special section ▪ LITERARY AGENTS59 POETS & WRITERS^what would have happened if Graywolf
had turned down the book. Maybe an-
other small press out there would have
taken it. The independent presses are
the ones that can take risks because they
don’t have shareholders to answer to....
The big trade publishers are just noto-
riously risk-averse, and they’re getting
increasingly so.”
The initial response from publishers
to Carmen’s debut reminds me of what
happened with the first book by Nathan
Hill that Emily Forland was unable to
sell. “It’s cliché now, but you hear it all
the time,” Kent says. “It’s this exact
sentence: Stories are hard. And they say
it in this soft, apologetic way—gentle.
‘Send us the novel when it’s ready.’ I
was in a meeting with a scout, and I
was talking about Carmen’s collection,
pitching it for foreign sales. And the
scout, that was the first thing she said:
‘Mmm, stories are hard.’ She was like
twenty-two. What do you know? Your
boss says that, so now you’re parroting
it. I told her she was never
allowed to say that to me
again,” he says, grinning.
In the end, Ethan No-
sowsky at Graywolf Press
bought Carmen’s story
collection, and it was pub-
lished in October 2017. The
book that was passed on by
the New York publishing
establishment went on to
be named a finalist for the
National Book Award, the
Kirkus Prize, the Art Se-
idenbaum Award for First
Fiction, the Dylan Thomas
Prize, and the PEN/Robert
W. Bingham Prize for
Debut Fiction. It won the
Bard Fiction Prize, the
Lambda Literary Award
for Lesbian Fiction, the
Brooklyn Public Library
Literature Prize, the Shir-
ley Jackson Award, and
the National Book Crit-
ics Circle’s John Leonard
Award. Last year the New
York Times listed Her Bodyand Other Parties as one of “15 remark-
able books by women that are shaping
the way we read and write fiction in the
21st cent u r y.”
“There was a lot of revisionist his-
tory going on in New York” once it was
clear what all those editors had passed
on, Kent says, then adds: “You can write
that my eyes rolled so hard my irises
disappeared.”
When I ask him to elaborate, he
gives me a kind of side-glance, grins,
and says, “This is a risk-averse indus-
try, unless they can see an audience for
something. That’s why they’re always
insisting on comps.” Comps, by the way,
is short for “comparable titles,” which
are standard ingredients in any query
letter or proposal. Agents and editors
want to know the titles of some recently
published books that have proved suc-
cessful (but not too successful) and that
share some characteristics with what
you’ve written. “A book doesn’t exist in
a vacuum,” Kent says, repeating what acouple of the other agents said earlier
in the week. “So if [editors] can point to
this particular recent success, or some-
thing that recently won an award or
was turned into a movie or whatnot, if
they can see that there is an audience for
something, then they can more com-
fortably get behind that.”
On the other hand, writers often hear
publishers and editors talking about
how they’re looking for the next new
thing: something exciting, something
they haven’t read before. There is an
inherent contradiction at play here,
and it triggers one of Kent’s biggest
complaints about the industry. “Here
is one thing I hate about this business:
publishers massively overpaying for
debut fiction. It’s the worst. Two or
three million dollars for a debut novel
and everything else on that publisher’s
list gets eclipsed by that book; they put
all of their efforts behind it,” he says.
“They circle their wagons around one,
two, three books a year, and everything
else is getting lost. This is
not a sustainable model.
It’s bad for publishers, it’s
bad for authors, it’s bad for
readers.”
Carmen’s second book,
a memoir, In the Dream
House, will be released by
Graywolf in November,
and despite the early rejec-
tions of her debut, it is dif-
ficult to see how her career
would have been launched
any better at one of the
bigger publishers. “With
Graywolf, it’s a smaller list,
and the attention they pay
to each book is noticeable,”
Kent says. “What’s nice for
an author being published
by a press like Graywolf is
that they’re more part of the
process. And I think authors
are given more agency, or at
least they are able to be part
of decisions in a way that a
[larger publisher] couldn’t
offer because of the layers
laura s. wilson Kent Wolf of the Friedrich Agency. of bureaucracy.”