special section ▪ LITERARY AGENTS51 POETS & WRITERS^B
EST-LAID plans indeed. The
first interview I am able to
set up takes place not over
lunch, as I had planned, but
rather over breakfast because Anjali
Singh’s schedule proves more crowded
than a Times Square subway
platform, which I thankfully
avoid on my way to Kirsh
Bakery & Kitchen on the
Upper West Side. A few days
earlier Anjali returned from
the Belize Writers’ Confer-
ence, where she spent a week
meeting with about a dozen
writers from all over the
United States who had trav-
eled to the tropical locale to
talk with agents about their
writing projects. She came
home to a full house: She
has two children, ages ten
and seven; her husband is a
professor of Chinese history
at Lehman College in the
Bronx. Tomorrow she’ll travel
to Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania,
where she is scheduled to give
a Q&A and talk with students
in the undergraduate writ-
ing program at Susquehanna
University. Such is the busy
schedule of a literary agent.
So, yes, breakfast it is.
Anjali spends the first ten
minutes of our time together
recounting in remarkable
detail the writers she met inBelize, all of them women—a retired
fire chief from California; a police de-
tective from Omaha; a speech patholo-
gist from Reno, Nevada—and the way
she speaks about these writers, with
excitement and genuine interest in not
only their writing, but also their per-
sonal and professional lives, provides
a caffeine-fueled preview of what’s
to come in our conversation. While
most people would rhapsodize about
the Caribbean shoreline or the daily
yoga sessions that I will later learn
were part of the conference schedule,
Anjali’s takeaways are the lives of writ-
ers whose paths she feels fortunate to
have crossed. “It was a beautiful beach
and everything, but the best part was
the writers I met,” she says. “It was
amazing. It was so good for my soul.”
Anjali’s career in publishing started
in 1996 when she took a job as a literaryscout with Mary Anne Thompson
Associates, having graduated from
Brown University with a degree in
English and American literature.
I’ve always been curious about liter-
ary scouts, or book scouts as they
are sometimes called, and wanted to
know more about what these “spies of
the literary world,” as Anjali jokingly
calls them, actually do. “So you’re basi-
cally a consultant,” she offers helpfully.
“You get paid a monthly retainer by
your clients, and your clients are for-
eign publishers. But you only work for
one per country because otherwise it
would be a conflict of interest. When
I first started, of course, there was no
Publishers Marketplace or Deal of the
Day or any of that. It was all on the
ground. Mary Anne would talk to her
editor friends...and then, officially, I
would talk to agents. I covered certain
agencies, and I would call
them and find out what was
going on and what books had
sold to whom for how much.
We would do a report every
Friday, like a deal memo, and
it would say, ‘XXXXX pub-
lisher, you should pay atten-
tion to this.’ So the idea is to
help them get ahead of their
competitors, or to be on par
with their competitors, to get
books early. It’s to be their
eyes and ears in the New York
publishing world.”
Anjali tells me that Mary
Anne Thompson had exclu-
sive contracts with foreign
publishers such as Macmillan
in the U.K., Droemer Knaur
in Germany, and Kadokawa
Shoten in Japan. Nowadays,
with so much information
available online, the scout’s
job is to filter that informa-
tion and tell the clients what
to pay attention to and what
to disregard, “because you
can’t possibly pay attention
to everything,” she says.
In some ways it was the
ideal first job in publishing,Monday
8 : 4 5 AM
Kirsh Bakery & Kitchen
551 Amsterdam Avenue,
near West 87th Street▪ Two eggs, scrambled; potatoes;
toast; side of lox
▪ French toast with mascarpone
cream and mixed berry jam
▪ Three caffe latteschuck wooldridge Anjali Singh of Ayesha Pande Literary.