Considering that it took Janet Silver only a few weeks to land a plum new job as editor-at-large for Nan A. Talese's imprint at Doubleday, perhaps it isn't worth going into the whole convoluted chain of events that resulted in her ouster, back in January, from her position as vice president and publisher of Houghton Mifflin, the venerable Boston-based house she'd headed since 2001. No doubt it would be cleaner to avoid the subject altogether and talk instead about her background (she was raised in South Orange, New Jersey, and educated at Brown and the University of Chicago); the staggering list of authors she has edited, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tim O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Robert Stone, Natasha Trethewey, and John Edgar Wideman; or her charming house in the woods in Concord, Massachusetts, where our conversation took place.

After all, maybe Silver was sacked after twenty-four years at Houghton for reasons having nothing to do with the ambitions of a thirty-nine-year-old Irish businessman named Barry O'Callaghan. But that seems unlikely. The facts are as follows: O'Callaghan is one of the richest men in Ireland. Although his background is in law, investment banking, and venture capitalism, in December 2006 his Dublin-based educational software company, Riverdeep, pulled off an audacious, highly leveraged reverse takeover of Houghton Mifflin. After the merger, he moved the new company's official headquarters to the Cayman Islands (always a promising sign). Then, seven months ago, O'Callaghan acquired another piece of low-hanging publishing fruit, Harcourt, taking the next step in an apparent attempt to build a publishing empire. In the fallout surrounding that merger, Silver was one of several well-regarded veteran editors to be shown the door.

Admittedly, it's hard to summon up much outrage about the conglomeration of American book publishers these days. Huge corporations have been buying and selling them with abandon for the past five decades. O'Callaghan is just the latest member of an elite fraternity whose top dog has to be Rupert Murdoch (his News Corporation owns the numerous HarperCollins imprints). Still, just as one can't help feeling a chill to realize that revenues generated by books like Brave New World, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A People's History of the United States are paying the lighting bills over at Fox News, O'Callaghan's recent actions, and their consequences, are poignant reminders that the media moguls who hold sway over today's publishing houses tend to look—and, more to the point, behave—less like Alfred Knopf or Bennett Cerf and more like Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone's Wall Street. The problem is not so much that men like O'Callaghan continue to buy publishing houses, but rather that they rarely care enough about the work publishers do to hang on to them when it stops suiting their bottom line. Which is about the time when people like Janet Silver and her colleagues start losing their jobs—and their authors lose their most passionate advocates.

If any of this keeps Silver up at night, she didn't let on during our conversation, in which she spoke candidly about what she looks for in first novels and dispensed some useful advice for writers about agents. We talked in her living room while her dog, Roxy, and her cat, Phoebe, lounged on the floor beside the fireplace.

Tell me a little about your background.
I grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, which today has become a little like Brooklyn in that a lot of people from publishing seem to live there and commute. When I was growing up it was not like that at all. I went to college at Brown and graduate school at the University of Chicago. It was when I was a graduate student at Chicago that I began to realize I was more temperamentally inclined toward editorial work than scholarship.

You were studying English?
Yes. I was actually on a track for a doctorate. But while I was in school I needed to support myself. I got a job as the managing editor of this quarterly, Critical Inquiry, which was one of the journals published by the University of Chicago Press. This was in the mid-seventies, late seventies. It was kind of wild. The journal did criticism in the arts, in all of the arts, but primarily in literature. This was in the heyday of the great deconstruction rage, so we were publishing the first translations of essays by Derrida, for instance, and Lacan, and some essays by Jacques Barzun. It was very, very intellectual. It was very abstract. But we were also publishing the early essays by people like Skip Gates. I got to work with some amazing writers, and we really did edit the pieces, because when you work for a journal things have to be a particular length and they have to make a particular point. A lot of the academic writers we worked with really welcomed some input.

The other nice thing about working for a journal—unlike working on a dissertation, which is endless—is that there was an end product four times a year. It was this thing that other people read. It was a way to be engaged in a cultural conversation that seemed important—at the time, anyway. I loved the interaction with the writers. I loved the opportunity to learn about the production of a journal. We were a very small office. We did all of the editing, all the copyediting, all the proofreading. It was this little mini-education in a certain kind of publishing.

How did you get from there to Houghton?
I was there for five years, doing my course work and working full time. But before I finished, my husband and I got married. He had finished his doctorate in philosophy and was teaching and on the job market. This was a time when there were pretty much no jobs unless you were willing to go from North Dakota to South Texas to wherever. That wasn't what he wanted to do. So, like many people with doctorates in that era, he went to law school. As much as we both loved Chicago, we also wanted to come back east. So we came back and he went to Harvard Law School and I needed to work. The only skill I had was editing. I started doing freelance work, some of it for the Museum of Fine Arts—I also have a background in art history—and some of it for Houghton Mifflin. It just sort of evolved and I began to work there full time.

What was your position when you started at Houghton Mifflin?
Manuscript editor. Some publishers used freelance copyeditors—this was 1984—but Houghton always had an in-house group of people, whom they called manuscript editors, who did copyediting and a lot of developmental work. It was a chance to get in the door and begin to learn trade publishing from the ground up. I never did the standard editorial assistant thing where you go up through the ranks that way. When I was a manuscript editor, one of the earlier books I worked on was [Margaret Atwood's] The Handmaid's Tale. Nan Talese was at Houghton Mifflin at the time—so it feels like a nice symmetry that it's come full circle now.

Was there somebody who taught you how to edit?
I pretty much learned by doing it. To some degree I feel as though the opportunity to edit articles first was a great way to start. It's much smaller. It's more contained. You learn to focus on every line, every paragraph, and get that fine detail down. I never thought of myself as a detail person, but when you start working that way, you kind of become one. You are forced to slow down and not only think about the larger argument and whether it's flowing naturally, but also to concentrate on a more micro level. To some degree, the authors teach you. You make your mistakes, and boy, do they let you know it. But the other thing is that, having spent a lot of time reading, you just naturally know if a narrative is flowing well or if you're stumbling over things and things don't seem entirely clear. When I was in graduate school, my concentration was in fiction, so I naturally gravitated toward editing fiction more than other kinds of narratives.

Were there older people at Houghton who helped you make the transition to being an acquisitions editor?
I was there so long I kind of think of it in terms of eras. There was the Austin Olney-Nan Talese era, which is what I came into when I joined. And that was kind of old school. The nice thing was that there were editors who had too many books to edit and really wanted additional help. So I was able to pick up some work that I might not have had the chance to do otherwise. The next era was the Joe Kanon-John Sterling era. That was when I really began to take on books of my own, with John's encouragement, probably four or five years into the job. I was very fortunate because I did get the support of people who encouraged me to go out on my own and acquire, and that doesn't happen for everybody.

I never thought of myself as particularly ambitious for myself, but more for my writers. At a certain point I found that I became so invested in the books I was editing that it felt like a loss to turn them over to other people. The longer I'd been at the company and had a chance to see the way books were published, the more opinionated I became about what to publish, especially what kinds of books to publish. Houghton went through a lot of changes—grew and contracted, grew and contracted—but the one thing that I always felt about the list was that it had a certain kind of profile as being fairly conservative, especially in fiction—a little sleepy. Some of Nan's authors helped to change that profile: writers like Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Valerie Martin. The authors she was publishing at Houghton are still the people she's publishing today, which is much to her credit. But it was a moment when the publishing world and the readership were changing and evolving, and it seemed like there was room on the Houghton list for different kinds of voices.

Like what?
More books by women. More books by ethnic writers. One of the first novels I acquired was by a young woman named Connie Porter, a young black woman who had graduated from the [Louisiana State University] graduate writing program. She had written a first novel called All-Bright Court, which was about a community of African Americans who had migrated up from the South after World War II when there seemed to be a lot of opportunity. The book was about this aspiring community of black workers who came to find that the promises they were given really didn't come through. And that book is still in print. The wonderful thing about it was that here was a young writer talking about a certain kind of community and experience that wasn't very well represented in the market.

Another example is a collection of stories by a young woman named Carolyn Ferrell called Don't Erase Me. Carolyn comes from a mixed background. Her mother is white and her father is black. The stories she wrote were very literary and ambitious and challenging in a particular way. Edward P. Jones is a writer whom I might compare her to. That book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. I just felt there was a need to hear from those kinds of voices—and that Houghton should be supporting writers like that.

Where does that interest come from for you?
I don't know. Maybe it's just the idea that in every era there are the voices you haven't heard from before. In the 1940s and 1950s it was Jewish American writers. The thing that makes reading interesting is hearing from different voices and different perspectives, especially in fiction. And the book that probably typifies that—the most symbolically important of the books I acquired with that mission—was Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.

How did she come to your attention?
It was a combination of things. She had just graduated from the Boston University writing program. She had a couple of small publications, and she did have an agent—who's no longer an agent, Cindy Klein—who was with Borchardt. I think Cindy sent me four or five stories. I pretty much knew right away that she was a writer I really wanted to publish. But I also knew about her through Peter Ho Davies, who called to tell me I was going to be seeing this collection and this was somebody I should really pay attention to. And she was also one of the writers who was on Katrina Kenison's radar for the Best American Short Stories, of which I was the in-house editor for many years starting in the eighties. I met with Jhumpa and talked with her about her writing and her ideas for the stories and the collection. We were very much on the same wavelength in terms of my editorial suggestions. And one of the great benefits Houghton could offer at the time was the opportunity to publish in paperback original.

Let's talk about that.
Mariner had just started, and the fact was that it was really hard to sell short story collections in hardcover. A lot of publishers were shying away from them unless they came with a novel that you could publish first and then have the stories trail along afterward. I think the opportunity to publish in paperback original really made a lot of sense at the time, although when Mariner started it sort of defied conventional wisdom. A number of publishers had tried that format, and the books being published in that format got a reputation for having a particular persona. You know—edgy, downtown.

Like the books published by Gary Fisketjon's Vintage Contemporaries.
Exactly. But in its first year Mariner published a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, who was in her seventies at the time, called The Blue Flower, which became a phenomenon. I think the fact that it was published in paperback original made a huge difference because it enabled people to take a chance. That's the beauty of it. A lot of publishers had published Fitzgerald's work in hardcover in the States with very little success. But here was a way to say to readers and bookstores, "You're going to read these fabulous reviews, and it's twelve dollars, so take a chance." And the publicity department waged a really aggressive campaign with reviewers, which I think was important. Because that was the other thing about publishing in paperback original—they were seen as second-class citizens and not necessarily to be taken as seriously by reviewers. We made a point of saying, "No, this is really just a way to reach readers by making the price point more accessible."

This was also the moment at which booksellers were switching over to computerized inventory so that ordering was happening based on the sales of the writer's previous book. Well, if you can increase sales simply by lowering the price—if you can double or triple or quadruple the sales you would anticipate in hardcover—then you can establish a base from which a writer can grow.

And now when we're talking to writers and agents, making the argument for paperback original, one of the books we always point to is Interpreter of Maladies.
Right.

But there wasn't any resistance at the time?
It was a short story collection by an unknown writer.

And nobody knew it would win the Pulitzer Prize.
Right, but it really began to sell well before it won the prize. You have to remember that when I bought the book she hadn't published in the New Yorker yet. They bought two stories shortly after I acquired it, and she won the New Yorker's first fiction prize at the end of that year. When the book came out it got great reviews—that always helps—and it won the PEN/Hemingway Award. So by the time she won the Pulitzer there were already something like forty-five thousand copies in print. Then there were a lot of copies in print. Of course it's hugely gratifying to find an author like her. I wasn't by any means the only one to discover her, but I was first.

So the decision about paperback original just made a lot of sense. It made sense to her. Her agent was probably hearing from every publisher, "Well, short story collections are really hard." And we were saying, "No, we know how to do it, and the first printing will not be twenty-five-hundred copies. It's going to be at least fifteen or it doesn't make any sense." So that argument made a lot of sense to her and to her agent. But it was a two-book contract. We had the novel under contract too.

But even after all the successes, authors and agents still resist paperback original. Do you think it will ever take over like it has in Europe?
Well, Europe is certainly way ahead of us. I like to think that Mariner set a precedent that other publishers followed so that the whole idea of paperback original became much more appealing. I guess the problem now is that the economics are even more challenging. The big economic problem with paperback original is that it costs just as much to publish and promote the book, but the revenues are half—for everybody. So you have to make sure it's the right book, that you're not flooding the market. I think it's important for publicity departments to continue to wage that campaign with reviewers. But I don't think it matters as much for reviewers anymore. I think there was something about the uniqueness of the Mariner list when it started—with writers like Penelope Fitzgerald and James Carroll, who had just won the National Book Award—that gave it a certain kind of profile. So while the world at large may not have known what a Mariner book was, booksellers and reviewers did. Now that it's more common, it doesn't have any particular cachet or imply a particular kind of publishing. Unfortunately, that means it's just like every other book. So it's complicated. I don't know where it's going. I think Morgan [Entrekin] did something very interesting with Man Gone Down, by upping the production values, with the French flaps and the rough front, to make the book itself a kind of object. Today the trick is to distinguish these books. Once the distinction disappears, it's going to become harder for everybody.

When you became publisher of the company in 2001, you became Philip Roth's editor.
Philip started at Houghton with Goodbye, Columbus in 1959, and after being with many other publishers over a long career he came back to Houghton with Sabbath's Theater, when Joe Kanon was the publisher. Roth always worked with the publisher. After Joe left, his editor became Wendy Strothman. When Wendy left, I became his editor. That was when we had just published The Human Stain. He was definitely at a high point. And what a privilege to be able to work with him. It was fun because my parents grew up in Newark and I grew up with Philip Roth in many ways. He was of my parents' generation, grew up in the same town, went to the same high schools, and also sort of made that same migration out of Newark and into the suburbs, to the South Orange and Maplewood area. So it was a world that I had not only been reading about in Roth's novels for all these years, but also kind of knew intimately.

I imagine it must have been incredibly intimidating to suddenly be Roth's editor.
Well, nobody "edits" Philip Roth. It was a real privilege, I would say, but also a responsibility. The biggest responsibility was to make sure that he was published as well as possible—and to be published without a hitch. Philip Roth is extremely knowledgeable about publishing, and very deliberate, and very attentive to detail. My job was to make sure all those details fell into place.

The first time you get a Roth novel in manuscript it's very, very exciting. The thing comes to you. It's complete. And you're one of the first people to have a chance to read it. So there are no preconceived ideas about the book, no reviews to sway you one way or another. The first book I read in manuscript was The Plot Against America. And when I read that manuscript, I just knew it was going to be his best-selling book. I just knew it.

Because of the hook?
Because of the hook and because I think he just hit a nerve. He hit a nerve and an anxiety in the American psyche at the right moment. He is so attuned to the American psyche. And the fact is that he didn't, as he said, write the book to make any particular political statement about current politics. He really did want to write about that era. But what he discovered in that alternative history was a way to touch a nerve that's very raw in our generation.

He is a very private person, and he didn't really talk much about some of his previous books, but we were able to convince him to do some publicity for that book, and to his credit, I think he actually enjoyed doing it. So Katie Couric interviewed him and he was on Terry Gross, who had interviewed him before. That was an opportunity for us. His willingness to talk about those books—he did a little bit for The Human Stain—really made all the difference. People want to hear from him, and his generosity in doing that was tremendous. Somebody said to him, "How come you decided to give interviews about Plot?" He said, "Well, my publisher asked me to do interviews and I said okay." It's much more complicated than that, but I think he was able to talk about the book on his own terms, and what more could any reader want than to hear him talk about a book on his own terms?

When we published American Pastoral, we had Roth come to sales conference. I'm not sure it was that book, but I think so. And this was amazing for the reps. I mean, to have Philip Roth at the sales conference? Edna O'Brien had come in the day before, and if you've ever encountered Edna O'Brien, she's very dramatic and theatrical and just has this regal quality to her, and she swept in and gave a marvelous speech and left. The next day Roth came in. Everyone was so nervous about meeting him. But he strolled into the room, and rather than standing up and giving a speech, he sat down at the table—this open square, the way a sales conference goes—and he talked a little about the book and then asked if people had questions for him. Nobody was going to ask him a personal question about something he didn't want to talk about—he knew he could trust us that way. The [Barnes & Noble] rep raised his hand and said, "I just want to thank you for putting New Jersey on the map." And we all laughed and from there he answered every single question he got about the book, about his writing career.... Someone asked him if he had other people read his manuscripts, and he said there were six people in American who he really trusted to read his work—he doesn't read reviews, that's not important to him—and the opinions of those six people were the only opinions that mattered to him. I just thought he was so thoughtful and gracious and generous in the way he answered and responded to every single question. I think it made such a difference.

Do you have any insight into this amazing productivity—both in quantity and in quality—late in life? It's kind of unusual.
I think that a lot has come together in his writing. There's a particular fury that's always been a part of his work, but at this time in his life he's been able to focus it on a large canvas. When he accepted the National Book Foundation's distinguished medal, he talked about having the great American writers as his models. By that he meant he didn't necessarily think of himself as a Jewish writer—that he's not necessarily Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud or the other writers he's usually grouped with. This is speculation, but at this point in his life maybe he sees his own writing in an even larger way—more in the context of the history of American writing—and that's partly where some of these more recent novels come from.

You also work with Cynthia Ozick. Tell me about your experience with her.
She's a delight in every way. Cynthia was at Knopf for many years. She got a new agent, Melanie Jackson, and I think that she was ready for a change—some writers just need a boost. She's a writer who I'd been reading for years and who I adore and who I think both in fiction and nonfiction—especially as an essayist—is without peer. She writes a better essay than any American writer. She is a public intellectual, in a way. I don't always agree with her. But she's so deeply engaged in this cultural conversation—like it or not, in terms of her opinions—and she cares so deeply about American culture and what's happened to it and where it's going, and she's so eloquent, that you must read her.

But she's also a great fiction writer in the tradition of Henry James and my favorite nineteenth-century Victorians. When I found out that she was looking to move—I had already brought over Anita Desai, who is also represented by Melanie Jackson—I immediately expressed my interest. Melanie sent me the novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, which was untitled at the time. Actually, it was called The Bear Boy because one of the characters is based on the real life model for Christopher Robin in the Winnie-the-Pooh books. I started reading this novel and I was just blown away. I said to myself, "It's her Middlemarch." And, in fact, the main character is named Dorothea, and there's this whole family drama that takes place in the Bronx. It's George Eliot in the Bronx! When I had my first conversation with Cynthia, I said to her, "It's your Middlemarch," and she knew that I understood where she was coming from. We had the best meeting. It was a love-fest all around.

I just felt that she was so important that she had to be published at the top of the list. She just had to be. Sometimes when you love a writer, and an agent brings you a book, it's just not the right book to move. You really want to be able to make a difference. Boy did I think this was the book where we could publish it in a different way and make a difference. All of her books had a similar look, a kind of "Cynthia Ozick look," and instead of doing that we gave it this bright cover with foil fireflies on the front and a title that was unlike any Cynthia Ozick title you've ever heard before. We got her to meet booksellers, which she had never done. She had never had a chance to go out and meet booksellers. Lots of people had seen her on panels and in that context, but they had not been able to sit down at dinner with her and just talk. She is just the most delightful dinner companion you can imagine. She truly is so generous and so deeply interested in what people have to say.

You also edit Tim O'Brien. Was he always a Houghton author?
Tim is one of a number of authors who left Houghton and came back. I can't take credit for all of them by any means, but a lot of them stayed under my direction. Roth came back, obviously. Bob Stone came back. Tim O'Brien came back. He had been brought to Houghton by Sam Lawrence, the legendary Sam Lawrence. After Sam died, John Sterling became his editor. About the time that Houghton published In the Lake of the Woods, John went off to start up Broadway Books. Tim went with John. As sad as it was, I love to see that. I love to see an author be really loyal to an editor. But he just never felt the same about the house. And at a certain point he came back and talked to our CEO, Nader Darehshori at the time, and said he wanted to come back to Houghton Mifflin. I met with him and Wendy Strothman, who was the publisher at the time. We had this great lunch, and he said to me, "I want to come back and I want you to be my editor." How gratifying is that? That's pretty great.

We just have a truly wonderful relationship. I think writing this last novel, July, July, was very hard for him. He's gone through so many changes in his life—he moved to Texas and got married and has two children. But all this time, and especially when we were working on this last novel, which evolved from a collection of short stories into a novel, we've just had such a wonderful back and forth, and I've also been able to get a sense of his own ambition and his own frustration with being boxed in as a writer who's expected to produce a certain work, always about Vietnam. The Things They Carried will always be the book he's known for. It just will. But, much to his credit, he really wanted to do more than that, and always has. He has always sort of tested that, and I admire that tremendously. His writing is so complex and so edgy, in a way, that I think people could relate to it in war stories but it's more unexpected when it comes to other kinds of stories. That's been a real tension in his work for a long time. But he's working on a new book now, I'm happy to say.

I'm curious about your transition from editor in chief to publisher. First of all, what is the job of the editor in chief in your mind?
I can only talk about myself—I think it's different at different houses—but in my mind it's really to guide the editorial group and to encourage editors to grow in their own ways. I became editor in chief at a time when the editorial ranks were really depleted. There had been a lot of change at Houghton, after having stability for literally generations. We were bought by this French water processing company, Vivendi, which had aspirations to take over the world. They bought us and sold us very quickly, so there was a lot of turmoil.

When Wendy Strothman became publisher, her background had been at a university press and then at Beacon Press. She had a strong affinity for books on social change and felt that Houghton could be doing more of that, which we did, with some success, but not with the kind of breadth that I felt the list really needed. But she was able to help me focus the list in a way to return it to its real strengths—rather than trying to be all publishers to all people and trying to compete with much larger houses with much bigger resources in all of the same categories. My feeling, and I had her support, was to really focus the list on areas that would sell over time, and to focus on narrative nonfiction in areas like science and history and biography that Houghton had a strong background in. Actually, Houghton was less known for science—we had been known for natural history—but I felt that you had to grow organically, and the natural way to grow out from natural history was to publish more science. So I wanted to hire a science editor. I wanted to find a history editor. My role was to find specialists who could really speak to authors in their own language. That's one way of being convincing when you have more limited resources: to find the most brilliant editors, with a deep knowledge of a subject area and experience editing those kinds of books, and to say to an agent and an author, "Let's get these two together. Let's have a conversation."

Eamon Dolan is a great example. There's someone who now, at a young age, has become a very legendary editor. Eamon was known for a certain kind of narrative book. But Houghton published sports books, and what did Eamon bring us? He brought us the best of sports. He brought Buzz Bissinger and Three Nights in August. I remember when he brought that book to the acquisitions committee, which includes sales, marketing, and all of that. The sales people sort of shook their heads. "Oh, it's regional." This was before Friday Night Lights became a movie and a TV show and popular in that way. Eamon said he didn't think it was regional. I didn't think so either. So sometimes you defy the internal wisdom. Eamon also found Eric Schlosser and Fast Food Nation. Again, there were some in-house doubters who said, "It's a magazine article. Is this a book that's going to sell over time? Isn't it all about the current moment?" But Eamon was convinced, and he convinced others, and he was right. So that's what you do as a publisher. You find the best talent and you let them shine.

Talk me through how you decide how much to pay for a first novel.
It's partly enthusiasm in the house. It's the uniqueness of the voice. It's passion. But unfortunately it's also "Who does this remind you of who has sold really well?" It's all of those things, and there's no one way to decide. When Jonathan Safran Foer's novel came to us, Eric Chinski was the editor at the time. He got that manuscript around to people so quickly, and so many readers in-house instantly knew that this was something very special. That was an investment unlike any we had made in a first novel before. I can tell you—I was the editor in chief at the time and Wendy Strothman was the publisher—that she was nervous about it. But she also saw what was going on in-house. She saw how many different readers were responding to it, and not just in editorial, but in sub-rights, in publicity, in marketing, in sales. And not everybody agreed. There were definitely naysayers, which is the best way to go about it. You want people to love it or hate it—mediocrity is the thing that you should pass up. But the people who adored it were so passionate that she was willing to take a very big flyer, and it was certainly worth it. It was a great bet in the end. It was also something that allowed us to push a little bit on the kinds of fiction that Houghton did, not to have a reputation for doing only one kind of thing in fiction.

One of the nice things about the era in which we were publishing writers like Jonathan, and building writers like Richard Dawkins, is that it was very much a group effort. As a publisher, you want to encourage your editors to work really closely with marketing and publicity, and to bring the author in as well. One of the things that we've all learned in publishing is that the authors know their audiences very well. We want to have them participate as part of the conversation.

That seems to have become increasingly important over the last decades. How did that evolve, from your perspective?
It's happened in different ways. First, it happened with the book tour. Today the book tour has become less and less productive for some authors—so now we have the book tour plus media. But I think publishers also have found that there are special interest groups for particular books that their authors are aware of, and that that kind of micro-marketing—whether it's regional marketing or a medical group or something else—can be really effective. I'm thinking about Jacki Lyden's memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, which was a great success for us. This was a very compelling memoir about her mother's manic-depression. Since it was published, Jacki has really been on the circuit. She talks to support groups, psychological associations, groups that work with families who have manic-depression in their families. She was aware of some of that in advance, so we were able to think of different ways to approach the promotion of the same book.

More and more, publishers are looking for nonfiction ways of talking about fiction. You have to find new ways to interest people. You have to get them to pick up the book. If one of the ways to do that is to find an extra-literary element to talk about, and if the author can do some of that talking and not just the publisher, it makes a big difference.

You've never worked in New York. Was that a conscious decision?
No. I made my home here, and I was very lucky because I started building a list at a moment when it was still not difficult to do that—there was still enough publishing in Boston that it wasn't an outpost. Little, Brown was still here in addition to Beacon and all the university presses. There was a real publishing community that doesn't exist as much anymore.

Still, I would imagine there are advantages to being in Boston now.
Well, that's what we all say. Everybody has always said that the great advantage of being in Boston is that you're not so much in the center of the hype. It's a little bit easier to have some perspective. And to some extent it's true. If you're not always talking to the same people in the same small publishing community, I think you don't get quite as caught up in the machinery. Houghton really had to think about distinguishing itself from the rest of the publishing community in order to attract the best authors. So, one way you do that is to say that it has this long, distinguished tradition with a vision that's outside the New York publishing community. But I think the main advantage is that it's a very sane life. It's a wonderful place to live. And there's a kind of intellectual energy because of all the universities, a kind of cultural energy around you that's really fabulous.

Which is a nice segue to talking about poetry.
My great love.

Yeah?
Yes, it is.

Were you always editing poetry?
I started editing poetry pretty early on at Houghton. We used to have a fellowship, a poetry contest, and as soon as I came on I knew I wanted to be one of the judges for that. Peter Davison was the poetry editor at the time. Houghton had this long history of publishing poetry, but one way of bringing on new writers in addition to Galway Kinnell and Donald Hall and the Houghton stable of writers was to find new talent through this annual contest. I became involved in judging it, and one of the early winners—maybe even the first year I was at Houghton—was Andrew Hudgins for a collection called After the Lost War, which is about the Civil War. I just loved having a chance to be engaged with those writers, so I copyedited that book. I copyedited Tom Lux and Rodney Jones and some of the other writers who were there at the time.

Peter was a great supporter of poetry and a poet himself, which maintained a certain profile for the list. But from where I sat we were really just publishing one poet at a time rather than having an actual poetry program. So at the point when I could make a difference, when I became the editorial director and then the editor in chief and the publisher, I wanted to expand the list, to bring on some different kinds of poets, and also to try to engage the rest of the house more. It's so hard for a trade house to publish poetry if it's just one book at a time. But if you can go to a reviewer with a whole campaign for the house's poets, three or four on a list, and you can advertise them together, you can get more attention and spread the costs over several books. I think they just needing some nurturing and attention and a sense that marketing and publicity were behind them.

What other things did you do?
I hired Michael Collier, who is the head of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. First I brought Michael to Houghton as a poet, and then the busier I got and the more I had need for somebody else to manage the program as it evolved and developed, I felt that Michael would be just the right person for that. Poetry is such a small world and there are so many egos involved that you need someone to manage it who is just so open-minded and generous. As the head of Bread Loaf, he's used to dealing with a wide array of writers and personalities. He also has impeccable taste. Another nice thing about having Michael come on is that he was able to really edit the manuscripts—I didn't have time to do that anymore—and to keep the poets in the loop about other book that were coming out and to foster a sense of community among the Houghton poets.

One of the other ways in which I worked with Michael was to take on the publication of the winners of the Bakeless Prize, which is awarded by Bread Loaf annually. Houghton would publish the winners in paperback original in Mariner. One of the earliest winners was Spencer Reece for his collection The Clerk's Tale—the judge was Louise Glück—and this was just a fabulous collection. This is another example of a way in which you can talk about poetry in the same way you can talk about fiction, with a nonfiction hook. The Clerk's Tale was an obvious allusion to Chaucer, but Spencer himself had a wonderful story. He was a clerk at Brooks Brothers in Florida. That's what he did for a living. After he won the prize, Michael was able to send the poems to Alice Quinn, and she loved them and published the entire title poem on the back page of the New Yorker. I think that was unprecedented. So here was a way to launch a poet with a prize-winning collection and to talk about his work in ways that could attract popular attention. It was always about quality, but it was also about good publishing—finding ways to grow the poetry list and bring attention to it.

As you've read first novels and story collections over the years, have you noticed any common mistakes that beginning authors tend to make? I'd like to get a sense of how you evaluate first fiction.
The one thing that every aspiring novelist and story writer should know is that it's really about personal taste. So much depends on taste. People always talk about the pros and cons of creative writing programs. It's a little clichéd now to say that there's an identifiable "writing program style," but there kind of is. It can be solipsistic, it can be dialogue based. I do think that some of the work coming out of those programs is being published too early. I find that the best writers, the most ambitious writers, are the greatest readers, and not just of contemporary fiction, but of classic fiction.

There are a couple of things I see in first fiction that always tell me something is not for me. The first is usually in fiction by young women. There will be a young female protagonist with a vaguely artistic temperament who goes to New York to do something. At some point, usually about page ten, she looks in the mirror and describes herself. And you see this device in many wonderful novels—this is the way the author's going to let the reader know what the narrator or main character looks like—but now you just see it too much. So I usually get to that on page ten and say, "Not interested."

The other is that you're only allowed one dream per novel. Because it's too easy. It's sort of like looking in the mirror—you get to know something about the main character's fears and inhibitions or whatever because it all came out in a dream. If there's more than one dream, I think, "Oh, wow, that's just too easy."

What about the opposite? What are you always looking for in a new writer?
I tend to like character-driven fiction by writers who are sort of pushing their own ambition and their own vision. Someone like Peter Ho Davies, who has this marvelous background. He can write about his Welsh heritage or his Malaysian heritage—and sometimes the two meet—but there's always a strong sense of history. In his story collection The Ugliest House in the World, there's a central story called "A Union," which is about the Welsh mining strikes. But it was also about a marriage. And I just loved the way these characters were set in time—which is not to say that I like historical fiction, because I don't especially—but I really do like to know that the author has a sense of history, so there's a context and a richness, a textural kind of context. Peter's stories take you all over the world, but they also are very grounded in his sensibility.

I also like when a writer can write all different kinds of characters. Back in the nineties we published a story collection called The Coast of Good Intentions by Michael Byers. He was a Seattle-based writer who now lives in Michigan. And he could write from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old immigrant living in Seattle as easily as a twelve-year-old girl or a forty-five-year-old man or an elderly woman. That flexibility, the ability to inhabit a character so fully, to make them totally believable on the page, is something I really look for.

Tell me about a particularly memorable editing experience.
Peter Ho Davies comes to mind. The greatest thing for an editor is when you read a manuscript, you give some comments, and then the author goes off and does something completely different from what you expected, but it's brilliant and wonderful. With some of Peter's stories, especially that one I was just describing, I gave him some comments, and the story came back about three times as long. So there was this kind of ebullient response from him—a kind of magnanimous sense of possibility. You could see him sort of stretching toward a novel in that experience.

How many times do you read a manuscript you're editing?
Quite a few. When I first read a manuscript, I feel like I have to read it all the way through without putting my pencil down, and then you make notes and go back through and make more specific comments. Then you get a revision and you have to do the same thing all over again. So I probably read every manuscript two or three times. Sometimes, if you've been through enough drafts of a book, you get confused. You forget if something was in this draft or a previous draft, you lose track of what's been dropped. When I was editing Jonathan's second book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, there was this line in the beginning where Oskar was talking about his grandmother—they needed to get somewhere—and she says, in this perfect Jewish grandmother kind of way, something about how she believes in God but she does not believe in taxis. In a subsequent version of the manuscript that line got dropped, and it stuck in my mind, and when I realized it wasn't there, I thought, "I loved that line. Put it back in!" So he did, just for me, I think.