the Innocent Man. Benjamin had zero journalism credentials when he started that project but taught himself how to be a reporter along the way. 

And you edited Leslie Jamison’s last book, The Recovering. Can you discuss the process you undertook with Jamison?
The Recovering is a fascinating book because it’s a fusion of a lot of different nonfiction styles. At a reading, someone jokingly referred to it as “the dope method.” (Dope as in slang for “excellent,” I should perhaps clarify, given the subject.) It’s memoir, cultural criticism, literary criticism, and reportage—a remarkable feat that takes Leslie’s own story and blends it together with the narratives of famous addicts whose addiction figured prominently in their work, everyone from Denis Johnson to Billy Holiday. Then Leslie weaves all this together with narratives of “ordinary” addicts, those who did not turn their addiction into art but whose stories are every bit as important for us as we try to understand how addiction affects a life. The book works like an AA meeting, as a chorus of voices, and it’s a story of the recovery movement writ large. The goal that Leslie set herself was to write a book about getting better that’s every bit as electric and gripping as the story of the train wreck itself. I think she succeeded magnificently. Her effort from the beginning was to figure out how to tell her own story of addiction and recovery while acknowledging that it fit into this long canon of addiction and recovery stories, and to figure out what those have meant to us. Mainly I just needed to be in sync with her ambition for the book, which I was, and then to try to keep up with her—easier said than done!

You’ve said that you view acquisition as just the beginning of a long editor-author relationship that will involve, ideally, many books. Do you think this approach is unique in New York?
I think every editor in every house would like for that to be the approach. I do think there’s a lot more pressure now for the first book to be a success sales-wise, and there’s less patience with building a writer over time. But at Little, Brown, anyway, we’ll work really hard to stick with a writer we believe in until wider success happens. Reagan Arthur published Kate Atkinson for many years—and it was especially sweet, after all that time, to see Atkinson’s novel Life After Life, her eighth, land at number one on the New York Times best-seller list. I still remember the moment that list came out, our CEO, Michael Pietsch, walked down the long hallway to Reagan’s office to give her a hug. Editors know how much work it takes to bring a writer to that level. 

One of my greatest joys at Little, Brown was reuniting with Edith Pearlman. Honeydew, Edith’s fifth book, which I got to publish at Little, Brown when she was seventy-eight, was her first ever published by a New York house. That was especially sweet since it was really because of Edith and her success with Binocular Vision that I started meeting people in New York in the first place. Honeydew was another fairy tale. It got reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review again, and was later on the longlist for the National Book Award. But my favorite reaction was from James Wood, who wrote in the New Yorker about Edith’s “uncanny wisdom” and called her “one of God’s spies.” I always think of her that way now, as engaged in some kind of divine espionage.

Can you talk a bit about the challenges inherent in promoting existing titles? Is the landscape of book promotion changing?
I think it’s constantly changing. Social media—whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it—plays a much bigger role than it ever used to, in terms of the way people find out about books. Traditional print advertising seems less and less effective. And meanwhile, although papers like the San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post and Boston Globe still review books, we’re now down to the New York Times being the only major paper in the country that still has a dedicated book review. One by one all of the others have fallen. But however the marketing and publicity happen, I’m completely in favor of anything that helps readers find the books. And whether it’s a physical book, an e-book, or an audiobook, I’m in favor of any way people can experience the storytelling of the writer.

What’s your perspective on the plight of midlist writers generally? Are they being—or have they already been—driven out of the mainstream publishing world?
New York publishers are first and foremost a business, and there’s pressure to sell a certain number of copies. It’s not only about not losing money on an advance. It’s that you can publish only so many books a year, so you want each book to have a shot at becoming really profitable. We owe our shareholders a certain return on the investment they make. Part of the issue with the midlist is what a writer needs financially, because there are times when a publishing house wants to remain loyal and continue publishing a writer, but the advance is not what that writer feels he needs to sustain his career—and then the writer feels it’s time to start over with someone else. 

So you’re saying writers want to move around laterally sometimes and that complicates our picture of what’s happening with the midlist?
That complicates it, yes. It’s also complicated because sometimes a writer is really believed in and supported by an editor and maybe a bit less so by the house, so if the editor leaves, there is less reason to continue publishing. Sometimes too you may have an exceedingly good novel on submission, but the author’s sales history makes it hard to change her trajectory, if the novel is much like her previous books. This is a reality that publishers face with booksellers. The booksellers see what the last book, or books, sold. And unless you can persuade them that this novel has a different pitch or a more commercial hook, then they will base their orders on that history. So the feeling is not that the book doesn’t deserve to be published, but a poor sales track is a big hurdle for the publisher to overcome. 

Now, there are exceptions. When we feel a book is going to completely alter the writer’s career, then we’ll make a big investment. That happened with Emma Donoghue, who had a declining sales history at the time she came to Little, Brown. Judy Clain, now our editor in chief, got Emma’s novel Room on submission. This was before my time, but the lore is that the whole company was blown away by Room and felt this was the kind of book that Little, Brown exists to publish and to make a big hit. It was acquired expensively, in a preempt, despite the author’s sales history, was published boldly, and has sold more than two million copies. 

So a lackluster sales history can definitely be a roadblock, and yet an author can still break through at any point, if the publisher feels passionately.
Absolutely. Look, every day we hope to read an amazing novel. Editors are first and foremost just readers who are moved and delighted by books. And the editor’s greatest desire is to bring an exquisite book to readers. It’s an unmatched thrill. So despite the impediments, and the unavoidable fact that most books don’t find the readership you hope they will, we still can’t wait to read something astonishing.

I’ll tell you the backstory for a book I published last year, a volume of new and selected stories by Thom Jones, who was a National Book Award finalist back in 1993, for his debut collection, The Pugilist at Rest. We talked earlier about my writing when I was young. Well, when I was twenty-two years old I went to a reading by Chris Offutt, and after the reading, hearing that I was an aspiring writer, Offutt stuck around to talk with me. Again, little did I grasp how lucky I was. Before we were done he told me that if I wanted to be a writer of stories there were two books that I had to read. One of them was Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, and the other was Thom Jones’s The Pugilist at Rest, and we walked over to the bookshelves and he put both of these in my hands. And I still love both of those books. Both are books of misfit, marginal characters. To me they represented a different kind of American literature, and The Pugilist at Rest became a book that—let’s say it opened the door to literature for me. It showed me different kinds of stories than I had been reading. It so happened that Little, Brown was Thom’s publisher, and had published two more collections of his, Cold Snap and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine. But by the time I came to Little, Brown, Thom had not published a book since 1999, and then, unfortunately, he died in 2016. I knew, though, that he had published some stories after Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine, and after his death I began working with his agent, Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency, together with his widow, Sally, and his daughter, Jenny, to gather these stories. I’m sad that Thom wasn’t here to see it, but on the second anniversary of his death we published this new and selected volume of stories called Night Train, which has, in addition to the greatest hits, seven phenomenal new stories. One of the most moving parts of the experience, for me, was this lingering feeling that I had somehow paid off a debt to literature.

It was a full-circle experience.
Right, exactly, because Thom was someone who started it for me. 

We’re talking about twenty years ago.
Twenty years. And this is the magic that gets to all of us who work in publishing: the magic of the writer’s heart and brain connecting to the reader’s heart and brain across space and time.

From both sides of the grave, even.
Right. And the power felt from that exchange is the biggest thrill for an editor—to be granted the opportunity to help the writer make that connection.

We all want instant success, of course. We want to see the book having an impact and becoming part of the conversation now. But my own deeply nourished hope is that I’ll get to work on books that, through whatever alchemy, will endure and that people not yet born may one day pick up and read and be moved by. Little, Brown has existed since 1837 and has published many books like that: Catcher in the Rye, Revolutionary Road, you name it, all the way back to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. It’s a great privilege to edit and publish a book that you dream may eventually leave that kind of indelible mark in the imaginations of readers. Nothing excites me more. 

M. Allen Cunningham is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Perpetua’s Kin, a reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that spans North America over five generations. His hybrid book Q&A, inspired by the 1950s quiz show scandals, will appear from Regal House Publishing in 2020. Founder of the small literary press Atelier26 Books, Cunningham teaches creative writing at Portland State University and elsewhere.