special section ▪ LITERARY AGENTSJULY AUGUST 2019 54in the small crowd outside (I’m not late),
and we duck inside and are quickly ush-
ered to our booth.
Originally from San Antonio, Texas,
Emily moved to New York City to at-
tend the M FA program in poetry at
Sarah Lawrence College. Through
a family friend (one of her father’s
friends was married to Judith Rossner,
author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar), she
lucked out on an invitation to have din-
ner with Rossner’s literary agent, the
much-beloved Wendy Weil. Nothing
momentous happened at the dinner,
but a couple of weeks later, she ran
into Wendy on the subway. “She was
coming from her weekly tennis game,
and she looked like Annie Hall, and in-
stead of being timid and hiding behind
my New Yorker, which might have been
what I normally did, I just went over
and said hi. And we rode together.” In
other words, it was one of those incred-
ibly fortuitous moments when your
life is forever altered
by happenstance and a
simple decision—like
screwing up your cour-
age and saying hi to a
famous literary agent
who you happened to
see in the crowd.
Emily was offered
a summer internship
at the Wendy Weil
A g e n c y — t h e s a m e
summer, coincidently,
that Wendy was in-
terviewed for a profile
that appeared in the
September/October
1997 issue of this
magazine—and contin-
ued on at the agency as
an assistant and, even-
tually, as a full agent,
up until when Wendy
died suddenly, in Sep-
tember 2012. Emily
then moved to Brandt
& Hochman and rep-
resents authors such
as Jane Alison, Flynn
Berry, Katharine Dion,
Carrie Fountain, Kirk Lynn, Elizabeth
McKenzie, and Dominic Smith.
As the waiter brings us our whitefish
croquettes, however, the author we are
talking about is Nathan Hill, whose
debut novel, The Nix, was the talk
of the town—and, more important,
bookstores—in 2016, when it was pub-
lished by Knopf and landed on all the
big year-end lists (the New York Times,
Entertainment Weekly, the Washington
Post, Slate). At last count the number of
languages the novel has been published
in was twenty-eight, but Emily tells me
that this morning the agency’s foreign-
rights director got a call from Beirut
about an Arabic edition, so it might be
twenty-nine by now.
The publication of The Nix is a les-
son in perseverance and patience that
pays off in a big way, the biggest way
imaginable for most writers. It’s not
just that the author took his time writ-
ing the book (ten years, from 2004 to2014), and that he was patient through
the publishing process (which took an-
other two years), but also that he was
patient in his professional relationship
with Emily—after all, The Nix wasn’t
even the first book of his that she had
tried to sell.
Nathan first queried Emily (it was a
“very straightforward” letter, she re-
calls) when she was still at the Wendy
Weil Agency, in December 2010. Na-
than had read Susanna Daniel’s novel
Stiltsville, which was set in Florida,
where he lived at the time, and decided
to send her agent, Emily, a collection of
stories he had written partly while an
M FA student at the University of Mas-
sachusetts in Amherst six years earlier.
“I wrote to him after reading the first
few pages of the first piece,” Emily
says. “The writing was so strong, and
I told him I had to keep reading, but I
a l ready k new.”
Ask any agent and you’ll likely hear
the same thing: Stories
are hard to sell. So it’s
a testament to Nathan’s
talent that Emily fell so
deeply for his writing
that she was willing to
send the collection of
stories (“very intercon-
nected, about a couple
inching toward each
other,” she says) out on
submission in 2011. “It
came close, but it didn’t
land,” Emily says about
response to the col-
lection. “There were
people who really ad-
mired it but couldn’t get
it through, or thought,
‘Ugh, stories.’ Also, sto-
ries come in waves of
editors being receptive
to t hem.”
Rather than let this
derail him, Nathan told
Emily about a novel
he’d been working on
for the past six years,
about a mother and
Emily Forland of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. her son, partially set in mark abrams