What makes a literary agent great? It is not necessarily editorial acumen, negotiation skill, or relationships with powerful editors, but rather the strength of an agent’s conviction about the writers and work that agent represents. Of course, being shrewd, tough, and connected doesn’t hurt—but the most important thing any of us in the publishing world can do is believe passionately in authors and their ability to communicate something real.

But where does that conviction come from? That is what I sought to discover by talking with PJ Mark, an agent whose clients are among the freshest voices in American writing, but whose path into the agenting business was anything but direct.

Mark made his way from Scottsdale, Arizona, where he played in a punk band, to New York City in 1990, where he founded Feed, an alternative literary journal, with his student loans. Soon thereafter he began to evaluate projects for Ballantine Books, and through a chance meeting while he waited tables at a macrobiotic restaurant, he became a book scout for foreign publishers. He later worked as a journalist covering the publishing industry, and since 2002 has been a literary agent, first at International Management Group (IMG), then Collins McCormick, McCormick & Williams, and now Janklow & Nesbit Associates, where he moved in 2010.

Mark’s list of authors includes five writers who have received 5 Under 35 honors from the National Book Foundation—Samantha Hunt, Grace Krilanovich, Dinaw Mengestu, Stuart Nadler, and Josh Weil—as well as many other notable writers, including Rachel Aviv, Rosecrans Baldwin, Jim Gavin, Shelley Jackson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, Ed Park, and Craig Thompson.

Let’s begin at the beginning.
I grew up in Arizona in the seventies and eighties, in what was then a small suburb called Scottsdale. I was the youngest of seven kids.

What was your first experience with reading?
I don’t have those memories of sitting in the back of the car reading or being in a library and borrowing books. I really struggled as a young person. I wasn’t a reader. I was a gay, poor, punk-rock kid in Scottsdale, and I fell into music instead.

That changed in high school, when I was the lead singer of a punk band. Through lyrics and music I began to understand the power of expression through writing. There was an album of spoken-word poetry released by Exene Cervenka from the punk band X and an African American poet named Wanda Coleman—literally a pressed vinyl album—called Twin Sisters that I listened to on a loop. They talked about cultural issues and outsider status, and that sort of alternative writing led me to the kind of people you would expect: Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Those were the writers I fell into reading and really loved.

It took me a while to develop the skill to sit down with a book and to allow it to take me on a journey. With the vocabulary and reading issues I had when I was younger, I didn’t have the capacity to fully comprehend what I was reading, so I would just shut down.

What else was going on in your life? Were you acting out or involved in drugs?
Both of those things. I had a nihilistic view, and took a lot of risks and engaged in dangerous behavior. Then two things happened. The first thing was writing: learning to express myself creatively, and finding other creative people to engage with. That directed my energy toward something productive. The second thing was that my twenty-eight-year-old brother killed himself when I was eighteen. I saw that I was pointed toward a really self-destructive path. I saw that I had to get the fuck out of Arizona and change my life. I had to turn everything around.

I got into Arizona State University, but I was determined to get to New York, because it was the furthest place from where I was. I knew New York would allow the kind of creative exploration I was interested in. I wanted to write fiction.

Wow.
My mother was determined for us to have a different future than what she came from. We were first-generation college graduates, my brothers and sisters and I. She expected us to do something with our lives. I was good at working through the requirements of what was expected of me, but I floundered with traction and had to find my own way. That brought me on a path to publishing and directed me to make the decisions that I’ve made throughout my career.

How did you get to New York?
I applied myself and transferred to NYU as a junior in 1990. I was putting myself through school by working full-time, five nights a week, at Tower Records. It was hard to work until 2 AM, close up, and get to class at 8:30. I dropped out and decided that the best way to get what I wanted, which was then to be in publishing, was to delay my studies for a year and finish up at Hunter College. Hunter was a community of other students who were also putting themselves through school. There was no campus to lounge around in. You arrived and you got down to business and you left and you had the rest of your life, and that was very meaningful.

How old were you then?
I was twenty when I came to New York in 1990. And then in 1991, when I was still in school, I used my student loans to start a literary magazine that lasted a few issues.

Tell me about that magazine.
It was called Feed. The parenthetical was “Eat your critique,” which was just a preemptive fuck-you to anybody who had anything to say about it.

The idea was to encompass marginalized voices. There were some very cool queer-theory things happening at the time, and a lot of gay and ethnic and marginalized writers were finding traction. Cool stuff was happening at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. The Portable Lower East Side journal was being published. And Ira Silverberg had released High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings, which was mind-blowing for me.

At one point, I went to a poetry reading by David Trinidad at the New York Public Library. It was pouring rain, and Ira was there—he and David were partners at the time—and there was a writer, Rachel Zucker, who wound up being a student of Wayne Koestenbaum. David read to the three of us and then we had this four-person conversation. I told them that I was working on this literary journal, and Ira, in his infinite generosity, said, “You should come to my office and look at the CLMP,” which was a bound book of information about distributors and printers. Then he said, “If it’s useful, I can introduce you to people.” Ira was one of the first people I met in publishing and he really set me on a path. I’m very grateful for that.

Were you still playing in a band?
I had aspirations to be Ian Curtis, right? But I didn’t have a very good voice, and depressive music only goes so far. There was just no time for it, and there was no money in it.

I once auditioned for a band and lost my voice the next day. I thought it was a sign from the universe that it was the wrong thing to be doing. I was here to be in school, to be a writer, to be in publishing. So I redirected the energy towards curating a creative community of writers and friends.

I arrived as a young gay man in New York in the midst of the second half of the AIDS crisis. It is a very scary thing to suddenly have friends who were dying, and not know how to navigate a sexual world when you’re coming of age. But there were writers like Dale Peck, who was writing Martin and John. And a little bit later, Scott Heim was writing about this new queer coming-of-age.

After the High Risk anthology, Ira published a list of “High Risk” books and I bought and read every single one of those. They were voices of a very specific New York time, and they probably feel very dated now, but they were about rock and roll culture, drug culture, gay culture. Gary Indiana and David Trinidad and Dennis Cooper and June Jordan and Lynne Tillman—these were important voices at a very important moment for me. They crystallized what writing could be, and what books could be. They were seminal in the way that I viewed what was possible in fiction and nonfiction, and how one could express oneself.

These books became a part of you.
They did. Those writers became the rock stars for me. Those writers were marginalized, and that made me more interested in them. I felt that they were clearly saying something that needed to be said but weren’t given a larger platform to say it.  

Tell me about the literary scene.
The community of reading was different in the 1990s. When something was reviewed in the New York Times, a new writer debuted, or someone was on the cover of the Book Review, it became part of the cultural conversation. It was your responsibility to read that book and to be engaged in that conversation. That was what you did. You read the New Yorker for their listing of readings, and looked at the Village Voice for what was upcoming. You went to the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s and you saw those writers read and you were part of it in a way that just feels different now.

Alternative culture was different, too, because it wasn’t commoditized and it wasn’t gentrified. The East Village was rough. I was on Thirteenth Street between First and Second Avenues. Between Second and Third was a crackhouse and between First and A there were heroin dealers. Tompkins Square Park had been shut down. You also didn’t go much west of Eighth Avenue—that was also sort of scary. New York was grittier.

I browsed bookstores like I would browse indie record shops. I would browse through covers and see that an album was put out by 4AD, and buy it, or that it was from IRS Records, and think it would be amazing. I would see a book on the shelf from Grove, or Knopf, or FSG, and think that it must be important.

When did you realize that you could get a job in publishing and help bring those books into print?
In my senior year of college at Hunter, Ira introduced me to somebody who knew the assistant to Clare Ferraro, who was then at Ballantine Books. This was back when one publisher would publish a hardcover, and other publishers would buy the paperback rights. They would get these hardcovers in and evaluate whether they were viable as paperbacks. But there was such a volume that they needed readers.

I was paid thirty-five dollars per book. It would take me eight hours to read, and four hours to write a report on it. But I learned how to discuss literature in shorthand, and to identify what was viable and what was relevant. That was my first inkling that publishing is a business, and that there are decisions that go beyond art and have to integrate commerce. Sometimes it’s just art, and sometimes it’s just commerce, and that’s okay. But the beauty is in the intersection of both.

At that point, I was also waiting tables at a macrobiotic restaurant, so you can imagine how much money I was making. [Laughs.] A young woman kept coming in, and she would read galleys and the New York Times Book Review before it came out, and I thought that was astonishing. We would talk, and she eventually said, “I work at a company around the corner and we’re looking for an assistant. You should come in for an interview.”

That was Mary Anne Thompson’s scouting office. I was able to arrive at Mary Anne’s office with the reports I had written for Ballantine and a literary journal of writers I had scouted and published and say, “I’m sort of doing what you’re asking right now: I’m looking at contemporary writers and evaluating whether they can be published, and I’m also engaged in this conversation with a mainstream house.” Mary Anne hired me immediately.

Do you remember any of the books that you evaluated?
I wish I did. When you’re reading that kind of volume and you’re that tired, it all becomes a blur. I can’t claim to have recommended anything that was bought. I was probably getting the not terribly important books to decide whether they should be published. But it was a good exercise.

Would you talk a little more about how people inside the business determined whether those books were “terribly important” or not? Those decisions can seem pretty opaque to a writer.
At that time, when you were looking at a book for paperback publication, it was to see if you could grow the audience that had been established in the hardcover, blow out the amazing groundwork that had been laid, or find a book that had been overlooked and create a second life. That was when you could have a second life in paperback. Reinventing a book in paperback in the traditional way is not really possible anymore.

I don’t know why books were given to me, but I would assume there was a tier of projects that were considered very seriously because there was potential to make a lot of money off of them, and a lesser group of projects that were considered to see if any money could be made if they were published properly or differently. I’m assuming those were the books I was reading.

Clare Ferraro would never remember this, but I recall having a conversation or two with her and her assistant about why a book should be pulled from the stack for consideration.

What did you learn from those conversations?
That you have to trust your heart—that even if someone disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean you are wrong. That was something I carried forth into scouting. That when I recommended a book to my clients, it didn’t matter if they disagreed. My opinion was true to me and the value of what I saw in the book was real. It might not be for them at that moment, or might not be for them for that list, but it didn’t negate my response.

That was very valuable to bring as an agent as well: to believe passionately in something, to be able to sell it to an editor, but also to recognize that it is not a failure if something doesn’t sell or doesn’t meet with the response that you hoped for. It just might not be the right time for that book, or there might be other factors that we can’t even see that are interrupting the process of acquisition.

A lot of people start out in this business in a tentative, indecisive way. But deciding that something is good is the first step to making others agree that it is good. I wonder where your conviction came from.
I have always felt that I want an emotional response to a work, whether it is a work of fiction or nonfiction or music. If I’m receiving an emotional response to whatever that work is, then I know it’s true. It’s operating with the capacity for honesty and generosity. That’s trusting the feeling you get when you’re reading something.

When you’re a book scout, you are reading a huge volume of books—eight to ten a week—and reporting on them. You have to be very clear, very quickly, about what you spend your time reading, and what your client should pay attention to. Your client is receiving not only submissions in their own country, but also international submissions from the United States and the U.K. You have to give them clarity about what they should spend their time on.

I was a junior person when I started with Mary Anne, and I was tasked with scouting the small presses. I was trying to find gems to break out, so my job involved seeing SoHo Press publish Edwidge Danticat, and saying, “Everyone should buy this”—and then seeing that happen, even before Edwidge had representation.

This was all pre Internet, pre e-mail. We heard about books that were on submission in hard copy and then called around to editors and their assistants to convince them to make a copy of a book and to leave it in a messenger bag for us to pick up. There was a series of steps that had to happen for us to even get the book in hand. And then we had to evaluate the stack and write a report, and then copy those books for our clients, copy the reports, copy all the scouting magazine reviews, and copy all the other reviews that were happening. We would send these huge packages internationally that would take two days to put together. That was every week.

You have to hone that skill very quickly: to say this is something engaging and fresh, this is not; this is going to sell for a lot of money and you should pay attention to it, and this is going to sell more modestly but has potential to break out.

The scout is probably one of the most invisible roles in publishing to an outsider.
Scouting has transformed tremendously since I was involved in it. I suspect there are different ways of doing business now, but basically scouts are hired by an international publisher in the U.K. or in another country to be aware of all of the material that’s being submitted at that moment. They have an ear to the ground to find out what people’s reactions are, what’s selling, and how much it’s selling for, and they try to secure that material and read and report on it as quickly as possible. They’re in competition with other scouts working for other companies, and they want their international publisher to get there first.

Scouting gave me a great bird’s eye view of publishing. I dealt not only with a range of publishers, but with agents of every scale, from independent shops to the bigger agencies and the more tony lists. It was a tremendous amount of exposure, and I formed relationships that have remained for the last twenty years. Stephen Morrison was a book scout with Maria Campbell at the same time I was scouting. Reagan Arthur was an editor at Picador with George Witte.

I also had the opportunity to travel to the book fairs, mostly Frankfurt and London, and got to see the world publishing community in action. It geared me towards recognizing what has potential internationally and what might be a harder sell.

How much do you interact with scouts now that you’re an agent?
I have some friends who are scouts, so I talk to them. But having been a book scout and then having also sold foreign rights at McCormick & Williams when I was there, I am okay with relinquishing the responsibility of the international market to my colleagues and working with them. They are on top of the movement of those markets and they are really the experts at this point.

I am eager to be involved in the selling of my books internationally to those foreign markets, but I don’t regularly meet with scouts and talk about my books. It’s hard when you’re friends with somebody to have them give a reaction to one of your projects that you don’t want to hear. To hear a scout not respond in the way that I hope is harder than to hear editors tell me that they’re turning something down. 

So much of an agent’s job is hearing the word no and an editor’s justifications for it. Has the way you handle that kind of response evolved?
Oh, yes. As a new agent one can be devastated by hearing no. You’re putting yourself on the line with your taste, and you feel the responsibility of taking a writer on and that writer’s expectation for what you can deliver. It’s incredibly disappointing, but it can be devastating when you’re younger if you don’t understand that there are other factors at play. An editor can really love a book but not be able to push it through, and that is not a failure of you or of the project. It’s a moment in that publishing house.

We like to hear yes more than we like to hear no. But the other evolution as an agent is that the longer you do it, the more you understand what you can successfully sell. You gear yourself toward those projects that are going to make you money.

That’s interesting to hear from somebody who grew up in the punk scene.
The work I am attracted to is relevant and authentic and meaningful. It’s unexpected and creates a response. That can be something commercially minded, or it can be something strictly literary. But we are in a business and I have to earn my own keep, so I have to find projects that are going to get attention, find an audience, and sell.

I can’t sustain, and don’t want, a list of writers who are read by a very small group of people. It’s just not what I am interested in. I am interested in those voices exploring issues of identity and duality that can reach a broader audience, and sometimes they are more successful than others. My goal is to have books both in fiction and nonfiction that create dialogue and engagement as part of a larger cultural conversation. I don’t care about books that have no impact. Sometimes, though, I know that the impact is undetectable to me and to the writer, but the work is still reverberating because of its content or style.

I suppose it’s true, too, that even many popular books do not become a big part of mainstream culture.
That’s the problem of there not being as many readers as you would want. We have conversations within the publishing world about a book, and the larger cultural conversation happens externally. It’s always the hope that the book that we in publishing are all excited resonates externally in the buying world. 

How long did you remain a scout with Mary Anne Thompson?
From 1993 until the very end of 1999. I had a good run, but I wanted to do other things, even though I didn’t know what those other things were. I had read a piece in the New York Times about Kurt Andersen founding an online company that would report on different media, like music and television and film and book- and magazine publishing, and politics.

I was familiar with Kurt because I was a Spy magazine reader, and because he had written a novel that I had read as a scout. But I was naive enough not to understand who Kurt Andersen was. I wrote him and said, “Hey, you’re starting this new online venture and I’m interested in exploring what that might be.” I told him what I did as a book scout and suggested that I could do that for him digitally. He really responded to that—the idea that I could report on Inside.com what submissions people were reading and what people were buying in real time blew his mind. I was hired. So was Sara Nelson, and we had a blast.

We worked together for a year and a half: Michael Hirschorn, Kurt Andersen, Sara Nelson, Lorne Manly, David Carr, Craig Marks, Joe Hagan, Todd Pruzan, Jared Hohlt, Greg Lindsay, Kyle Pope, Steve Battaglio. These key people within their industries all came together for this one venture, and we were for a year the white-hot center of media coverage. But it was the Internet version 1.0, and we couldn’t figure out how to monetize it properly. We launched as Publisher’s Lunch was about to launch. We had a lot of ambition about what we could do, and we disrupted things for a period of time, and then it ended after September 11.

That was my transition step. My reporting on projects about writers and auctions caught the eye of Mark Reiter, who was an agent at IMG. When David McCormick left IMG to start Collins McCormick, IMG needed a literary agent and Mark offered an amazingly generous opportunity to cut my teeth.

IMG’s literary department was unwinding, but it was an opportunity. It was just Mark Reiter, Lisa Queen, and me. I had not thought about being an agent until Mark asked me.

Had you thought about writing?
I wrote a terrible novel. A really, really terrible novel. And no, it is not discoverable. It does not exist in any form digitally. It is buried deep within a drawer in a remote undisclosed location. I discovered very quickly that real writers are those who wake up and believe that they cannot do anything else but write. That they will not survive if they are not writing.

In a way, writers are people who find ways to organize their lives to support their writing.
Yes, I think that’s a terrific way to state that. And very few writers can support themselves completely independently from their writing. That’s because of the nature of payout on a book contract. Even a very lucrative book contract is paid off over the course of two years, and when you’re taking 40 percent of that money to pay an agent and pay taxes, you are working with a very small margin. I do have writers who are fortunate enough to be able to survive on their writing. But most writers are not able to do that.

I didn’t have that drive. While I was writing that novel, it was what I wanted to do, but when it was finished, I saw that I didn’t really have anything to say—or if I did have things to say, I didn’t have the language or experience to say them. The book felt false.

I was able to recognize that and put it aside. But that experience reinforced that I do have this creative instinct, and that I could cultivate those impulses and ideas with other people who were more skilled, and who could actually execute them on the page. I could bring my own creative perspective into shaping the work with the writer.

IMG was an opportunity to be paid a really decent salary, take a lot of risks, and make a lot of failures. I didn’t have a clear mentor or guide, so I learned through trial and error. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. That can only last so long. You have to get it together and step up.

What sort of mistakes did you make?
I took on things that I thought would be financially viable, but which I didn’t really care about. I thought they would sell and that I was employed to make money for the company, and to that end I should just find books that were a commodity. But I quickly learned that if your heart isn’t in a project it’s very difficult to sell it, and people recognize that. I learned that agenting was going to be much harder than I expected, and that I have to really love everything that I take on. I have to be determined to go to thirty-five people even if they keep saying no.

My first writer when I was at Inside.com, Joe Hagan, and I became friends. His wife, Samantha Hunt, was starting to publish in McSweeney’s, and she sent me a seventy-page prose poem called The Seas. And I thought: “This is brilliant! And I have no idea what to do with it!”

Through a very generous relationship she had with Dave Eggers, she worked that book into a novel. Sam was my first fiction client, and her book was the first novel that I sold. We had a lot of firsts together. She was in the first group of writers to be named “Five Under Thirty-Five” by the National Book Foundation. She was the first writer whose work I sold to the New Yorker. We’ve had a lot of nice milestones in our growing up together. 

And you just recently sold a big book by Joe Hagan—a biography of Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone.
Right! I have talked to Joe over the years about many, many projects. The great thing about Joe and our relationship is that we could talk out an idea and very quickly realize that he wasn’t interested in sustaining it over the course of writing the book. We have known each other for fourteen years. Patience is the story of my life.

How long were you at IMG?
A year and a half. And then the writing was on the wall. When [the founder of IMG] Mark McCormack died, it was clear that the company was going to go through a transition. Lisa Queen told me I should reach out to David McCormick. I met with him and Nina Collins, and they said, “You can be a part of our shop, but we don’t have any room, so you would have to work from home.” I did that for about a year, and then Collins McCormick moved to Bond Street and I had my own office.

Did you have a fire in your belly to prove yourself?
The fire in my belly was hunger for food. [Laughs.] I had to work my ass off to make a living. I was not paid a salary and every dime I made was self-generated. Once we moved to Bond Street, I took on foreign rights and that gave me a little bit of an income stream, but I was still unsalaried and trying to develop my list.

The dark secret about agenting is that it takes time to build a list and to get traction. It took three years to feel like I was on my feet. I started as an agent at thirty-two years old, so I already felt I was late to the game. But I had relationships with editors who were very patient with my early submissions, when they weren’t up to par or needed work. They would give my material a read because they wanted me to succeed, and would give generous feedback about what wasn’t working. I learned quickly, and by the time we moved to Bond Street, I had sold books for six figures. I was confident I was on track.

The beautiful thing about being in publishing is that it’s a little like gambling. You never know when your number is coming up and a book is going to hit. The Seas was a novel that was turned down by a lot of people, and MacAdam/Cage bought it for more money than they had spent on a novel previously. Sam got a tremendous amount of attention for that book, and we did well.

Whom did you represent early on?
It was one writer bringing me another. Samantha Hunt brought me Sarah Manguso. Then, because I was working with Sarah, Ed Park came in. People kept connecting me to their friends and my list grew. I took on Rosecrans Baldwin when I was at Collins McCormick.

Then, in 2005, there was a shift in the arrangement between David and Nina Collins and the company folded. It was right before the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was tricky. I went to Frankfurt to represent Amy Williams’s and David McCormick’s lists but I had no idea what I was going to return to. While I was in Frankfurt, I negotiated a deal over the phone, with David and Amy, who wanted to re-form the agency with me as a part of it.

I loved working with David and Amy. I learned so much from both of them, about instincts and business. When to talk, and when not to talk, in a negotiation. What to expect, what to demand. David and Amy were my real first mentors and the people I turned to for advice and for guidance.

One of the first novels that I sold was The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu. I read that in June 2005. I had a sense things were tricky within the agency. Dinaw and I were going back and forth on some revisions for the book, and I decided that it would be good to submit it around Frankfurt. By the time the company was re-forming, I had sold Dinaw’s book. I was standing on the corner of 23rd Street when I did it, because there was no office. I was working with David and Amy in Amy’s apartment, sharing her living room on the Upper West Side.

That set the tone, I felt, for whatever the next step was going to be for me. There were lots of great moments after that. But then at some point my list was becoming bigger, and the work I needed to do as the foreign-rights agent was not sustainable—I couldn’t effectively do both. And that was the moment that an opportunity presented itself at Janklow & Nesbit. My next step was to come here in 2010.

Tell me about making the transition from one place to another.
Moving from an agency like McCormick & Williams to an agency like Janklow was about servicing my clients in the best way possible. I was aware that as my clients received more and more attention and acclaim, they were getting eyed by other agents. I needed to be able to provide them with the kind of attention they deserved.

Not just from you, but institutionally?
Exactly. This company had a history of doing that, from a contracts department negotiating terms that I wouldn’t be able to negotiate independently to a general counsel who is anticipating the changing landscape way ahead of what I could possibly anticipate to a foreign rights department of four engaged, really integrated agents who intimately understand the market. 

Having the opportunity to work with Mort Janklow and Lynn Nesbit and Tina Bennett was really exciting. Tina became a very good friend and a terrific confidante. It was incredibly valuable just to run scenarios by her and to learn from her experience. And my list grew and exploded. That first year I think I sold twenty-three books.

What connects the work of the writers you represent?
There are a few loose associations. I’m interested in explorations of religious identity, probably because I came from a born-again Christian family. My brother converted our family during the seventies campus movement. We had Bible studies in our house and groups of teenagers came in to play the guitar and read Bible verses and converse. I was allowed to be a part of that, and I loved those times. Everything felt safe. It was, weirdly, a joyful part of my life, because it provided a sense of community and belonging. Children were valued in that community and I felt looked after. So, faith is a general theme of books that I like—and the subversive or not obvious ways that faith can be explored.

I’m also interested in sexuality. There is a blurring of binary gender roles, and a fluidity to gender and sexuality, that I’m interested in. There are people who explore that in their nonfiction work, like Maggie Nelson or Wayne Koestenbaum, whose beautiful collection of essays Farrar, Straus and Giroux published last year. He talks about how art and culture influence the man he became. But he looks through a queer eye at these things.

I’m interested in marginalized and underrepresented voices, whether that is related to ethnic or national or cultural identity. Dinaw Mengestu brings a perspective to what the immigrant idea is that subverts the idea of the immigrant narrative. Stuart Nadler’s first collection explored the relationship between fathers and sons and Jewish identity.

All of those books are having a larger cultural conversation and prompting responses, I hope, in readers. I look for that dialogue when I read something. If it doesn’t give me that response, I know it’s not for me. I see plenty of intellectually rigorous, smart, good, ambitious fiction that doesn’t have this kind of heart, and so it’s not for me.  

Would you give me an example of a book that spoke to you?
Ismet Prcic is a beautiful example of a writer with a punk rock ethos, cultural ambition, and a pure heart. I read a piece of his in McSweeney’s and contacted him. He sent me a 420-page manuscript—it may even have been longer. It was a rant. It was parts of a novel. It was a story of war and coming of age and immigration and fear and damage and fracture. I flipped out over it. It was so ambitious and so smart, and it was making me happy and sad and I had a pure emotional response to the book.

I sent that submission everywhere, and that book freaked people out. They didn’t know what to do with it. We got so close with so many people and it just kept getting killed at the top. Then Lauren Wein and Morgan Entrekin at Grove recognized that there was real brilliance in that voice and that the book ought to be published. They took a risk. In the end, Shards won or was shortlisted for a long list of prizes, and we made money on the book and established this tremendous voice.

There are incredible, smart young editors who have their ears to the culture and can recognize the future in the writing they see. It is devastating to me when a young editor loves something, but hears “no” from the boss. My career has been because people have taken risks with me and allowed me the room to make mistakes and to have successes. It is very aggravating to see how afraid of taking a risk the corporate machine can be.

You’re talking about building a literary list, not just turning a profit.
A literary list needs to get critical attention and awards and have a conversation with a community of readers. It should also sell, and we hope that it sells very well. But a literary list also attracts other writers to it. It is magnetic. A more commercial writer is attracted to the literary merit represented on that list, and that will make a publishing house more money. And of course there are those literary authors who break out in a very big way, whether on their first or second books or even three or four or five books later. The returns on taking those risks are evident. 

Who are the publishers who recognize the value you see in cultivating that kind of list?
They’re literary houses that you would assume that they are. Farrar, Strauss; Grove; Knopf; Houghton. They’re publishers who are saying that the market for a book might be modest, but they understand the importance of that book within the market. 

Of course, all publishers take risks. If we knew the secret to making a book successful we would be printing money. The fact is that the cultural landscape and the interests of readers are always shifting. Trying to forecast that is a risk. It’s arbitrary. But there is some skill to it. The skill is in recognizing individual and collective successes and failures. You know, realizing that you do not publish this book this kind of book very well, and therefore this kind of submission isn’t right for you, or that you have had luck breaking out this kind of writer so you’re willing to take a risk on someone similar. The worst kind of publishing, and the worst kind of agenting, occurs when you throw something against the wall just to see what happens.

How did you learn to negotiate?
My relationships with editors in submission and in negotiation are always pretty transparent. I think it’s just through experience that you learn how to negotiate. You learn to trust your instincts about whether you’re working toward closing a deal with the right components: the finances, the editor, the author. All of those pieces have to fit. You know when it doesn’t, and when it’s going to be a problem.  Sometimes there is no other option, but it just requires more work. 

From your vantage point as an agent, what makes a great editor?
When I’m selling a book to an editor, I want that editor to have an intuitive response to it. I want that editor to love the book as much as I do. I want editors to call me and tell me they stayed up all night, or they freaked out, or they have been hand-selling the book in-house. Then I know they are not going to give up later on when things get hard. Because things are going to get hard! The book is going to be up against another book in-house that is possibly going to be getting more attention. Or the book didn’t get the review we hoped for, or the marketing money we want. Or the booksellers aren’t responding, or we’re having trouble getting blurbs.

My most valuable relationships with editors are ones in which I’m working very intimately with them through every step of the process through publication and beyond, to figure out ways for the material to move forward and get the attention it deserves. I remind them that they have a responsibility to the writer. I remind them when things aren’t going appropriately. I remind them that they need to be investing more money and remind them that they need to be doing more for publicity and remind them that their edits are overdue.

My job is to run interference between the editor and the author on difficult conversations that the author can’t have. One of my best skills is that I am able to back into difficult conversations very easily, and have those conversations end in a result that is beneficial to my writer. My hope is always that I’m working with an editor who understands that we need to be collaborative and that we need to figure out together how to make this work.

What are some essential components to breaking a book out?
It’s essential to understand how to talk about the book so that everyone is on the same page when they’re pitching it. How I pitch the book to the editor comes from my discussions about the book with the author. I have tried to articulate their intent as clearly as possible. Then that editor needs to take that information and have a response to the material and articulate that same intent to their colleagues. Once the book is acquired, it’s essential to make sure that we’re on the same page regarding what’s said to the sales force, what the sales force says to the booksellers, what the booksellers say to the customers, what the publicity department says to reviewers, and what the marketing department puts up for public consumption. You must figure out how to position the book apart from other titles.

There are many things that we do, and they’re all part of the repertoire, but everyone has to be doing them. Not every book is going to have the same response, and attention for a book isn’t going to manifest in the same way. Sometimes it’s just somebody hustling and getting a book out there. 

What can writers do to make sure they get the best shot at success?
It is important for a writer to be a part of a literary community. A writer needs to read and buy books and attend readings and support fellow writers. It’s very difficult to engage others in supporting that writer’s work if that’s not happening. Sometimes it is the responsibility of the agent and editor to bring that writer into a community.

I don’t believe that Twitter sells books. But readers need and want to feel connected to a writer, so it is the writer’s responsibility to learn how to do that—whether it’s having a Facebook page or packing books in the back of a car and setting up readings if a publisher can’t pay for a book tour. Going to festivals, writing for online magazines, publishing work in journals.

Have you ever worked with somebody who was originally self-published?
I have not. I don’t know if I have a good viewpoint on self-publishing. I know there are success stories, but it just seems like a very hard road. It’s already very difficult for readers to discover new writers. I haven’t seen a road map for self-publishing success for the kind of writers that I work with.

I wanted to ask you about genre fiction. You represent some novels with dystopian, sci-fi, and fantasy elements.
Just as I was attracted to reading marginalized texts in my formative years, I was interested in books that experimented with form. A lot of time that meant science fiction or fantasy or comic books. I love the literary interpretation of those genres. Then, having Sam Hunt as one of my first writers—somebody who plays with form and time and reality—really laid the groundwork for attracting writers like Lucy Corin and Ramona Ausubel and Grace Krilanovitch. Now Josh Weil is playing with dystopian concepts in his new novel.

I love people pushing outside of what is typical. On the other end of the spectrum, I also love things really rooted in reality that are very clearly sincere and honest and generous, which was why Josh Weil’s novellas first blew me away. His characters were isolated men longing for connection, and the emotional components of those individual novellas were so strong that it was undeniable.

I’m not a genre reader, so I’m not one going for strictly sci-fi. I respond to the books that can cross over. Writers who play with form broaden their audience in a way, because they can hit a literary audience and also a genre audience. A lot of times genre allows you to get at the root of something through a narrative engine that couldn’t exist in a typical literary novel.

It can be a different way to show what’s actually happening in our world.
Exactly. It’s another prism, a spiky piece of mirror that’s reflecting the narrative in a different way. I love that.

What are the other things in the culture that your passionate about?
I love documentaries because I get immersed in a world very quickly and can digest it and feel like I’ve had an experience. As I get older, I get more interested in other cultural touchstones, whether that’s opera or experimental music or art or dance. I devour magazines all the time. I like media and stimulation and creativity. Television, too, but I don’t have shows I religiously watch. I would prefer to see a movie. I think the last real series I committed to was Battlestar Galactica. I find the commitment of time difficult.

That’s interesting. In another interview, the agent David Gernert noted that the Netflix series House of Cards called its episodes “chapters.” That made me wonder if soon people will feel the same sense of accomplishment after watching ten hours of television that I feel after reading a literary novel.
There is a sense of accomplishment. The requirement of sitting down and reading a novel is that the story is propelling you forward, and the same is true of sitting down to binge-watch a series. Both are narratively driven impulses, and there is probably an overlap. But I don’t sit down and read a novel from start to finish, in the same way I don’t sit down and binge-watch Orphan Black. I do most of my pleasure reading on the subway to and from work. A half hour a day, five days a week—it takes a long time to get through books. 

It must be every writer’s aspiration to find out that the New Yorker wants to publish her work. Can you take me through what it’s like to submit a story to a magazine like that?
I submit to the top-tier journals for my clients: the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope, Harper’s, the obvious places. I do this almost exclusively for fiction. I have relationships with those editors. I know what they are looking for, and I know that when I submit something, it’s going to be read and that I’m going to get a response. But if each client has a finite amount of time with me, it’s not a great use of our time together for me to submit to smaller magazines and journals. I depend on my writers to handle that on their own.