working for five years in a small office,
learning about the business alongside
colleagues who would also go on to
successful agenting careers, including
PJ Mark, now an agent at Janklow &
Nesbit; Cecile Barendsma, who has her
own agency in Brooklyn; and Susan
Hobson, director of international
rights at McCormick Literary. “What
it allowed me was an incredible data-
base of information about publishing,”
Anjali says.
But this information couldn’t have
prepared her for the vagaries of the
next dozen or so years, during which
she moved from one house to the
next—not uncommon for editors com-
ing up in the business. First she was an
editor at Vintage, the paperback im-
print of Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group, and she very quickly made a
name for herself by discovering Perse-
polis, the best-selling graphic mem-
oir by Marjane Satrapi, on a shelf at
a friend’s apartment in France, where
the book was originally published.
Anjali brought it to the United States,
and it was published to great acclaim by
Pantheon, another Knopf Doubleday
imprint known for publishing graphic
classics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus
and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the
Smartest Kid on Earth.
Anjali worked at Vintage for four
years, buying paperback rights to
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut
novel, Purple Hibiscus, and working on
her second, Half of a Yellow Sun, be-
fore leaving to go to Houghton Miff-
lin (later Houghton Mifflin Harcourt),
hired as senior editor by vice president
and publisher Janet Silver. Silver was
later let go, about a year before Anjali
herself was laid off, during the finan-
cial crisis of 2008, just after Anjali’s
first child was born. Two years later,
Jonathan Karp hired Anjali as senior
editor at Simon & Schuster, but she re-
mained there for only two years before
she was laid off during a restructur-
ing in which Free Press, an imprint of
Simon & Schuster, was folded into the
company’s flagship imprint.
Her next stop was Other Press, an
independent publisher of literary fiction
and nonfiction founded by Judith Gure-
wich and Michael Moskowitz, where
Anjali was editorial director. Although
her stay at Other Press was relatively
short—only sixteen months—it was
a refreshing change after her years in
the corporate environments of Vintage,
Houghton Mifflin, and Simon & Schus-
ter. At Other Press, she says, “I just got
to feel a sense of stability again, and a
sense of self-worth, I guess. I got to be
much more connected to what made me
care about books and publishing.”
Shortly thereafter her husband got
tenure—and the time and financial
stability, not to mention health insur-
ance, that comes with it—so she made
the switch to agenting. She’s been at
Pande Literary for three and a half
years.
Which is where Arif Anwar and
his debut novel, The Storm, enter the
conversation. Before Anjali became an
agent, Arif had queried Ayesha Pande,
head of the eponymous agency, with
the manuscript of a novel that told a
half century of Bangladeshi history
through the braided stories of charac-
ters who live through a storm similar
to the 1970 Bhola cyclone, in which a
half million people in East Pakistan
and India’s West Bengal died over-
night. Ayesha had offered representa-
tion, but Arif went with another agent
who had offered her services first.
Two years later, Anjali was now an
agent and Arif was looking for a little
more hands-on attention, so he asked
again whether Ayesha was interested
in representing him. Ayesha and Anjali
both read his manuscript, compared
notes, and decided that they would
take him on, with Anjali assigned to do
the editorial work necessary to prepare
the novel for submission.
“One of the things that I found re-
ally moving was that he depicts a fish-
ing community in Bangladesh,” Anjali
says about Arif, who was born in Chit-
tagong, a port city on the southeastern
coast of Bangladesh, and now lives
in Toronto. “There have been other
books, but not that much South Asianliterature focuses on the underclass—
those people who aren’t visible. He just
immediately brought me into this world
in a very visceral way. It’s really ambi-
tious, and I admire that ambition. He’s
also writing outside of his experiences,
writing from the perspective of a Brit-
ish nurse in the 1940s, and a Japanese
fighter pilot. I admire the scope of that
v ision.”
Anjali worked with Arif for roughly
six months, cutting two whole narrative
threads from the manuscript and weav-
ing together the remaining five. Finally
it was ready to be submitted to editors.
Because Arif lives in Toronto, Anjali
says, it made sense to have a separate
Canadian publisher. After an auction in-
volving three excited editors—notable,
given the relatively small Canadian
market—the book went to Iris Tu-
pholme at HarperCollins Canada.
Reactions to submissions in the
United States were less encouraging.
“We got a lot of passes, which was dev-
astating,” Anjali says. “A lot of passes,
including from someone who really
liked the book but after talking about it
with her publisher was like, ‘We can’t do
this because we have another book with
a Bangladeshi character.’ The author
wasn’t Bangladeshi, but it was about a
Bangladeshi woman.”
Anecdotes like this one, that throw
into relief the cold reality of publish-
ing as a subjective business that is not
always all about the writing, have clearly
made Anjali more determined than ever
to use her role as an agent to fight for
greater access on behalf of her authors.
“A hunger to see more stories, to tell
different stories in different places
in the world,” she says about her own
agenda. “A hunger for representation
across class, which I think literary fic-
tion doesn’t always do that well. All of
that I’m bringing to the table.”
Eventually Rakesh Satyal of Atria
Books, an imprint of Simon & Schus-
ter, offered a deal in the United States,
and Arif was off to the races. About
four months ahead of publication—
HarperCollins Canada scheduled it
for March 2018, Atria set a May 2018special section ▪ LITERARY AGENTSJULY AUGUST 2019 52