May 14, 2026 On Books The Literary Agent’s Invisible Hand: Laura B. McGrath on Middlemen By Rosa Lyster The literary agent is a mysterious and camera-shy creature, rustling busily in the literary undergrowth, her tracks visible only to those familiar with the species and its habits. If we were in the mood to further pursue this metaphor, we might compare her to one of those small but weirdly powerful wild cats one might glimpse in an episode of Planet Earth, only about knee-high but capable of causing great scurrying and alarm merely by swishing her tail. As Laura McGrath, a literary historian, argues in Middlemen, her history of the profession, “no figure has been more significant, and yet more invisible, in American literature than the literary agent.” Take, for example, the agent Candida Donadio, a legendary figure with impeccable taste whose regular table at the Italian Pavilion restaurant in New York was “the undisputed central node in the network of the U.S. publishing industry” in the sixties. One of her clients was Thomas Pynchon, whose first novel, V, Donadio had helped to publish in 1963. A few years later, Pynchon’s trusted editor was moving to a new publishing house, and Donadio persuaded him to “throw something together” in order to fulfill his contract and follow his editor to Viking. The product of Donadio’s prompting was The Crying of Lot 49, today considered a masterpiece of postmodernism. Agents, McGrath suggests, are the first and most consequential gatekeepers in contemporary publishing. Though the agent’s hand is rarely visible outside a book’s acknowledgments section, agents often play a decisive role in developing a manuscript long before an editor acquires the book. This can mean anything from editing “at the 30,000-foot level, thinking with their client about positioning their book in the market” to close line editing. “We all edit,” says one anonymous agent interviewed in Middlemen. “We think about the book not just as a piece of art … but also how it will be most appealing to the audience it’s intended for.” All of this will be obvious to anyone who works in the publishing industry, but one strength of McGrath’s book is that she comes to the subject as an unjaundiced outsider. A professor of English literature who has never worked in publishing, McGrath describes the mechanisms and eccentricities of the industry with a clarity and curiosity that insiders don’t necessarily have. Over email, McGrath and I discussed the importance of the debut novel, the relationships between agents, editors, and clients, and the almost mystical significance of the publishing lunch. INTERVIEWER You call agents the unacknowledged legislators of the literary field—what do you mean by that, and how did you come to see them that way? LAURA B. MCGRATH Agents have so much influence over American literature, and yet they’re virtually invisible outside of a few square blocks of Manhattan or a few corners of the literary internet. Agents decide who gets access to the literary marketplace and who doesn’t, by virtue of their decisions about who to represent. They control the way books get published, by determining which editors to pitch and how to position a project and how best to advocate on their writer’s behalf. They educate writers about the ins-and-outs of the publishing industry and help writers decode, and sometimes appease, the market. Because agents serve as mediators between the author, on the one hand, and the publisher, on the other, they embody the contradictions of contemporary publishing. It’s not either art or commerce with agents—it’s always both. INTERVIEWER You say that before you started working on this book, you knew agents only by their stereotypes. What changed your view? MCGRATH I imagined literary agents were like Looney Tunes characters, walking around with dollar signs for eyes. I assumed that they were interested only in money. I’d been influenced by the Hollywood agents I’d met—charming but also sleazy, doing a lot of coke. But the days of making a fortune in publishing are past. I didn’t have a good sense of the financial realities of the industry. If they only cared about making money, they would’ve gone to work at Goldman Sachs. Read More
May 12, 2026 On Books Sheila Heti on Andrés Felipe Solano’s Gloria By Sheila Heti I love a novel that tells you why it was written, a novel that has a bit of backstage to it. It’s like sitting at the edge of a row of theater seats, in a cheap seat that reveals an actor standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I hate that in the theater, but I love it in a book. Gloria, written by the Colombian novelist and journalist Andrés Felipe Solano, and elegantly translated by Will Vanderhyden, is that kind of novel. It is the story of one long night in the seventies, during a brief spell when the author’s mother lived in New York. She was twenty. It was before her marriage to his father, and before Solano was born. But the story of a young woman (not yet a mother) becomes, through a series of very delicate, very sparingly placed interruptions in the telling, also the story of a son imagining the life of a mother he can never meet. He lingers in the shadows, brings her to life, withdraws, and then returns again in brief passages, or stray sentences, offering little hopes, a bit of wonder, tiny narrative gifts, as if from a god in the sky. Read More
May 4, 2026 On Books Wolfgang Koeppen’s Structural Musicality By Joshua Cohen © Suhrkamp Verlag, courtesy of New Directions. Wolfgang Koeppen, the maestro dirigent of the post-Nazi German-language novel, was born in the cold old Prussian port of Greifswald in 1906, a bastard, as they used to be called, the out-of-wedlock son of a seamstress who moonlit as a theater prompter and an ophthalmologist father, who dabbled in winter sports and competitive ballooning and refused most contact. Mother and son moved around a lot, from Koeppen’s grandmother’s house to the house of his mother’s stepsister. In 1912, the year Death in Venice (not Death in Rome) was published, the pair settled in Ortelsburg, Masuria, which is now the Polish city of Szczytno, where Koeppen attended Realschule. Mother and son fled west with World War I, heading along the Baltic coast until returning to Greifswald, where Koeppen made efforts to resume his schooling before dropping out totally and working as a deliverer for a bookstore, a cook, a ship’s cook, an assembler in factories, a theater usher, a movie theater usher, a projectionist, an ice maker and deliverer, and a tester of light bulbs. Each of these occupations, it might be argued, is a metaphor for “novelist”: delivering the books, preparing nourishment, et cetera. They certainly provided what in German industrial circles is called “material.” Read More
March 11, 2026 On Books Bolaño’s Heresy: On Distant Star By Ben Lerner Photograph by Kgbo, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Are there any actual poems in Distant Star? “The three poems were short; all less than ten lines,” Arturo B., our poet-narrator, says of the early verse of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, the mysterious autodidact who one day appears, as if from nowhere, in the poetry workshop Arturo attends. “One described a landscape: trees, a dirt road, a house in the distance, wooden fences, hills, clouds.” No part of the poem is quoted; we’re given none of the text or texture. According to Marta, another young poet in their orbit, these weren’t Ruiz-Tagle’s “real poems” anyway; even the poems withheld from us are only stand-ins. Where, then, in Distant Star, are the “real poems”? One fateful night soon after Pinochet seizes power, the Garmendia sisters—“identical twins and the undisputed stars of the poetry workshop”—read their poems to Ruiz-Tagle (right before he’s revealed to be the murderous aviator Carlos Wieder), but they don’t read them to us; we’re just told their poems are “wonderful.” They “often described painters lost in the wilds of southern Chile, embarking on hopelessly ambitious works and hopelessly in love.” (The poems we don’t see are about impossible works of art.) Again and again, poems are characterized in a way that only makes them more opaque: “the opening lines were worthy of Isidore Isou, while the unexpected ending would not have been out of place in a Chilean folk song,” or “a narrative poem, which … reminded me of John Cage’s poetic diary spliced with lines that sounded like Julián del Casal or Magallanes Moure translated into French by a Japanese psychotic,” and so on. Read More
March 3, 2026 On Books Main Character Syndrome in Wartime By Julian Castronovo Kamala Harris shares a statement to reporters following the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs parade before boarding Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrews, Wednesday, February 14, 2024, in Maryland. Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson. The White House, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. I have begun to suspect that I am not the main character. I spend my days watching history unfold on the screen of my phone. History, of course, is a story: a narrative sequence of causes and effects. Right now it seems to be a story about intolerable violence, something from which I am, I know, profoundly remote insofar as I continue to tolerate it. This is not very protagonistic of me. Main characters, surely, do not feel the world to be distant and bewildering in its senseless horror. They do not feel the story of history to be totally disconnected from their personal, concurrent experience of being alive. Main characters, after all, drive the plot. Conveniently, real-life main characters love to write about themselves, so there’s plenty of material from which I might learn how to achieve main character status myself. Material, for example, like George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries and 107 Days, two recently published diaristic texts. Both of these meticulous nonfictional accounts of living through history are said to be very novelistic. One is “remarkably vivid and suffused with novelistic detail” such that its author “emerges as an unforgettable, three-dimensional character.” The other, we’re told, “reads like a suspense novel” in that it has “a novelistic feel” and “the pace of a page-turning novel.” It would seem that these writers—George Templeton Strong and Kamala Harris, respectively—are main characters because their realities were, even during times of crisis and dissolution, like books. Things, in other words, make sense when you’re a protagonist because you live inside a novel. The present operates with a narrative purpose and a unifying logic by which the lives and actions of individuals are bound together and to the world at large such that it is possible, as any main character innately knows, to do something important. Read More
November 14, 2025 On Books Soraya Antonius’s Portrait of a Lost Palestine By Selma Dabbagh A Palestinian woman from Jerusalem, 1938, via Wikimedia Commons. Photograph by John David, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The Lord, Soraya Antonius’s vivid chronicle of Palestinian life before the Nakba of 1948, is a novel that moves fast, driven by fury and passion. Tales are told within tales; there are jump cuts and flashbacks. Antonius’s eye is as keen as her wit. The narrator of the book, which was first published in 1986, is an unnamed woman journalist in the Lebanon of the early eighties. She is covering current events—the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres are obliquely referred to at one point—but she also takes an interest in the region’s past, and is particularly curious to find out about a young man named Tareq, who grew up under the British Mandate and played a significant role in the 1936–1939 Palestinian uprising against colonial rule. Her curiosity leads her to the elderly Miss Alice, an Englishwoman who was Tareq’s teacher in a mission school founded by her father at the start of the twentieth century. Tareq, Miss Alice tells the narrator, was a boy of humble background and an undistinguished student, who, however, possessed uncanny powers that Miss Alice can’t really account for. How he put those powers to use will be the novel’s story. Read More