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Our Literary Agents Issue features a look behind the scenes at the offices of Folio Literary Management as well as the stories of how three authors found their agents; plus our twelfth annual roundup of debut fiction, the literary art of name branding, reflections on the postpublication journey, and more.
The search for the true identity of the author behind three of the most unusual books of fiction published in the past five years, including the new collection Sorry Please Thank You, just took a turn.
For our twelfth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors—Charles Baxter, Attica Locke, Christine Schutt, Peter Ho Davies, and Sam Lipsyte—to introduce this year’s group of talented debut authors: Natalie...
Folio Literary Management, a six-year-old agency in New York City, agreed to let contributing editor Michael Bourne spend a day as a fly on the wall to capture a behind-the-scenes snapshot of a literary agency.
Literary agent Ellen Levine describes the moment when she first decided to take on unpublished author Ayana Mathis and offers a line-by-line reaction to a page from Mathis’s forthcoming novel that commanded the agent’s attention and convinced her of...
We found three versions of the prototypical success story—an author finds an agent who sells the manuscript to an editor—and asked the three principal characters in each to share how they found one another and worked together to make their...
Twenty-five years after poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange founded the Dark Room Collective as a community for established and emerging African American writers, members have gathered for a reunion tour that celebrates the DRC’s rich history and far-reaching influence in the literary world.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter and Joyelle McSweeney’s Percussion Grenade, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
In a fight against the controversial Arizona House Bill 2281, which effectively bans ethnic-studies classes and curricula, novelist Tony Diaz and other members of the Texas-based arts advocacy group Nuestra Palabra have formed a network of writers and supporters to raise awareness about the impact of the bill and to counter its effects with initiatives such as “banned book bashes” and the building of underground libraries.
Despite worries that digital media sounded the death knell for serious, immersive reading, publishing platforms such as the iPad, Kindle, and Nook have given rise to single-sitting works—longform journalism pieces, single stories, and short novellas—that have broad reader appeal.
Small Press Points highlights the innovative and can-do spirit of independent presses. This issue features Stoneslide Books, a recently launched fiction press looking for narratives that prompt readers “to think, to ask questions, to move the mind forward.”
Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue’s MagNet features Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism, Fairy Tale Review, and Unstuck.
In this issue we offer a look at a new, illustrated translation of the Antigone of Sophocles. Antigonick, a collaboration between poet Anne Carson and poet and artist Bianca Stone, was released by New Directions in May.
As he steps into his new role as the NEA’s literature director, Ira Silverberg speaks about the books that first drew him to literature and how he’s currently serving the field at the nation’s largest art organization.
Fiction writer Jami Attenberg shares her experience using social-media platform Tumblr and offers advice to authors who want to get started themselves.
Three authors who followed very different paths to publication in 2011 speak about what they learned after their books were published, including hard lessons about publicity and reviews, readings and events, and advertising and sales.
What’s in a name? Contributor and verbal-identity consultant Margaret Wolfson examines the inventiveness and linguistic energy behind brand naming, an industry that welcomes the skills of poets, writers, and linguists.
With “real world” concerns vying for one’s attention, it’s all too common for disciplined writing to fall by the wayside. Contributor Jennifer Baker writes about how she beat the odds and learned to carve a space in her life for her first love.
