September/October 2013
Michael Szczerban
State:
New York
A vice president and executive editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin discusses her terror of launch meetings, the particular genius of Sonny Mehta, and her job as a writer’s ideal reader.
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It’s easy to get a touch of vertigo in the book world these days: So much is changing, and so fast. But whenever the rate of transformation makes me a little loopy, I try to tune out the noise about the business and focus instead on the books, those extraordinary little devices that connect writers to readers. After all, every publishing empire is built upon the simple truth that readers need good things to read—and every great editor is first, and always, a devoted reader.
That’s why I was so glad to talk about the pleasures of books with Jordan Pavlin, a vice president and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. “Most of us are here because literature sustained us,” she told me. But not all editors are as beloved as she is to her authors. One of them, Karen Russell, describes working with Pavlin as “the ultimate lottery win.”
Pavlin and I spoke at the end of June, a week before Knopf’s parent company, Random House, announced that it had completed its merger with Penguin—both a response to volatile conditions in the bookselling world and fuel for wild speculations about the future. Booksellers are concerned about e-books; publishers are concerned about bookstores; editors are concerned about first printings; agents are concerned about advances; and writers are concerned about, well, everything.
Amid these changes, Knopf remains remarkably stable, known not only for the physical beauty of its books and the prestige of its writers—who count sixty-one Pulitzer Prizes and twenty-five Nobels among them—but for the lack of turnover in its editorial department. As Pavlin put it, “People come, and they stay. It’s a very special place.”
Knopf’s editors represent just ten of the ten thousand employees in the new global Penguin Random House, but they punch well above their weight.
In December 2012 Pavlin published The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis—a debut novel that Oprah immediately anointed as the new title in her book club. Then, in early March, Russell joined Mathis on the New York Times fiction best-seller list with Vampires in the Lemon Grove, the follow-up to her widely acclaimed novel Swamplandia! Later that month, Pavlin published Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which landed at number one and hovered for months near the top of the best-seller list.
After catching the publishing bug at the Radcliffe Publishing Course (now the Columbia Publishing Course), Pavlin began her career in 1990 as an editorial assistant at St. Martin’s Press.
A year and a half later she moved to Little, Brown, where she worked with Vikram Chandra, Charles D’Ambrosio, Thom Jones, and Katie Roiphe. In 1997 Pavlin joined Knopf as an editor and has remained there for the past sixteen years, publishing works by Pauline Chen, Jennifer Egan, Nathan Englander, Ethan Hawke, Anthony Lane, Ben Marcus, Sue Miller, Susan Minot, Julie Otsuka, Ann Packer, Allison Pearson, Maggie Shipstead, and Julie Orringer. In May she was promoted to her current position.
Let’s begin with your origin story.
There are often two essential people in the life of a passionate reader: a great local librarian and a brilliant, inspiring high school English teacher. I had both, in Long Island, on the North Shore.
As a kid, I was a bit of a misfit and I read avidly in the most escapist manner. I was more comfortable, more confident, when I had a book under my arm—a book was a kind of armor. In the most awkward, socially challenging moments in adolescence I would skip lunch in the cafeteria, which was a minefield, to sit in the library with a sandwich and a book.
Which books were the most important to you?
One of my most beloved books was A Wrinkle in Time. And Judy Blume—I don’t know how any girl grows up without Judy Blume. From those early books I moved pretty quickly into excavating my parents’ bookshelves. I was utterly promiscuous in my affections. I moved right from Judy Blume to Rona Jaffe and Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins and Robert Ludlum and James Michener. And from there it was a short hop to the nineteenth-century novel, and from there to the Russians, who have been my touchstones ever since.
Did you think about being a writer?
I loved writing, and I adored writing essays on great writers, but no—that was never on the table, thank goodness. I had absolutely no talent as a fiction writer or poet.
How did you find your way to publishing?
I was an English major at Vassar, and in my senior year I did an internship at Ecco Press. I knew that I wanted to have a life in books, but the idea of becoming an editor had never entered my mind. I didn’t know what publishing was.
I had been looking for something local to Vassar, and I took two internships. One was working with abused children in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the other was this Friday-afternoon internship with Ecco—which was then both Ecco and Antaeus, the literary magazine. My job was to read the slush, and I took it really seriously. I felt that I had been tasked with this immense responsibility—to judge a writer’s work—and I loved it. The offices were on Seventeenth Street then, and one whole wing of the office was essentially an enormous book room.
I think that in my heart, like so many of us, I was a book thief. Every Friday I would go in with a canvas bag, and I would leave with copies of Antaeus and volumes of poetry. This culminated, finally, when I turned a corner one Friday and came upon the beautiful, multivolume Ecco editions of Chekhov. I don’t know if you’ve seen them.
I don’t think I have.
Oh!
You just swooned! Twenty-odd years later, you swooned!
It was a powerful moment. A moment of tremendous conflict. I stood looking at them, and, really, I just couldn’t walk away. I had absolutely no self-control. I put as many of them into my bag as I could, and as I walked out the door I bumped directly into the publisher of Ecco, Dan Halpern.
And he saw what you had done?
I was mortified, and ashamed. He looked into my bag and put his hands on my shoulders and said, “You don’t have to steal. You are allowed to take these books. You are welcome to these books.” That was a magical moment for me. I understood one part of the beauty of the business: that it was not theft to take the books that you were in some way helping to make. I was very moved, and I credit Dan for putting that seed of virtue and honesty in me. I bet that he has no memory that I was ever in those offices.
Did you ever have a similar encounter with your local librarian? I think of the number of times I crossed my fingers and said, “That book? I'm sure I returned it.”
I loved this woman so much and I felt that she was personally shepherding me through my childhood, so no, I was good at returning them. Also, the library book is such a dead giveaway!
I wish I remembered her name. It was the Shelter Rock Public Library.
What happened after the internship?
At the end of senior year I was walking to the career development office. I had no idea what I might do after college; I was thinking graduate school but I really didn't know. On the floor was a brochure for the Radcliffe Publishing Course, and having come through this internship, that idea connected with me. I thought, “Well, I can go and learn and see.” Even having had the benefit of this brief internship, I didn’t have a sense of the mechanics of book publishing, because I had been reading primarily for Antaeus rather than Ecco.
I applied and was given a scholarship, which was a lifechanging gift. It would not have been remotely a possibility for me otherwise. The first time I encountered an editor talking to me directly about the work and the books and the process, I just fell in love. It was pretty much instantaneous. By the end of the publishing course, I was sure I wanted to come to Knopf.
Why Knopf?
The beauty of the books, the list, the writers. I spent that summer noticing for the first time that there were different logos on the spines of the books, and by the end of it, I understood what it meant if a book came from FSG or Knopf. It was my deepest aspiration to land at a house like FSG or Knopf.
Instead, I was offered a job working for Tom McCormack at St. Martin’s Press, which was in so many ways the polar opposite. At that time, St. Martin’s was all about volume; we must have done five hundred offsets of British mysteries on every list.
But it was a wonderful place to be young. There was an extraordinary pool of assistants. I was there with Bill Thomas and Reagan Arthur and Cal Morgan, all of whom have gone on to have extraordinary careers. It was also a place where there was very little sense of hierarchy.
Which is the bane of an assistant’s life, typically.
You could do almost anything that you could make the time to do. Of course you had to do all of the Xeroxing and the typing and filing, but Tom encouraged young people to acquire, and he let me edit alongside him. I think his philosophy, in part, was that the longer the editorial meeting, the better. And he took enormous pride in being a mentor.
He did something else for me that was very important. I was living in a horrible apartment on Avenue A. This was the summer of the riots in Tompkins Square Park, before Alphabet City was gentrified. I was working at St. Martin’s every day, and every night I was working at Shakespeare & Company. Then, on the weekends, I was waiting tables in the East Village.
Shakespeare & Company was exactly the experience I needed to have—if by day I was writing flap copy for thirty British mysteries, by night I was in the stacks reading poetry and shelving the classics. But I was exhausted. I began to think I had to give one of the jobs up, and I had a real question about whether it should be St. Martin’s or Shakespeare & Company.
One day Tom called me into his office and put a hundred dollar bill down on his desk. He said, “Kid. Do yourself a favor. Get yourself a new pair of pants.” [Laughs.] It was pretty bad. Humiliating. And as I turned to walk out, he said, “Another thing. I hear you’re moonlighting. That’s a good job, Shakespeare & Company. I’m sure you like it and I’m not going to tell you that you have to quit. But I think that you have a talent and I want you to be able to quit if you want to.”
He gave me a five-thousand-dollar raise on the spot. At the time, I had been making four hundred and seventy-three dollars every two weeks.
How long had you been there?
That had to have been four or five months in. It was liberating, and encouraging. Nevertheless, I missed great literature, and by the end of that year, I had pretty much decided to go to graduate school to study Shakespeare. I had applied to graduate programs all over the country.
I shared this with [the late] Lindy Hess, who was the director of the Radcliffe course and [until her death in July] the director of the Columbia course. She said, “It would be a mistake for you to leave for academia without seeing what it’s like in one more house.” I was reluctant, even though it had been an exciting year, but she convinced me that I should interview for a job at Little, Brown, working for a man named Roger Donald. And I took that job.
Tell me about Roger.
Roger was truly one of the great men in publishing. He now lives in Montana, and he is just a fabulous person, a true intellectual. He took many of us under his wing. I think the person who followed me after I left that job was Geoff Kloske [now publisher of Riverhead]. Because he was so accomplished, like Tom, he was absolutely delighted to have his assistants do as much as they could possibly do. This is not always the case.
Sometimes an editor can feel competitive with an assistant.
Yes, exactly. With Roger that was not the case at all. One of the first experiences I had with him came after I read a story in the New Yorker by a writer named Thom Jones. The story was “The Pugilist at Rest,” and it knocked me out of my seat. I brought it to Roger. He thought it was excellent, and said, “Let’s write to him.”
Thom’s story had come in, I believe, over the transom at the New Yorker, and had been pulled out of the slush pile by Deb Garrison, who is now our brilliant poetry editor at Knopf. By the time we wrote to him, he had gotten himself an agent, Candida Donadio.
It was very exciting to be in correspondence with him—this was my first experience of seeing something and then forging a connection to it. And it was at just about this moment when I heard back from graduate schools.
Which letter held more sway?
I feel very fortunate that these things happened simultaneously. I was given a scholarship to Columbia, and a stipend for a six-year PhD program that was actually more than my salary. But I had fallen in love with Thom Jones’s story and with the possibility of publishing more of his stories. It had such a powerful hold on me that I couldn’t go. And because it was a scholarship, I couldn’t defer. I had to make a very clear choice.
I felt that in a parallel universe I would be very happy to read Shakespeare all day and all night. But publishing was a way to bring my love of literature into the world. For me, the university would have represented a retreat. The greater challenge was to find a way to be at the intersection of art and commerce.
The moment when that coalesced for me was when I read Thom Jones. To this day, I feel an enormous debt of gratitude to Thom, who kept me on the path I feel I was meant to be on.
Did you end up publishing him?
We did! We published The Pugilist at Rest and then we published Cold Snap. Thom had been a janitor in Lacey, Washington, when he published that story in the New Yorker. When he received the bound book he wrote me a beautiful note, and sent me his janitor shirt with his name across it. It was very moving.
Lindy was absolutely right. Little, Brown was a thrilling place.
Who else was there?
Bill Phillips was editor in chief, and he was editing Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. It was a very long book, and he’d been at it for a long time. In an act of extraordinary generosity and inclusion, he asked me to read behind him. That was such a thrill, of course, and he took me to the White House to sit down and go through the pages with Nelson Mandela. I was twenty-four years old. It was absolutely unforgettable.
Jordan Pavlin 2
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It was the beginning of a golden time for Little, Brown, which has obviously continued. I arrived six months after Michael Pietsch got there. One of the books that he shared with me early on, not on submission, was The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace. He was just in the process of acquiring Infinite Jest. It was this vibrant, thrilling moment in the life of a great publishing house.
I was there for five years, and I would have stayed, happily, for much longer. But I was approached by Marty Asher at Vintage, who was looking for a paperback editor. I was so excited to meet him, and admired his work and Vintage so much, but I told him that I knew in my bones I wanted to be a hardcover fiction editor. And he said, “You should really meet Sonny Mehta.”
What had you done at Little, Brown at that point? You had bought Thom Jones’s book?
It was really Roger who bought Thom Jones. I was just along for the ride. And Jim Silberman, a great editor, had orchestrated a match with Katie Roiphe. He felt that Katie should have a young female editor, and so I published her book The Morning After, which ignited a charged conversation about feminism. That was terrific.
I published a novel, a brilliant novel I loved so much, by a guy named Max Phillips. This novel just enraptured me. It was called Snakebite Sonnet. I published Vikram Chandra’s first two books. And I had published, or was about to publish, Ethan Hawke’s first novel, The Hottest State.
Who were the agents you were working with?
It’s funny—it’s such a long time ago now. Eric Simonoff was my first ever agent lunch. Sloan Harris. Jennifer Walsh, who was already extremely accomplished. I was just getting to know Nicole Aragi. It was a small group.
Tell me about meeting the head of Knopf, Sonny Mehta.
Marty engineered a lunch with him, and we went to Billy’s, a wonderful old Random House hangout with red-checked tablecloths. It was an informal meeting, and there was no job on the table. We were just making one another’s acquaintance. But because my deepest wish was to come to Knopf, it was extremely freighted for me.
Do you remember it?
Vividly. Then, as now, there is absolutely no one in the whole world who is better to talk with about books than Sonny Mehta. It loomed large for me. After that lunch, we met again for a drink. And when we set up that meeting, I felt a sense of mission. It was another informal meeting, and there was nothing on the table. But I put it on the table. I brazenly suggested that perhaps there would be some way in which I could be of use at Knopf, which was so plainly not the case. Knopf abounds in brilliant literary editors, and there were no lacunae on the list.
And there’s no turnover.
People come, and they stay. It’s a very special place. I wanted to be here so much. And I wore him down.
Over the course of a single drink?
Over the course of several subsequent meetings. He would always spend some portion of these meetings telling me no. But I continued to press. Finally, he said, “I really don’t have a job for you. And if I did have a job for you, I would have no place to put you.” I had an answer to all of these insurmountable hurdles. I remember that I had cast my net so wide, I had to ask, “Is it in editorial?” when he finally offered me the job.
It was a lateral move. I was an editor at Little, Brown, and I was coming to Knopf as an editor. The salary was identical. Sonny said, “One day, you will resent me.” I told him that I would never resent him. But in an early indication of my dubious skills as a negotiator, I said, “If you really think that is the case, would you consider throwing in a complete set of the Everyman’s Library?”
The next week, these boxes started to arrive at my tiny apartment. When my boyfriend, now my husband, moved in, I said, “Don’t think of it was moving in with me—think of it as moving in with the Everyman’s Library!” They took up virtually the whole apartment, and still do, though I’ve moved many times since.
Did you ever come to resent him? What did he mean by that?
I have no idea what he meant. No, not for a second. I am so grateful. This is the life I dreamed of. It’s the work I love. It’s a gift.
Who was the first writer you acquired for the Knopf list?
I don’t know. I was looking back over some of the early books I published, and I think that my life illustrates the axiom that, in fact, most books disappear without a trace. Some don’t, and that is sustaining. But most of the experience of being a book editor is defined by heartbreak.
You published Nathan Englander early on. How did you come to meet him?
It was through agent Nicole Aragi. At the time I was on the board of Story magazine, and Lois Rosenthal at Story had been very excited about publishing Nathan. Nicole told me that he was giving a reading at the KGB Bar downtown, and that I should go because she would be going out with For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. It was his first-ever reading, and it was phenomenal. We won that book in an auction, and we had to compete fiercely for it.
You know, the first book that I acquired on my own at Little, Brown was also a collection of short stories. I don’t think that is a coincidence.
You bought only the stories? Not a novel, too?
Just the stories. It was a book called The Point by a writer named Charles D’Ambrosio.
I love Charles D’Ambrosio! The Dead Fish Museum is in my all-time top five.
When I say that so much of this business is heartbreak, talk about someone who should be more widely read! He is one of the great short story writers of our time. It breaks my heart that I haven’t been able to put him across with greater success. But the people who read him are passionate about him, and he is a fantastic teacher at Iowa, so he’s cultivating another generation of writers as well. He’s a great human being.
I was a young editor when Charlie invited me to go trout fishing with him in Montana. I was hoping he would write a novel, but I couldn’t get him to talk to me about it. He told me that if I came trout fishing with him, he would talk to me.
He picked me up at the airport in Bozeman. He had some waders, a rod, and we went camping in Yellowstone. It couldn’t happen now, but it’s a glorious memory. He remains in my life—he was in my wedding.
And here’s a picture, actually, of Nathan, with my husband. I like to call that picture “Young Jews with Chainsaws.” [Laughs.] Everyone was so young. We slept on Nathan’s floor in Jerusalem more than a decade ago.
Did you ever work on books that you inherited from other editors?
Tons. The life of the associate editor.
I’m interested in what you have to say about an editor’s personal passion for a work. How important is it?
I have a very strong feeling about that in relation to fiction. My job is to be a writer’s ideal reader. It’s an amazing thing to make a life out of: to be the most open, the most credulous, the most willing to surrender. I am first and foremost a fan. That is where the work has to begin. It has to come from love and sympathy and from a feeling that I not only share the writer’s vision, but that I’m able to see even a flawed work not only as what it is, but what it wants to be. But that is not always possible. At Little, Brown, I was editing primarily nonfiction. The books that tended to be heaped upon me were self-help books. They all had lessons to teach me, because I was a young editor, but I didn’t enjoy learning them.
What do you know now that you wish you knew at Little, Brown?
The difficulty of publishing is that every book is so entirely new. Every book is the first of its kind. So in that sense, it’s an impossible business to rationalize.
I was learning the mechanics. At that stage in my life, if I had a deadline, I literally would sleep in my office to meet it. If I didn’t have the time, I would find the hours in the night. Being a mother has made me, I must say, much more efficient in that sense.
In addition to Sonny, who are your role models at Knopf?
The two great unsung heroes of Knopf are Kathy Hourigan, our managing editor, and Andy Hughes, our director of production. They are the standard bearers—do you know what I mean?
They set the bar of excellence.
Yes, exactly. And in countless moments when I have been prepared to capitulate in some manner, or compromise, they are the last ones standing. In a sense they are the authors’ most tireless advocates. They have such reverence for the work of the writers.
Would you share with me a specific instance?
Susan Minot’s next novel is coming out in February. We wanted to have galleys for the BEA convention in May. And she has since made substantive changes, including some small structural changes to the novel.
There was a question of how to move forward with booksellers and media. You need to get the galleys out so people can begin reading it and falling in love with it. But the galley was not the final version of the novel—it had evolved. Kathy Hourigan was the first person to say, “No, of course we need to make new galleys.”
I started out as a managing editor, and can verify how rare that is.
I’ll give you another example. This is a Sonny example, but it is the kind of attention to detail and perseverance and dedication to the author that distinguishes Knopf. I was publishing a first novel, and we had been through—no exaggeration—sixty-five jackets. And the clock was running out.
How many of those jackets had the author seen?
Maybe nine. Patience was running thin. We were wearing out everyone’s goodwill. We had, in the sixty-fifth round, a jacket that we all thought was pretty good and that positioned the book well. We were prepared to accept it. I showed it to the author, and she wrote me a long letter. She said, “I know it’s been a trying process, and if this is the jacket, I can certainly live with it, and I thank you for going this far. But here are all the reasons why I think it’s actually not the right jacket for this book.”
She proceeded to detail, very precisely and brilliantly, why this jacket was a compromise. I sent the note on to Sonny, thinking it would exasperate him and further erode his best intentions toward the novel. I sent it with an apology: “Maybe this is too much information, but I thought you should see this.”
He wrote me back immediately and said, “Come to the conference room.” So I went to the conference room, and there he was with all of the jackets spread out on the table. He turned to me and he said, “That was a brilliant letter, and she’s right. We have to try again.” And we tried once more, and we had a terrific jacket—the jacket the book deserved to have.
Which book was it?
It was Maggie Shipstead’s book Seating Arrangements. It was worth fighting for, and worth holding out for.
Let’s talk a bit about book jackets. What makes a jacket excellent?
If you had asked me this many years ago, I probably would have said that it was important for a jacket to be beautiful. I now believe that the most important quality is how arresting it is: how readable, how telegraphic, how distinct on the shelf, and yes, how it looks reduced to the size of a postage stamp. That’s important.
Here at Knopf we have a great atelier, a true art studio. But design is an unscientific process, and it’s important that the author feels that the jacket is right. It is the author’s name on the book, though you are often in the position, as an editor, of straddling your allegiance to your colleagues and your allegiance to your writers.
Tell me about another jacket you love.
Alexander Maksik, A Marker to Measure Drift. This is a jacket that we struggled with so much that we actually made advance copies with a completely different cover. The ARCs show a picture of a volcano erupting.
That’s about as different from a calm, gray sea as you can get.
But this is magnificent. This is from Peter Mendelsund, who is a magician. I think this is exactly how this novel should look. But the final judge is the world.
The jacket is the most important marketing tool you have, but ultimately, it’s alchemy. There is a great yawning abyss between ourselves and our readers. And negotiating that is the work.
How much of a role do you play in titling the book?
Almost none, particularly with fiction. Writers tend to come with the titles fully formed, but that’s not always the case. Initially there was a possibility that Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves was going to be “Ava Wrestles the Alligator.” And then it was going to be “St. Alba’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” and “St. Insert-Girl’s-Name-Here-Ten-Times for Girls Raised by Wolves.”
That book was such a joy from the moment I first read her work. I read “Haunting Olivia”—it was the first story she published in the New Yorker—and it was just overpowering. I was two paragraphs in, and absolutely sure I had to work with her.
Tell me the rest of that story.
Her agent was Denise Shannon. Denise sent me the manuscript, and I read the stories in one great gulp. They were magnificent: piercing and beautiful and full of sorrow, with this absolutely singular sensibility. Zaniness. Karen’s unfettered imagination and her wild risk-taking in both style and subject. I just loved it.
I was enraptured. To some degree this is the case with almost all the books I’ve acquired. When a book works upon you in that way, you have a kind of lunatic passion that is an elemental experience. Have you ever read this book? You haveto read this book.
You just reached for Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners.
This is probably the most brilliant book ever written about fiction and the short story. She’s talking about why people read. She says: “People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope, and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I am always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality, and it’s very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.”
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She goes on to talk about people who read to improve their minds, and says: “The lady who only read books that improved her mind was taking a safe course—and a hopeless one. She’ll never know whether her mind is improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel, she’ll know mighty well that something is happening to her.” [Laughs.]
You know when you are in the presence of something that is alive on the page, when a voice just takes you in and sweeps you up. That was my experience with Karen. I was absolutely sure that this was such a distinguished and distinctive and important debut, that it would be on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Now, in retrospect, that was very close to madness—to be certain that a debut story collection would be the cover of the Book Review, or even reviewed in it.
I believed it so completely. And I was wrong, of course. But Swamplandia! was. And that is the game.
Where does that mad belief come from?
You have to begin from a place of love and need. A very similar case for me to Karen was Ayana Mathis’s novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. I remember it was the night my eldest son was graduating from fifth grade, and also was the night of the fifth-grade dance, which I was not permitted to chaperone. But I was expected to be local.
I went and sat by myself in a café across the street from where the dance was taking place, and I took this manuscript with me. I was transported into another time and place. The language was so beautiful, and I spent the rest of the weekend reading it. On Sunday morning, around seven o’clock, I sent an e-mail to Sonny. I was absolutely beside myself. “I’m so sorry to e-mail you on the weekend, but I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that I have this sublimely beautiful first novel, and it’s the best thing I’ve read in ages, and can you please read it?” I wanted to buy it right away.
Walk me through how you acquired that book.
The book had come in on Friday and I couldn’t wait until Monday. I was so afraid it would disappear, that someone would intercept it.
I e-mailed the agent, Ellen Levine, to tell her that I was beside myself and that I would do everything I could to bring her to Knopf. So that week, early in the week, several others read it, including Sonny and colleagues at Vintage. I wanted to preempt it. And there was another house also trying to preempt, so we were in a kind of impromptu auction almost immediately.
There was a question of how to be aggressive to be. Whether to let it go to auction; to compete for it at auction; what the limit should be.
I tend to be cautious about advances, because I know how difficult it is to actually sell books in the quantities that you posit in your highly speculative and fictionalized P&Ls. And I know how rarely it is the case that we are able to reach those levels of net sales.
But with this book, at every step, I was so determined and unconflicted and certain that, even if it was a risk, this was the beginning of a huge career for Ayana, and that we had to participate in it.
I had my first conversation with Ayana in the evening at home. This gets tricky when you have kids. Finding that quiet space, that uninterrupted private moment, can be very difficult. I have frequently had to lock myself in bathrooms, but in this case I locked myself out on the terrace, and had a long and wonderful conversation with her. And I think I was able to persuade her that she would never regret coming to Knopf.
Was it a beauty contest? Was the money essentially the same?
We were the underbidders, so yes, it absolutely was. The other publisher was someone I admire enormously. She would have been an excellent editor, and she would have done a brilliant job.
When you spoke to Ayana, what did you talk about?
We talked about the book in great detail. It was an editorial conversation. As with most of the great writers I’ve published, she needed very little from me other than support. But there were a couple of issues I wanted to raise with her, specifically about the ending of the novel. That was an exciting conversation—generative and fruitful.
My goal in that conversation was just to persuade her that I had read the book very, very closely, and that I loved it on its own terms. I was dazzled by her language, by the characters, by the scope.
I remember, in the lead up to galleys after I had acquired it, sending bits of it around in emails to various colleagues—just sentences I loved. I would get notes back saying, “That’s gorgeous! What poem is that from?” But it wasn’t a poem. It was a sentence from this extraordinary first novel.
Here is the other relentlessly optimistic part of my character: I really believed that what happened to this book was going to happen to this book. Because of the book itself. Because the novel was so beautiful.
If that’s the case—that it was destined to be a success—what value does a publishing house offer the writer of such a book?
We don’t know, because we can never publish a book twice. That is the case with a lot of sleepers. We wonder: Would this book have met the same fate brought out by another house?
But our whole business is predicated on the belief that we do something essential in connecting a writer to readers, and maximizing that readership.
I do think that Knopf brings something very special to the life and the evolution of a writer, especially a young literary writer. The books are so exquisitely made, and it’s such a deeply literate community editorially.
There is a very old-fashioned separation of church and state here in the way that there once was, and perhaps still is, at the New Yorker. The author comes first, and everything else is secondary to that. Our editorial department is protected to a remarkable degree by the vision of our editor in chief.
It seems that you come to books nakedly.
I hope so. There’s a line in one of Camus’s essays where he writes, “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” I really do feel that about my work. I feel that my job is to fall in love. It’s also not to fall in love. [Laughs.] But fundamentally that’s the job.
The first requirement is therefore to be openhearted and credulous and available to be worked upon. That’s definitely part of why this work feels so personal, because it is personal. When you tell someone that you love her novel, what you’re saying is, “I share this despair, or pain, or experience of beauty or longing.” It’s a very intimate place from which to begin an association.
Something I ponder is the exact source of Sonny Mehta’s genius. Because his genius is absolutely unmistakable. One part of it, I think, is that he is just the most curious person I’ve ever met. I’ve never met anyone else who has maintained his curiosity to this degree and over such a long stretch of time. I know that he is regarded as living in a kind of rarefied literary landscape, but the truth is that he is the most catholic reader. And his ability to read high and low and across all genres with equal curiosity—there are many others of us who struggle mightily with that. He comes to everything fresh.
Is that a trait one can cultivate?
I think it’s actually a gift. I really do. There are many others of us who have a greater capacity for boredom. Which is a kind of laziness, in my mind.
The other night, I said something about boredom, and my daughter said, “I know, I know—‘a failure of the imagination!’” But we do, so many of us, fail in that way, and he never does. It’s astonishing.
Could you take me through an editorial meeting at Knopf?
Here? We have meetings infrequently, I would say. And our meetings are unlike any other editorial meetings I’ve ever attended.
Would you contrast it with the meetings at Little, Brown?
I don’t know if it’s still the case now, but at Little, Brown the process was in two parts: the editorial meeting and the publishing meeting. In the editorial meeting you talk about the book that you’re interested in, and if you are able to garner enough support, you proceed to the publishing meeting, which is quite formal. You present a memo about the book and the history of the author, and make an impassioned and sensible case for it.
Our editorial meetings at Knopf are not acquisition meetings. They occur after a book has already been acquired. It’s the very first moment in which you are presenting it to your colleagues in a preliminary manner. They take place in Sonny’s office. Some people sit on bookcases, some people sit on the floor.
Who comes?
All of the editors who happen to be here. The assistants do not come. Our publicity director and art director come so they know what’s on the horizon. Our associate publisher and marketing director.
It’s a small group, and a chance for our colleagues in different departments to offer insights about the state of the business, what’s happening in the publicity department, what’s happening with our retailers, what’s working, what’s not working. It’s kind of an overview—a snapshot of a moment. There’s usually a report on the sales conference that we’re coming out of or heading into.
They are by any measure not traditional editorial meetings. Tom McCormack’s meetings lasted for three hours, and he would read off every single submission that had been logged in by anyone, and everyone in the company came.
When I told a young editor in my building that I was going to speak with you, she said, “You have to ask her two things.” The first one was about breaking out debut fiction. What made Maggie Shipstead’s book Seating Arrangements work?
Well, clearly with Maggie Shipstead it had to be the jacket!
Maggie had many wonderful things happen for her, but foremost among them was that this novel was selected as a Barnes & Noble Recommends pick. I think that was the key factor for Maggie. What was the other question?
It’s a tougher one. How did you feel when Jennifer Egan left Knopf to work with Nan Graham at Scribner?
It took me about four months to peel myself off the floor. That was one of the hardest moments in my professional life. I wish her only the best and I miss her terribly.
Have you ever worked with a writer who hasn’t been agented?
No.
What do the best agents do to add value to the publishing process, beyond bringing a writer’s work to your attention?
First and foremost, they make it possible for the relationship between the author and the editor to remain pure by handling the negotiations. The best agents also provide another editorial eye. Not all agents can do that, but they are often the first readers.
I appreciate it when an agent presses for greater attention, whatever that might mean: a more focused marketing campaign, or a more substantial ad budget, or more prominent positioning.
This will not make me very popular here, but it is often helpful to me, as I advocate for an author, to have an agent putting a reasonable amount of pressure on me, and sharing those extremely high hopes with me. Within reason! [Laughs.]
The best agents also have a vision for their authors’ entire careers, so that they are helping to strategize and build an author in a variety of ways.
Is that different than an editor’s perspective on an author’s career?
In the best-case scenario, it’s shared. I would add that—this will sound so self-serving to say—but I value agents who cultivate and help to sustain long-term relationships for authors with houses.
An agent who will work with you to keep an author on the Knopf list.
Exactly.
Before a reader buys a book, it’s typically been sold four times: First, the writer sells the agent on the idea of working with him or her; then the agent sells it to you, the editor; then you sell it to your salespeople at a launch or positioning meeting; and then they sell it to booksellers.
There are so many opportunities for missteps!
Or opportunities to bend the life of the book toward the remarkable.
This is why I have a particular terror of launch meetings: It is a moment when I can do so much damage.
Do you mean that there aren’t many books that have been made by an editor’s launch presentation, but there are plenty that have been sunk by a poor one?
That if I fail, this is an important failure. I feel the weight of that when I walk into that room, trembling and sick to my stomach. Always, after twenty years. I find it very daunting.
What strategies do you use to put the books across in the best way possible?
I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried writing speeches; I’ve tried not writing speeches. I’ve tried making bullet points. I’ve tried writing out six key sentences.
I’m afraid to say this because it’ll sound so ridiculous, but a friend of mine once put these words in my head, and I have thought about them ever since: The goal is to look into people’s hearts and try to touch them there.
By the time I walk into that room, I’ve read the book anywhere between two and six or seven times. I have a pretty clearly articulated vision of what the book is, and that has been expressed in innumerable bits and pieces of copy.
So if I’m talking about this novel, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation—a book I love and which we will launch with all of the flourishes—I’m not just talking about the language, even though the language is exquisite; I’m not just talking about the audaciousness of its extreme economy, or all of the things that make this unique. I’m talking about the things inside of it—the moments that penetrated me as a reader.
Books, and novels especially, operate on us in such intimate ways, and in such intimate places. I’m trying to reveal that about my own encounter with a novel when I walk into that room, in the hope that it will encourage someone else to pick it up and to engage with it.
The idea is that, if there are ten or twenty or even just two other books discussed in that meeting, people won’t really remember exactly what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel?
That’s true. In this house, everyone who walks into that room is brilliant. Everyone who’s sitting at that table is remarkably literate. The only thing that distinguishes me is my experience of the book, my love for it. And that’s what I am trying to put across in that moment.
How do you help your colleagues reveal the gifts inside your books to other people along the road to publication?
I try to be the most cogent I can be in developing a handle for the book, and in creating clarity around what makes a book special. It’s a collaborative process. My wish is always to be involved with, and welcomed into, every aspect of the publishing process, but there are many stages at which part of my usefulness is to get out of the way.
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I think the editorial response to a jacket is essential, because it’s also the writer’s response to a jacket. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay for me to art-direct a jacket. That isn’t my job.
There’s a powerful feeling of helplessness among editors. You fall in love with this book, and you work so closely with a writer, and you care so much. And yet all the care in the world is not going to allow you to control, or even necessarily significantly alter its fate.
A lot of productive things come out of that helplessness. All of the handwritten letters editors send out to people on bigmouth lists, urging people to read and talk about the book. Trying to cultivate a groundswell of support in the wider world. But at the end of the day, what is most helpful for a book is to have everyone in the house feel equally invested.
Has one of those notes ever led to something wonderful?
Bill Loverd, who used to run our publicity department, was famous for using a purple pen to write handwritten notes to book reviewers, and I think he had an impact. It was legendary.
Frankly, I have no idea whether my notes have been the variable that helped something reach critical mass. You very rarely hear back, and the impact isn’t always a direct one. But it is an accretion of effort and commitment around a book, and you keep putting your note into a bottle and releasing your bottle into the sea in hope that someone will find it.
So in that feeling of editorial helplessness—maybe it’s after the galleys are in but before the book is published—how do you support a writer who may be feeling the same thing?
That’s an uncomfortable moment. It’s uncomfortable for all writers, that span of time between the arrival of galleys and the publication of the book. My tactic usually centers on urging writers to get back to work. That’s a great moment to begin book two, when they’re casting about, slightly unmoored, with great anxiety and uncertainty. To get back to the page as quickly as possible. Then, if that doesn’t work, there’s always whiskey. [Laughs.]
How do you begin collaborating with a writer?
I tell all my writers, when I enter into a new relationship, that I’m available to work with them in whatever way they are most comfortable. There are writers who want to read whole chapters to me over the phone, and others who won’t share a book with me until it’s virtually complete.
The first time Julie Orringer let me read her novel The Invisible Bridge, she had been working on it for years. It is like a great nineteenth-century novel, truly. It is so expertly crafted, but it is also so ambitious and sweeping in its scope and covers generations. And she would not release it to me until she had a full first draft.
Many other writers would have given me those pages—a hundred pages in, or two hundred pages, or five hundred pages. But Julie had to make that journey on her own. What she gave me was magnificent. It was so thrilling to roll up my sleeves and get to work on it, because I saw instantly the scope of what she had undertaken and what she had already achieved. The heart of the book, the structure of the book, it was all masterly.
Then there is the first letter, in which I put everything I possibly can out on the table, but I always finish those letters by saying that these are suggestions. That this is your novel, these are your stories, and your instincts are magnificent and you should implement those things that coincide with your own instincts, and be wary of the things that don’t.
What should a writer expect from any good editorial letter?
Encouragement. Clarity. Specificity and direction. I tend to use my editorial letters to call out the most substantive issues an author will face in his or her revisions. Structural issues, issues of character development. I try to set those forward sort of as a road map so that the author will have a sense of the scope of the work I am suggesting that they undertake. There are always extensive notes in the margins; I feel I do the bulk of my correspondence with a writer in the margins.
The greatest challenge with an editorial letter is to offer criticism without leaving the writer feeling demoralized. You want to provide the writer with the sense that you see what’s best in the book, and have a vision for how to bring everything up to that level. You want the author to walk away feeling buoyed rather than daunted.
Is it part of your job is to educate a writer about what it means to be edited?
I can’t really say that I’m educating anyone about anything, to be honest. [Laughs.] Most writers know what they need.
How do you determine when a book is ready?
I think it’s something a writer feels in the gut. Editors are always looking for that moment in which the writer stops creating something and starts to take it apart, but I also know that there are many refinements and miraculous insights that happen in the eleventh hour.
Now I have to ask about Sheryl Sandberg. You were promoted to executive editor at Knopf two months after Lean In landed at number one on the New York Times list.
This book had—has—an almost magical impact on its readers. I count myself among them. It is such a wake-up call, on so many levels, to women at every level to value the work that they do. Not to denigrate themselves, and not to diminish themselves, by deflecting responsibility for their own achievements. It had a huge impact on me personally. It had an immediate impact on the way I thought about myself in my daily life, in how I hoped to carry myself. And certainly it made me want to believe more in myself, to take greater risks.
Who represented her?
Jennifer Walsh. I wrote her a letter telling her why I wanted to publish the book. I said that I was born to publish this book because it spoke to me so personally, as Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It did. That was a novel about being a working mother, and I remember my voice cracking when I presented that book at launch, because I felt I was revealing so much of myself.
I don’t publish a huge amount of nonfiction, but I always have published some of it, primarily narrative nonfiction, when I had a particular vision for a book or when something spoke to me so directly. And this book did.
What are you most confident about in this business?
I’m most confident that great writing will continue to find its way into the world, and will be championed and recognized. It’s a glorious time for the short story. And we have seen so many superb first novels, and literary novels, hit the New York Times bestseller list. It’s a great time to be a writer. There are more opportunities for reaching more people than there ever have before.
Tell me about a recent high point.
A true high point for me was when both Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Ayana Mathis’s novel were on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. A short story collection and a gorgeous, literary first novel. It can’t get better.
What are you least confident in?
There are a lot of unknowns. There are certainly a lot of unknowns.
What is the most satisfying part of your job?
The most satisfying part of my job is the moment in which I feel I have been of use in some way to a writer in his or her work. It’s such a privilege to be entrusted with something so early, when it is still taking shape and coming to life. It’s immensely gratifying when I feel I have been able to help a writer on his or her way. On the page, especially, and then into the world.
You now speak at the Columbia Publishing Course?
I go up there and talk once a year, because I will do anything for Lindy, because I owe her my life!
What do you talk about?
I did it last week, and I have no idea. The great thing about the talk I give at the course is that I go with [FSG editor] Eric Chinski. And Eric Chinski, in addition to being a brilliant editor, has actual, practical advice to offer. I tend to be more abstract and to tell stories about some of the great moments of my life in publishing, as a way of providing a glimpse into what the work is, and what the life that ensues from it can be like at its best. Then Eric provides real wisdom. [Laughs.] We’re a very clever pairing.
Do you work on paper, or on a device?
I read on paper and I edit on paper. I would be happy to read on a device, but I haven’t yet found one I really love. In a pinch, I read things on my husband’s iPad. So far, that’s the device I like best for reading.
I would never read poetry on a device, except if I was stuck. I like to be able to come back to a place, to mark. I find it very difficult on a device.
Are you able to make time for extracurricular reading?
I love to read! I actually haven’t read a book in so long, but I’m hoping to read this summer. In my personal reading I try to read as much of what’s being published by other houses as I can. The books that I feel I missed, or wish I’d seen, or wish I’d published. I love to read books that my colleagues are excited about, but I always come back to the classics.
You’ve mentioned poetry a couple times.
Poetry’s very important to me.
Which poets do you return to?
Yeats, Auden, Rilke, Eliot, Stevens. I try never to go a day without reading poetry.
What about contemporary poets?
I love Mary Oliver and Sharon Olds. I absolutely worship Philip Levine. But I tend to reach back.
You mentioned that there aren’t any lacunae in the editorial department of Knopf. What distinguishes you among your editorial colleagues?
I have never been able to answer that question. I think you could just as easily send a novel to me and three or four other editors here. And that’s fine. If I see fewer novels than I might elsewhere, I’m okay with that. I’m willing to see less for this experience, to be in such excellent company, with such an extraordinary apparatus, and to work for people I admire so much.
Readers may recognize that a Knopf hardcover often becomes a Vintage paperback. Does that mean you only work on the hardcover?
That is the case here. It is very different, I know, at other houses where the hardcover editor is also the editor of the paperback.
This is one of Vintage’s unique strengths—that a book is truly republished at Vintage. It has a new editor, a new publicity department, and so another chance at finding its audience.
Even in an increasingly digital world, the paperback is so often the way that people discover a book.
It’s also where a book lives. A book’s hardcover life is finite, in the big picture. But it lives in paperback forever.
Does publishing in a digital-only format interest you?
Anything that builds a writer’s audience interests me. It’s not something I have a particular talent for, or vision for, yet.
When you’re working on a collection of short stories that have been published by a magazine like the New Yorker, where the editorial standard is superb, what kind of editing do you do?
That’s an interesting question. There is certainly a standard of excellence at the New Yorker, but they are also constrained by word counts. Not infrequently, when writers publish their stories in book form, they will reinstate portions that have been cut for reasons of space for the magazine.
I don’t re-edit stories that have been published in the New Yorker. I frequently re-edit stories that have been published in other publications.
There’s no urge to leave your palm print, like a kid confronting a patch of wet cement?
No, no. I feel that less is more. It’s a question I ask myself, in relation to almost every single sentence: Does it really need to be fixed?
I would rather not see my handprint on the work. It’s important to resist the temptation to tamper with something that is not fundamentally broken.
I love line editing. I love finding the music in a sentence and clearing away the clutter. But the music of the sentence should be the author’s music and not my own.
Do you think that’s a mistake that editors make—to get caught up in ego, or to forget whose name is on the cover of the book?
Maggie Shipstead’s new book is set in the world of the New York City ballet, and she took me to the ballet last night, at the Met. Right before the curtain went up—which is a moment I love, it gives me goose bumps—I confessed to Maggie that I have stage-manager fantasies, which, we decided, was analogous with being a book editor.
I am drawn to working offstage. I think that’s a requirement of the job. I can’t speak about other editors, but, for instance, this interview is very uncomfortable for me. I hate talking about myself. I love that my work is known only to my writers. That’s where I am most comfortable.
What advice can you give young editors who want to learn from your mistakes?
The hardest thing, and the most essential thing, is to trust your own instincts. At the end of the day, this is a completely unscientific business. There are very few empirical facts.
This is why on every list there are sleepers. If we knew which books were going to succeed, perhaps we would publish only those books! [Laughs.] We are constantly being taken by surprise. The only thing we can be certain of is our own instincts. So we have to allow ourselves to be guided by them, even when others disagree.
That means fiercely pursuing the things we feel most passionately about, and it also means resisting the temptation to acquire a book because other people are excited about it.
What can separate a young editor or agent from the pack?
There’s a certain amount of natural attrition that occurs when progress is halting or slow. In other words, those early years, the years spent reading for someone else and Xeroxing for someone else and trying to make someone else look very smart, can be an extremely protracted and challenging period for a young person who is hungry to begin to achieve on their own.
During that period, there’s a lot of falling away. There are people who can’t summon the patience, or who find that their desire is attenuated by these menial responsibilities. The people who go on to do this are the people who really can’t live without it, who almost don’t have a choice, who don’t see another life.
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