Every editor I know has a secret list. Not a list they keep on paper or in a spreadsheet, but a list that lives in the back of their mind, slightly embarrassing and completely sincere: the books they wish they had written. Not edited, not published. Written. As in, put every word on the page themselves, from the first sentence to the last.

I asked our editorial team to share theirs. The conversation lasted three hours, involved two bottles of wine, and produced what I think is one of the most revealing pictures of who we are as a publishing house. Because the books an editor wishes they’d written tell you everything about what they value in literature, what moves them, and what they’re chasing, consciously or not, every time they pick up a new manuscript.

Here are their answers, lightly edited and arranged in no particular order.

Rachel, Senior Editor: “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Rachel has been with ScrollWorks since year two. She edited Still Waters by Elena Marsh and The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo. She reads more than anyone else on our team, averaging about ninety books a year, and her editorial instincts are the sharpest I’ve encountered in twenty years of publishing.

“I’ve thought about this question for years,” she told me, “and the answer has never changed. It’s always The Remains of the Day. And it’s not because I think it’s the best novel ever written, though I think it might be. It’s because Ishiguro does something in that book that I’ve never seen anyone else do: he writes an entire novel about a man who is wrong about everything and makes you love him for it.”

She went on: “Stevens, the butler, has organized his entire life around a set of principles that the book slowly, gently reveals to be a defense mechanism against emotional vulnerability. He’s not a tragic figure in the traditional sense. He doesn’t fall from a great height. He’s been on the ground his whole life and has convinced himself that the ground is where dignity lives. And Ishiguro never judges him for it. The prose has this extraordinary restraint, this refusal to point at the character and say ‘look how deluded he is.’ Instead, you arrive at that understanding yourself, gradually, and the understanding brings compassion rather than condemnation.”

“What I wish I could replicate as a writer is Ishiguro’s control of irony. The gap between what Stevens says and what he means, between what he claims to feel and what he actually feels, is the entire emotional engine of the book. It’s irony used not for comedy or superiority but for heartbreak. I’ve never read another novel that does this as well.”

Rachel paused, then added: “Also, it’s 245 pages. He does all of that in 245 pages. I edit novels that are twice as long and accomplish half as much.”

Marcus, Developmental Editor: “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson

Marcus joined us three years ago after a decade at a university press. He handles the early-stage structural work on our manuscripts, the big questions about what a book is about and how it should be organized. He’s the person who tells authors, diplomatically but firmly, that their chapter three should be chapter one, or that the subplot about the aunt needs to be either expanded or removed.

“Housekeeping,” he said, without hesitation. “Robinson wrote it in her early forties, as her first novel, after years of writing nonfiction. It reads like the work of someone who spent decades thinking about what a novel could be and then sat down and wrote exactly that.”

“The thing about Housekeeping that I find almost impossible to understand, from a craft perspective, is how Robinson maintains two registers simultaneously throughout the entire book. On one level, it’s a story about two girls being raised by their eccentric aunt in a small Idaho town. On another level, it’s a meditation on impermanence, on the impossibility of keeping anything, houses, families, memories, from falling apart. Both of these registers operate in every sentence. Not alternating, not switching back and forth. Simultaneously.”

“As a developmental editor, I spend a lot of time helping authors find their book’s thematic center. With Housekeeping, the thematic center is the texture of the prose itself. You can’t separate the theme from the sentences because the sentences ARE the theme. The language enacts what the book is about. I’ve never been able to articulate how she does this, and I’ve tried many times. I think it might be the kind of thing that can only be felt, not analyzed.”

“If I could write one book in my life, it would be a book where the form and the content were that perfectly married. Where you couldn’t summarize what the book was about without quoting the actual sentences.”

Dana, Line Editor: “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis”

Dana is our sentence-level person. She reads every manuscript word by word, out loud, listening for rhythm, precision, and clarity. She’s the editor who will circle a comma and write in the margin: “This comma is doing too much work. Give it an em dash.” (She’s the only person at ScrollWorks allowed to use em dashes; the rest of us have been instructed to find other solutions.)

“Lydia Davis,” she said. “All of it, but if I had to pick one book, The Collected Stories. Because Davis writes sentences that are so precisely calibrated that changing a single word would collapse the entire meaning. She’s working with ordinary language, nothing fancy, no pyrotechnics. But every word is exactly the right word in exactly the right place, and the effect is something like hearing a tuning fork: this one perfect tone that clears away all the noise.”

“Some of her stories are one paragraph long. Some are one sentence. And they’re as complete and as complex as novels. She proves that the unit of literary meaning isn’t the chapter or the scene or even the paragraph. It’s the sentence. If you get the sentences right, everything else follows.”

“What I admire most is her willingness to be strange. Her stories don’t behave the way stories are supposed to behave. They don’t have plots, necessarily, or characters in the traditional sense. They’re more like observations that have been compressed until they become art. And because she’s working at such a small scale, every decision is visible. You can see the writer thinking on the page. There’s nowhere to hide in a one-paragraph story.”

“As a line editor, I’m always pushing authors toward precision. Davis is the ultimate example of what precision looks like when it’s achieved. She’s the standard I hold in my mind, even when I’m editing books that are nothing like hers.”

James, Associate Editor: “Austerlitz” by W.G. Sebald

James is our newest team member, hired last year after an internship that we extended three times because we couldn’t imagine working without him. He handles a mix of editorial and marketing work, which gives him an unusual perspective on how books move from manuscript to reader.

“Austerlitz,” he said. “I’ve read it three times and I still don’t fully understand how it works, which is part of why I want to have written it. It’s a novel that operates by accumulation. There’s no traditional plot structure, no rising action, no climax. Instead, Sebald builds meaning the way coral builds a reef: slowly, organically, one tiny accretion at a time, until you realize you’re surrounded by something enormous and you can’t see the shore anymore.”

“The book is about memory, specifically about how traumatic memory hides itself and then resurfaces in unexpected ways. And the form of the book mirrors that process. Sebald buries information inside nested narratives, digressions, descriptions of architecture and photography, so that when a revelation arrives, it feels like it’s emerging from beneath layers of sediment. It feels like memory itself.”

“What I wish I could do, as a writer, is what Sebald does with images. The photographs embedded in the text, the descriptions of buildings and landscapes, the way he uses visual detail to carry emotional meaning. Most writers describe things to create setting. Sebald describes things to create feeling. A train station in his prose isn’t a place; it’s an emotional state.”

“I also admire that Austerlitz is uncategorizable. It’s not a novel in any conventional sense, but it’s not nonfiction either. It exists in a space that Sebald essentially invented, and that space is, I think, closer to how consciousness actually works than anything the traditional novel form can achieve.”

My answer: “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson

I promised the team I’d share my own answer if they shared theirs. So here it is. My book, the one I wish I’d written, is Gilead.

I know. Two Robinson picks from the same editorial team. Make of that what you will about our aesthetic preferences. But Gilead is a different book from Housekeeping, and I love it for different reasons.

Gilead is written as a letter from an old minister to his young son, a letter that the father knows the son won’t read until after the father has died. This framing device is so simple that it almost disappears, and yet it controls everything. Every sentence is weighted with the knowledge that this is a person who will not be around to explain himself later. The stakes of every observation, every memory, every piece of advice are absolute, because there will be no second chance to get it right.

Robinson writes about ordinary things, light on a wall, water in a baptismal font, the way a child runs, with a kind of attentiveness that transforms them. Reading Gilead makes the world look different afterward. Colors are more vivid. Silence is more present. The ordinary becomes, for a while, astonishing. No other book has ever done this to me as consistently or as powerfully.

And the prose. I could talk about Robinson’s prose for hours and never capture what makes it special. It’s clean without being plain. It’s theological without being preachy. It moves slowly, but every sentence earns its place so completely that the slowness never feels like a fault. It feels like generosity, like the author is giving you time to absorb each thought before offering the next one.

If I could write one book, it would be a book that made ordinary life feel as miraculous as Gilead makes it feel. I don’t think I could. I don’t think many people could. But that’s the standard, and I’m grateful to have it.

What these choices reveal

Looking at our answers collectively, a few patterns emerge that I think say something about ScrollWorks as a publishing house, even though that wasn’t the point of the exercise.

All five choices prioritize prose quality over plot. None of us picked a thriller, a page-turner, or a book whose primary virtue is its story. We all picked books where the language itself is a source of meaning and pleasure. This makes sense for a literary publisher, but it’s worth naming explicitly because it informs every acquisition decision we make. When we read a manuscript, the first question we ask is: does this prose reward attention? If it doesn’t, no amount of plot will save it. Not for us.

Four of the five choices involve some form of emotional restraint. Ishiguro, Robinson (both books), and Sebald are all writers who achieve emotional power through understatement rather than direct expression. They trust the reader to feel what the prose implies rather than stating it outright. This, too, informs our editorial sensibility. We tend to be suspicious of manuscripts that tell the reader how to feel. We prefer books that create the conditions for feeling and then step back.

And all five choices are books that reward rereading, which connects to something I wrote about recently: our belief that the best books are not consumed but inhabited. We publish books that we hope readers will return to. Our editors’ personal choices reflect that same value at the level of individual taste.

I share this not because I think our taste is better than anyone else’s. Taste is personal and not really subject to argument. I share it because I think readers deserve to know who is making the editorial decisions at the publishers they support. When you pick up a ScrollWorks book, whether it’s The Last Archive or Echoes of Iron or Still Waters or The Cartographer’s Dilemma, the editorial sensibility behind it was shaped by the books you’ve just read about. That lineage matters. It’s the DNA of every book we publish, and I think it’s worth making visible.

Next time you pick up one of our titles, you’ll know a little more about the people who chose it, edited it, and sent it into the world. We hope that knowledge adds something to the reading. At the very least, it adds context. And context, as any good editor will tell you, changes everything.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. The books we love shape the books we make. We hope the connection shows.