I
F YOU want to learn about the busi-
ness of books, it helps to be hungry.
Not only hungry to learn, as the
expression goes, but also just plain
hungry, literally—it helps to have an
appetite. Or an expense account. Ideally
both. Because no matter how much the
world of publishing has changed over
the past hundred years—and, boy, has
it changed since the days of Blanche
Knopf, Horace Liveright, and Bennett
Cerf—some things remain the same. It
is still a business of relationships; it still
relies on the professional connections
among authors and agents and editors
and the mighty web of alliances that
help bring a work of literature out of
the mind of the writer and onto readers’
screens and shelves. And those rela-
tionships are often sparked, deepened,
and sustained during that still-sacred
rite: the publishing lunch.
In the two decades I’ve worked at this
magazine, I’ve had the pleasure of eating
lunch with a small crowd of publishing
professionals—mostly book editors and
publicists, the majority of whom want
to tell me more about a new book they
have coming out, or an exciting debut
author I may not have heard about and
who would be perfect for a little extra
coverage. I’ve always considered it one
of the perks of my job to receive such
invitations, because without exception
they have come from kind, passionate,
smart people—in short, ideal lunch
companions. But until recently rela-
tively few have been agents. There was
a lovely meal in Chicago with agents
Jeff Kleinman and Renée Zuckerbrot.
And last fall, quite out of the blue, the
legendary agent Al Zuckerman, founder
of Writers House and agent to Ken Fol-
lett, Michael Lewis, Olivia Goldsmith,
Nora Roberts, and Stephen Hawk-
ing, invited me to lunch at the Belgian
Beer Café, which is now closed but had
clearly offered Zuckerman, whose of-
fice is a short stroll away, in Manhattan’s
Flatiron District, years of sustenance.
Those lunches notwithstanding, I have
not had as many opportunities as I’d like
to sit down with agents and talk about
the important work they do.
“According to the hallowed tradition
of book publishing, it was necessary to
have lunch with all these people, and
many more, as often as possible,” wrote
Michael Korda, the former editor in
chief of Simon & Schuster, in his book
Another Life: A Memoir of Other People
(Random House, 1999), a treasury of
anecdotes about the publishing indus-
try in the mid-twentieth century. He
goes on to paint a picture of publishing
that has changed little, except perhaps
the size of editors’ expense accounts:
For editors, in fact, having lunch
is regarded as a positive, income-
generating, aggressive act, and a
certain suspicion is extended toward
those few who can be found eating a
sandwich at their desk more than once
or twice a week. Publishers have been
known to roam through the editorial
department at lunchtime to catch edi-
tors who are ‘not doing their job’ in
the act of unwrapping a tuna sandwich
from the nearest deli. A large expense
account is very often perceived as
proof of ambition and hard work....
Nobody has ever done a poll to see
whether the agents—the putative ben-
eficiaries of this largesse—really want
to be taken out to lunch every day of
the workweek. It is simply one of the
basic assumptions of book publishing
that he or she who lunches with the
most agents gets the most books.
To be honest, most afternoons I can
be found in my office, staring over a sad
desk lunch and trying to clear a heavy
plate of work, not food. Meanwhile I
suspect New York publishing’s best and
brightest are rushing off to lunch res-
ervations at fancy restaurants all over
Manhattan, laying the groundwork
for book deals and discussing plans for
book launches and, yes, gossiping about
titles the average reader won’t discover
for many months or, more likely, years.
To writers this world can seem opaque,
removed from the solitary task of writ-
ing. So I figured it was time to get out
of the office. It was time to learn more
about how agents find writers and turn
them into authors, to collect some hon-
est advice for those who are looking for,
or working with, an agent. And what
better place to do that than in the
agent’s native habitat: loud Manhattan
restaurants.
The plan was simple: In five days
invite five agents to lunch. (What did
Robert Burns write about the best-laid
plans of mice and men?) I asked each
of them to pick a restaurant, ideally
one they frequented with book editors
and/or clients, and in exchange for a few
hours of their valuable time, I’d pick up
the check. Not surprising, all five chose
restaurants in Manhattan—still the
undisputed center of commercial book
publishing—but thankfully not all were
located in Midtown, that area between
34th and 59th Streets, where the con-
crete canyons can start to feel stifling
to even the most urbane of urbanites.
I had previously met only two of
the five agents I chose for this project.
I was introduced to Anjali Singh of
Pande Literary at a writers conference a
couple years ago, and Emily Forland of
Brandt & Hochman appeared in a cover
feature, “The Game Changers,” in the
July/August 2011 issue of this magazine.
But for the most part, I didn’t know
these agents, at least not well. I’d never
met Julia Kardon of HSG Agency, Kent
Wolf of the Friedrich Agency, or Marya
Spence of Janklow & Nesbit Associates.
I’d simply heard their names in casual
conversation with editors and other
agents, in the way one hears names
when one talks about who is publish-
ing what, when, and with whom.
All five of the agents represent au-
thors whose recent publishing stories I
suspected would illuminate certain as-
pects of the business—some positive,
others maybe less so. I had no specific
agenda for the conversations beyond
eating some decent food and learning as
much as I could about agents as people,
their incentives for doing what they do,
and how they see their role in the grand,
flawed, beautiful experiment that is
twenty-first-century book publishing.
special section ▪ LITERARY AGENTS
JULY AUGUST 2019 50
KEVIN LARIMER is the editor in chief of
Poets & Writers, Inc.
