On a recent afternoon, I walked up Park Avenue from my office in downtown Manhattan to interview the literary agent Lynn Nesbit. The agency she founded almost twenty years ago, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, occupies an entire floor of a large office building on the corner of Fifty-seventh Street. In the elevator, I couldn't help but think of the celebrated authors who must have taken the same ride to visit Nesbit, and my mind wandered to some of their memorable opening lines: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold" (Hunter S. Thompson). "That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze" (Tom Wolfe). "It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends" (Joan Didion).

For Nesbit, the beginnings of things were no less evocative. Raised in the small town of Dundee, Illinois, and educated at Northwestern, the Sorbonne, and in the Radcliffe Publishing Program, she came to New York in the fall of 1960 and took the first job she was offered. The position, as an editorial apprentice at Ladies' Home Journal, was unsatisfying. She badgered Sterling Lord—even then a legendary book agent—for a job as his assistant, but he had nothing permanent to offer. So, in her spare time, she read manuscripts for him in French. Eventually a position opened up, and Nesbit leapt at the opportunity, despite a salary cut of ten dollars a week.

She worked her way up to being an agent in Lord's office; her early clients included Donald Barthelme, Michael Crichton, Frederick Exley, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. In 1965, she left Sterling Lord to start the agency that would become International Creative Management; in 1989 she joined forces with Mort Janklow to found another new agency, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, which remains one of the most successful in New York. Over the years she has guided the careers of luminaries such as John Cheever, Joan Didion, William H. Gass, Shirley Hazzard, and Gore Vidal; younger writers such as Ann Beattie, Stephen L. Carter, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Price, and Scott Spencer; commercial superstars such as Robin Cook, Richard Preston, and Anne Rice; and nonfiction heavyweights such as Robert Caro, Jimmy Carter, Jonathan Kozol, and Gay Talese.

In this, the first in a new series of interviews with veteran book editors, publishers, and agents, Nesbit talks about her life, her career, and her authors, reflecting on the past, present, and future of the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today's publishing world.

Why don't you start by telling me a little about your background. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Illinois, in a town thirty-five miles northwest of Chicago called Dundee.

And you went to Northwestern?
I went to Northwestern because I wanted to be a drama major. But then I quickly learned, once I was involved in it, that I didn't want to do it. It was such a serious professional school. So I switched my major from theater to oral interpretation of literature. You'd do chamber theater, for example. You'd take Don Quixote and present it as a chamber theater piece. I was in a production and I played all of the women roles. Of course they were all variations on Dulcinea or his fantasy. It was an extremely good way to learn about the construction of a narrative. Because when you're breaking it apart, often you will characterize or have an actor play the narrator's role, so you learn a lot about voice.

What brought you to New York?
I always wanted to come to New York. When I was a child I used to listen to Grand Central Station—"Crossroads of a million private lives"—and think, "What could be more exciting than New York?" I was wandering through the English department my senior year at Northwestern and saw something about the Radcliffe Publishing Program. I thought, "Hmmm, I want to come to New York, I love to read books, this sounds like it's for me."

How did you get started in the industry?
At the Radcliffe program, they told you to take the first job you were offered because there were no jobs in publishing. They've been saying that for forty, fifty years. Sterling Lord was the agent who came to speak to the students, and I thought—I don't know why, I've thought about this over the years—but I thought, "Agent, that's what I want to do." But Sterling said he had nothing to offer. So I took the first job I got, which was as an editorial apprentice at Ladies' Home Journal. And I hated it. It just wasn't for me. So I kept hounding Sterling. And I read French quite well then. He was representing a couple of people who wrote in French, Tereska Torres and Juan Goytisolo. So I would read the books and write readers reports on them. And I hounded him. After three months at Ladies' Home Journal he offered me a job, for which I took a ten-dollars-a-week salary cut. I became his receptionist, his typist, his file clerk, and I had to weigh the packages and stamp all the letters.

Was Sterling Lord your primary mentor in the industry?
Sterling wasn't very interested in fiction, which helped me. He was immediately turning some things over to me. After I'd been working as his assistant for a month or two, he went to the Staten Island Writers Conference and came back and just threw these stories down on my desk. He said to read them and write to any of the writers I liked. One of the stories was "The Big Broadcast of 1938" by Donald Barthelme. And I read it and thought, "This is extraordinary." So I wrote, Dear Mr. Barthelme, I'm an agent and I just read this story and I think it's extraordinary and blah blah blah and I'd love to represent you. And he wrote back and said, "Fine." Now I don't think that happens today. There would be thirty agents crawling all over that story today—there are more agents than writers. And there are more writers than readers. I'm convinced of that.

Was Donald Barthelme your first big client?
Donald was very important because I sold the first story of his that I represented to the New Yorker. And he went on and became such an important force in the short story. But my first really big client—big in every way—was Tom Wolfe.

How did you meet him?
I pestered Byron Dobell at Esquire. I told him I wanted to meet Tom Wolfe. This was probably 1963. He'd published "Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," the piece, in Esquire, and every other agent was after him too. I still ask him, to this day, why he signed with me. He says it's because I'm the only one who suggested he do a book, which is hard for me to imagine, but that's what he says. He was older than I was, and already a big deal, and I was just this kid.

The other big writer that I got young was Michael Crichton. I left Sterling Lord in, I think, 1965, to start a literary department for Marvin Josephson. It was called Marvin Josephson Associates. The head of his television department was a man named Ralph Mann, and he had a friend who had been a television agent at the William Morris office, whose daughter was Michael's first wife. This man was determined to find Michael the biggest agent there was. Of course he knew everyone. So Michael was interviewing all these people and he interviewed me, too. He was in medical school then and he had published one of his paperback John Lange thrillers, and he only had one other contract. So he came back for a second meeting and said—and this I remember very well—he said, "Let's grow up in the business together." So that was great.

Who was Marvin Josephson?
He was a very mild-mannered, shy, rather diffident television agent. He went around and bought these other agencies. He bought CMA, Monica McCall, Ashley-Famous. And this became ICM, this big corporate behemoth. He was never really an agent; he was a deal-maker, a buying agency.

And when you went there, you were the head of the agency right away?
I started the literary department for them at age twenty-five. They didn't have one. I went there and I was this kid. I was really young. I got there because I was dating an agent who worked for Marvin who said, "You should hire Lynn Nesbit." That's how I got there.

Tell me about some of the big personalities from those days in the book world.
Well, there were a lot of them. Bob Gottlieb was a genius.

From your perspective as an agent, what is his genius?
In the first place, he, like Michael Korda, who is my client actually, could read an eight-hundred-page manuscript in a night and come back to you the next day and give you a perfect analysis. Also, Bob never let a manuscript lay around. You would never hear from him, "Oh, I have seven manuscripts on my desk, I can't get to yours until a month from now." Bob also has such an incredibly big personality. And I always said that Bob has a big ego, but he can lend it to his writers, so they can share it. Bob Caro is one of my clients, and it's written into his contract that he has to have Bob as his editor.

A lot of people lament how the publishing industry has changed over the years. Your career seems to very much bridge all that—from the small independent shops to the corporatization of it all.
I say to Bob Gottlieb, who's still a very close personal friend, "You couldn't stand to be in publishing today." And he says, "I know." It is very corporatized. We all began to think about that in those days. What was going to happen? These big conglomerates, synergy, all that. People began to worry about it.

Tell me about some more of the big characters.
We just don't have them anymore. Morgan [Entrekin] is as close as we have. And Sonny [Mehta]. There were so many: Henry Robbins, Ted Solotaroff, Joe Fox, Sam Lawrence, David Segal. Even Dick Synder is a lot more colorful than Jack Romanos, who is now gone. I mean, they had passion, they cared about literature. Even Dick, who's not an intellectual. He cared. He was a madman. I mean, we need a little bit more…. Who is a madman now in publishing? Peter Olson, but of a very strange type. I mean, Morgan's eccentric, Sonny's eccentric. Morgan's less eccentric than he used to be. He's getting very conventional now with the wife and the child. It was just different then.

So you miss the personalities
Yes. I miss the fun. I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], "You missed the good days." When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who's now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who's also an agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I'll never forget that. There was just more of a sense of fun.

So why was that lost?
It's the corporate thing. People are too scared. It doesn't attract eccentrics anymore.

Where are the eccentrics going?
The movie business. [Laughs.]

When did you start to represent Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne?
My daughter is thirty-seven and John told this story—it's still difficult for me to talk about John—he told this story himself. He said, "Remember what I said to you when we were talking about you representing me?" I said, "No, I have no memory." He said, "Don't you remember when I said, 'What if you were to have a child?' Nobody would dare ask that question of a woman today! You would be stigmatized!" So I've represented him since before my first child, and she's thirty-seven.

At that point were you already representing Joan?
No. I didn't represent Joan until the book After Henry, when I came here. It's been a long time now, about eighteen years. They were very good friends of mine. I knew Joan very well. She was represented by Lois Wallace. Well, first Helen Strauss at the William Morris Agency, and then she was inherited by Lois, and then she came to me. It's been a long time now, but not back into the dark ages like it was with John.

Were you surprised by the phenomenal commercial success of The Year of Magical Thinking?
Yes. So was the publisher. The first printing was supposedly thirty-five thousand copies, then the Times magazine piece came out and they upped it to fifty thousand, then if you look at later editions and the number of printings.… It obviously touched a chord in so many people—young, old, people who hadn't even had anyone die. I think the honesty of her voice, the way she directly addressed the reader, without any sentimentality, was so moving.

How did you meet Hunter S. Thompson?
I don't know how Hunter came to me. I can't remember the sequence. I don't know who would have suggested it. Hunter was such a larger-than-life character. I always said that he was the one writer who always tried to say, "Oh, that didn't really happen"—talking about his escapades—but unlike most writers, they probably did happen. With most writers it's the opposite. He liked to go to these very chic restaurants in New York. I can remember taking him to the Carlyle and he'd be snorting cocaine right off his watch. He'd order six bottles of beer, two margaritas, and some salad. But the funny thing is, often he wouldn't even touch the stuff. Lunch would go on for hour after hour and he really wouldn't be drinking all that much during that time.

I read somewhere that you represented Fred Exley—and you sold A Fan's Notes?
That was when I was a kid too. That was very early. I don't remember the date, but that was when I was still at Sterling Lord, I think.

Do you remember how you met him? Were you close?
Oh, yes. I had an incredible correspondence with him. Fred was a terrible alcoholic and a tortured soul. Even more with Fred than with Hunter, there was a very, very tender part of him. Very sweet. Fred showed it more than Hunter did. I think that they couldn't deal with their vulnerability, therefore they drank. Or in Hunter's case, he drank and did drugs and everything else. They just couldn't cope with it. A Fan's Notes got tons of rejections and finally I sold it to David Segal, who was great. David was an eccentric. We need more people like him. He started his career at New American Library, which was a rather commercial imprint. But David had such a passion for literature and good writing. For instance, he picked up Cynthia Ozick when no one else did. And Fred. And Bill Gass.

You represent so many of the original New Journalists. What was it like to be at the center of a movement like that?
When I first represented Tom Wolfe, I was younger than Tom. I was a kid. And when I went to sell Tom's first book, his editor, Clay Felker, was the most important magazine editor in New York. I sent Tom's book out for auction. Viking, with whom Clay had an arrangement as sort of editor at large, brought Tom in for a meeting with Tom Guinzburg. But on the auction day, Viking didn't bid. So I thought that was curious. But they didn't, and the book went to FSG.

A few days later I went to this big literary party at Rust Hills's. I will never forget walking in. It was jammed with every writer and editor in New York. Clay was then dating Gloria Steinem, and Clay walked right over to me—this is like two days after the Tom thing—and he said, "You fucking cunt." I thought, "Oh my God!" I saw Tim Seldes coming up, so I said, "Tim, do you know Clay Felker?" And I walked away.

So what happened—the reason Clay was so furious—was that he thought he could deliver Tom Wolfe to Tom Guinzburg without anyone else looking at it. So of course he got mad at me instead of Tom. He was furious! Tom Guinzburg was furious too.

Now I'm going to skip forward many, many years. It's the publication party for Barbara Goldsmith's book Little Gloria…Happy at Last. It's a dinner at Phyllis Wagner's house. There are fourteen people invited. When she tells me the names, one of them is Clay Felker. And I said, "You know, he and I haven't spoken in years." And she said, "I think he thinks it's time to make up." So I go to the party and he comes over to me for the first time and says, "I'm really sorry about that. It wasn't your fault. It was that fucking Tom Guinzburg!"

But Clay's hatred of me got me a lot of good clients. Because around New York magazine he would scream that I was the toughest, bitchiest agent in town.

And it helps to have a little edge to your reputation?
Of course it does.

Why did you eventually decide to leave ICM and start Janklow & Nesbit? Was the decision affected at all by how the publishers were doing that—combining forces and becoming conglomerates?
No. My decision to leave ICM was more because I wanted to become an equity partner. I didn't want to just work for a big organization as a salaried employee. That's pretty much what drove it. And I'd probably been there long enough, and it was getting very big. I like the way we can focus more here. I have much more time to focus on the clients here because we have such a strong back office. It frees me to do more representation, not to worry about things.

Looking back, what would you say were some of the crucial turning points in your career?
Going to Marvin Josephson was a big turning point—getting to start a literary division. And then I got Charlie Portis and True Grit. That was a big deal. I had him from the beginning too. Tom [Wolfe] was a big thing. He was a big deal before I signed him. Michael [Crichton] wasn't. Victor Navasky was my first client. He was very helpful in introducing me to people in New York. We used to have this thing at the Algonquin, the round table—Victor tried to resuscitate the Algonquin round table. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and I used to go, Kurt Vonnegut, Bud Trillin, Marvin Kitman, Knox Burger. People would come and go. We'd have it like once a week. This was in 1961, when Victor was starting Monocle and signing a lot of good people on.

Donald Barthelme was a big turning point. Donald was the one who introduced me to William Gass. That's another book that was turned down everywhere and David Segal signed it, Omensetter's Luck. That was a huge literary event. David was crucial.

I never thought, "Oh, here's an obstacle." I didn't think about building a career. It just sort of evolved. James Mills became a client. He wrote Panic in Needle Park. That was a big book. That was when I was at ICM. And Joan and John wrote the screenplay. That might be how I met John, by representing Jim Mills.

When did you meet Jimmy Carter?
I met him when I was at ICM with Marvin Josephson. He was just leaving the White House and Marvin and I went to the oval office to meet with him. I said to him, "You know, I'm one of the few Protestants in New York publishing." And I think he liked that. So he signed with us and Marvin and I divided the selling of the presidential memoir. After that, he began to write more and I completely took him over, and then he came with me here.

How do you see your principal roles and responsibilities as an agent? Have they changed over time?
You are part of a writer's support system—a very important part. The role of the agent is more important today than it was when I was starting out. Because the publishing world is so corporate, and editors move around so much, you are increasingly the only fixed point for the writer. That's one way it's changed. Another thing that I notice here, with younger agents like Tina and Eric, is that they do a lot of editing, and we didn't do that when we were young. I think it's partly because of the editors. There is such pressure on editors to come in with something that's almost ready to go that the agents are assuming part of what the editors used to do.

When did you start to recognize that as a phenomenon?
Probably just in the last eighteen years, or ten years.

Did you ever edit?
Not to the extent that they do.

What is your editorial process like? Will you give notes?
Oh, yes. For example, Andy Greer is a young new client of mine. I've read the draft of his new novel, which is coming out next spring, five times. That doesn't often happen, but with Andy it did. It was fascinating because I kept seeing how he kept enhancing and changing it.

What kind of specific thoughts would you give?
Just sort of general thoughts. Is this character really working here, or what about this scene.

But what you see with younger agents is more getting in there with a pencil and editing?
Especially on proposals.

What are the implications of that?
I think the implications are that editors need to see something very polished because everyone is so nervous. Books are an endangered species, especially fiction. I do think that younger agents work more on the nonfiction proposals, with extensive notes, before they go out. But with fiction, everyone is so nervous about it.

What do you mean exactly by "nervous"?
Nervous that fiction is very difficult to sell. An editor wants to see something that's more near completion, that the idea or the thrust behind a novel is more fully realized. Twenty-five years ago an editor would say, "Oh, this has promise," and sign it up. Today, editors want to say no rather than yes. Unless they see it as a big book.

And this is because of corporate pressures? Profit pressures?
Profit pressures. You must know that fiction is very hard to sell. Today it's almost that fiction needs to seem like it's going to be an event. It almost has to open like a movie, on the commercial side, or else the editor has to be convinced its going to get such praise, such positive literary acclaim, that even if it doesn't sell a lot you're launching a real voice.

Everybody talks about how the model for a writer's career has changed. You just talked about a book opening like a movie. There's this blockbuster mentality, especially for debut novels, with astronomical advances and very high sales expectations. How do you feel about that in relation to writers and their careers over the long haul?
Well, if it works, it's fine.… If they spend a lot and the book works, then everyone's happy and your career is launched. If they spend a lot and the book doesn't work, then it's a problem. Because as you know, everyone can see the numbers today. There is no fudging. And that's because of the chains. There are two or three big outlets. It used to be that we couldn't sell as many copies per book. We could argue that this is very good, this new chain system, because you can sell more copies.

Tell me how you feel about these changes, the blockbuster mentality.
I think it's kind of unhealthy. Because a movie is a movie, but when you're building a writer's career…. As I said, if it works, it's great. If it doesn't, I think it's a huge black spot on that writer's career. Everybody knows what's gone on. In the old days, we could fudge it a bit better. But today everybody knows if a book's been a success or a failure. There's no fudging. The problem is not the first book. It's the second. At least nobody asks me that question anymore, "How hard is it to sell a first novel?" The first novel is the easiest to sell. But if it doesn't do well, you're up a creek. You have to reposition the author, probably move them to a new house, because the publisher doesn't want to take another bath. So you sell it to a new house and say X overpaid and maybe they didn't do as good of a job as they should have, and the author probably understands that he probably has to take less money.

If you were a first-time writer and you were offered a big advance, would you be wary of it?
I think I would probably take it. There are very few who could resist it. Sometimes an author—and it's happened here at the agency—they'll take a somewhat smaller advance because they prefer the editor or the house or whatever. But it's never that much less. It's not a hundred thousand dollars less. Maybe it's twenty thousand dollars less. But you never know what will happen. The Elizabeth Kostova book worked. I mean, I don't think that's literature. It's sort of what we call, you've heard this term, faux literature. But it sold. Can we think of a book that was a real bomb?

It can be devastating to an author's career.
Well, not devastating, but not hopeful. Let's put it that way.

In terms of the book industry itself, what would you say are the most troubling or frustrating changes today?
What worries me is that there aren't as many younger people who want to become editors as there used to be. Because at a certain point they get frustrated. There's not enough money to make the job palatable, and they don't have enough freedom. So they feel that they have this corporate bureaucracy imposed on them and yet they're not making a decent enough salary. What I see is this flow of young editors becoming agents. There are hundreds of agents. I can't believe how many there are. When I was starting out, there were agents, but not at the number there are now. Because today they can operate out of their apartments with a telephone. Or they think they can. I can't imagine that because in an agency you do need a big support staff of people who handle the foreign rights, the first serial, the permissions. We have two lawyers on staff who go over the contracts. So I can't imagine operating that way.

What other changes are you seeing?
I said this earlier as sort of a joke, but I'm beginning to think there are more writers than readers. I get these e-mails pouring in from people who want to write their life stories. It's because of the memoir. Everybody thinks they have a story. I also feel there are fewer and fewer civilians—I mean people outside of our business—who I meet who have time to read. They all say, "I'd love to read, but I'm just too busy." What worries me is that people are on blogs, Web sites—there is a lot of that going on—but they aren't reading books. That phenomenon, to me, is not a product of the industry, it's a product of how our culture is changing. People's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. And everybody has their specialty. I don't ever look at blogs or Web sites because I would never get anything done. I'm tempted to because I hear about these great things.

What does that mean for the future of books and reading? A lot of people seem to think an iPod-like device will come along for books.…
Great. That would be terrific. I have no problem with that. The more forms in which people can read intellectual content, the better. I don't care if they read it in a real book or on an iPod. If they're more likely to read it on some device, great. I have no fear about that. I have no idea why people do. It's the content that matters, the intellectual content. As long as we can keep it copyrighted. I also look forward to books on demand. Jason Epstein has been working on this machine for years, and he tells me that other people have been trying to do it too. The modes of distribution are so antiquated.

Epstein also seems to think that publishers are getting too big and will eventually collapse from their own bigness and fracture into smaller shops.
Like what's happened in Hollywood. I think it will happen. I think it's happening now, with all these imprints. There are so many imprints. And once they get the distribution figured out…. If these machines really do become effective, and there are more efficient ways of distributing books, then I think there will be more and more independent producers. And independent producers use a distribution outlet. So the publishers will be more like distributors. I think it could happen. I don't know because this business is so primitive—the publishing business—so unsophisticated. It takes so many years to make a change here that I don't think it's ten years away.

I'm always thinking about this issue of distribution—and returns, which is this convention that came about in the Depression that allows bookstores to return unsold books for full credit. It's very complex, very fraught, and it's a huge problem. But nobody really talks about changing it because it would scare booksellers.
I think the only way to solve the problem is these machines, books on demand. Then we won't have to have returns. We'd have a storefront with a display of books, and you'd go in and print out the book you want.

But what would that mean for booksellers, and for the aesthetics of being a book lover?
I'm right next to Borders. To go in there is such a nightmare. I love to go in and browse up near my country house in Millerton, New York. We have quite a good bookstore, an old-fashioned one. But even with these machines, they'll still probably display books. There will probably be some stores where people can go in and browse. I think it's going to hurt the chains more than anyone. Or maybe it won't. Maybe Barnes & Noble will get this machine. If there were print on demand, maybe some independent stores would come back. I mean, people want to go in and physically pick up a book, and it's hard at a big chain store. It's so big and the sales clerks don't want to help you.

What effect has the decline of independent booksellers and independent publishers had on books in this country?
I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg. Of course Barnes & Noble and Borders—the chains—helped kill the independent bookseller. But on the other hand, there are so many stores available to people—in shopping malls, in places that probably didn't have a decent independent bookstore. So, in a sense, we can say the chains have helped the book business. They certainly have been able sell a lot more copies. The blockbuster books sell commensurately much more than they did thirty years ago.

I don't think that many people have a real sense of what agents do all day. Obviously all days are different, but walk me through a typical day.
You spend most days divided between things. You're reading the final draft, talking to the editor and to the writer. I'm having dinner tonight with Jayne Anne Phillips, who just delivered the final draft of her new novel. I read about five drafts of this one, too. And I was talking to her editor, Ann Close, yesterday. Questions like, "When are we going to publish this?" The question of course this year is the election, which is not always the case. Ann is sort of pushing for fall of '08, and everyone is sort of nervous about it, but on the other hand, is the election really going to affect a novel? Maybe it's a good time to publish them, Jayne Anne's included. You have all these questions. Then you have the question of the cover. We often have to go through many sketches before we get a cover. We also have to send the books out for first serial, which is right at the time when we get the manuscript in. And then we start thinking about foreign rights, and we try to submit a manuscript to the U.K., because the U.K. edition should come out simultaneously. So we hope that the U.S. pub date isn't so close that we can't have our best shot at getting a U.K. deal. And then in some cases there's a question of movie rights. In most cases with literary fiction you want to wait until there's some buzz.

So you spend your day deeply involved...
Yes. Deeply involved in all the minutiae—it's important minutiae—of the print runs, the jackets, the timing of the pub date, first serial, foreign rights. And then, if you've represented an author for a number of years, you have their backlist. Someone wants to make a movie out of Ann Beattie's "The Burning House." So you're dealing with that.

Say you have a novel from a new writer. How do you typically go about selling it? Do you pick up the phone and call one person, or five people, or ten people?
If it's of literary quality but I don't think it's going to be a megabuck sale, I probably submit it to the key editors who I think would respond to it at maybe a half-dozen houses.

How do you make those decisions—about which editors you send it to?
It's part of my job to know editors, to know what they respond to and what they like. I just intuitively know that from working over the years.

Are you ever consciously trying to match dispositions or personalities between a new author and an editor?
That wouldn't be my primary concern, but I think of that as a secondary problem. Will this person really mesh with so-and-so?

What's your style when you have several publishers interested in a project?
I would want the author to meet the editors, and probably the publicists, and maybe the marketing people. Then we would make a decision together, or the author may have strong feelings about who he or she wants to be with. I think you have to get a feel for it.

Do you know how many new clients you take on in, say, a year?
I really don't, because sometimes I'll take on an odd project. I took on Sherry Lansing's book. I mean that's a one-off. Or perhaps she'll do another book. That can happen. Right now I have two new authors I'm ready to go out with pretty soon. I don't know how many I take on.

How are new clients finding their way to you at this point?
They come in recommended. A client of mine will recommend them to me. A lot of my writers teach, like Deborah Eisenberg, Ann Beattie, Roxana Robinson, André Aciman—a lot of them. So they'll recommend someone and often I'll give them to some younger agent here. I mean, Vikram [Chandra] came to me through Barthelme and I gave him to Eric. And Edward P. Jones came to me and I gave him to Eric.

Tell me about some of that, about some of the mentoring you're done over the years.
I hired Binky [Urban] and Esther [Newberg] and trained them.

But what does that amount to?
They weren't agents. They were working in other jobs. Esther had been in politics, Binky had been working at New York magazine. I hired them when I was at ICM, and they would tell you I trained them. I hired Suzanne Glück and trained her. John Sterling worked for me at one time at ICM as an agent.

What do you look for in an agent?
Enthusiasm, energy, commitment, and taste. Eric and Tina are probably the two stars. Do you know Tina? She was with my daughter in graduate school at Yale. Tina was a few years older. Priscilla called me and said "Mom, you've got to hire this woman." Mort and I looked at her resumé and said, "This is amazing." And Eric should be an editor! He was at Norton.

Now put yourself in an author's shoes, an author who finds herself in a situation where she's lucky enough to have her choice between a few different agents who want her. What are the factors you would use to make the decision?
I think a lot of it is chemistry between the two people. I would also want to know a lot about how the office works, how much of a support system there is. I don't want to just sing our own praises, but I think our agency offers that more than any other agency because we are completely book oriented. There is not another book agency in New York that has two lawyers and a paralegal devoted to our authors and their contracts. We have four people in foreign rights. I would want to know, "How does this agency work?"

What other factors?
I would obviously want to know the agent's reaction to my work. I think it's important to feel out the level of commitment they have. Unlike twenty or thirty years ago, the agents now—at least here—are not going to take you on unless they're going to go gung ho. Because they know how tough the market is. They're not going to speculate.

What about in the industry at large?
I don't know. I can't speak to that. But I have a feeling that some of these more independent agents who are just starting out will take more people because they need it more.