B
EN George’s arrival in big publishing was more of a
vault than a climb, and it surprised him as much as
anybody. “Being a New York editor,” he says, “was
never something I was aiming toward.” Remarkably,
what brought George’s editorial acumen to the atten-
tion of Manhattan publishers was a book with a small
initial print run and no commercial hook—a singularly unpresum-
ing volume of short stories by a seventy-four-year-old self-professed
“amateur.” That author was Edith Pearlman, and the book was a col-
lection of new and previously published stories titled Binocular Vision
(2011), which George had solicited and edited as the inaugural title
for Lookout Books, the tiny imprint he cofounded while on faculty
at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington.
Pearlman was relatively unknown, but she had been writing for
forty years and since the 1990s had quietly published three story
collections with small presses. Her work was cherished by a coterie
of writers who looked to her as an unheralded master. Among them
was Ann Patchett, who, in an introduction for Binocular Vision,
called Pearlman a national treasure on par with John Updike and
Alice Munro. That, says George, “was like catnip for a certain kind
of literary reader: ‘What? A seventy-four-year-old master I’ve never
heard of being published by a small press I’ve never heard of?’”
Binocular Vision landed on the cover of the January 4, 2011, edi-
tion of the New York Times Book Review, a triumph in itself for a
writer whose readership, until then, had numbered in the hundreds.
But then Binocular Vision went on to collect the National Book
Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the PEN/Malamud Award for
Excellence in the Short Story, and was named a finalist for the
National Book Award, the Story Prize, and the Los Angeles Times
Book Prize.
The year after Binocular Vision appeared, George was wooed
from Wilmington to New York City to accept a position with
Viking Penguin, where he worked with president and publisher
Kathryn Court on a list that included new titles by Chris Abani and
Richard Rodriguez. Shortly thereafter Reagan Arthur, publisher of
Little, Brown, hired George to develop his own list for the storied
imprint, a list that now includes writers such as Leslie Jamison,
Adam Haslett, Rick Bass, David Bezmozgis, Lauren Slater, James
Hannaham, and Luis Alberto Urrea.SEPT OCT 2019 72Agents & Editors
AGENTS & EDITORS
BEN GEORGE
Having come up in the world
of literary magazines and
small presses, Ben George,
who is now a senior editor at
Little, Brown and works with
some of the biggest names in
literary fiction and nonfiction,
talks about the author-editor
relationship, the plight of the
midlist writer, and the art of
revision.
BY M. ALLEN CUNNINGHAM • PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY GALE