Last August I spent a week on the coast of Maine with nothing but a duffel bag, a pair of hiking boots, and six books I’d been meaning to read for months. I came back having read four of them,… Read more →

I once wrote a blurb so bad that the author emailed me to ask, politely, if I could try again. I don’t blame her. The blurb was two sentences long, vaguely praised the prose, and said nothing that would make… Read more →

A writer I work with recently showed me her royalty statement from a major publisher. She’d spent three years writing the book. It had been well reviewed, reasonably well promoted, and had sold about 12,000 copies in hardcover, which is… Read more →

I want to tell you about a study that changed the way I think about fiction. In 2013, psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a paper in Science magazine showing that reading literary fiction temporarily improved performance on… Read more →

I remember the first time someone told me hardcovers were dying. It was 2009, maybe 2010. The Kindle had just started gaining serious traction, and every publishing conference I attended had at least one panel with a title like “The… Read more →

I read a novel in Finnish translation last year that stopped me cold in the middle of a sentence. The original was Japanese, a mid-century work I’d read in English years before and found competent but unremarkable. The Finnish translator… Read more →

There’s a photograph from 1926 that I keep pinned above my desk. It shows a group of women seated around a table in a Paris apartment. The light is coming from a tall window on the left. The women are… Read more →

I want to tell you a story about a book that doesn’t exist anymore. It was a novel, originally published in Spanish by a small press in Buenos Aires in 2003. The author was a retired schoolteacher. The print run… Read more →

We signed a first-time novelist last year whose manuscript arrived in the slush pile on a Tuesday and was in contract by Friday. That almost never happens. Our average time from manuscript submission to offer is about four months, and… Read more →

If I asked you to name the most important page in a book, you’d probably say the first page. Maybe the last. A case could be made for the title page. But I’d argue the most important page in any… Read more →