Category Archives: Miriam

June 23, 2010   DG&B   Miriam, nonfiction, opinion, reading  
4

Relevant much?

by Miriam

Amidst the usual panicky, hyperbolic, and sometimes comical publishing headlines to be found throughout the blogosphere—“Is Fiction Culturally Irrelevant?” “Holly Golightly Is a Call Girl…” (for reals?); “Are Publishers More Worried about eReaders Than Readers?”—the one that caught my eye yesterday was “Where Have All the Mailers Gone?” In this piece, Lee Siegel essentially argues that fiction has no contemporary giants who push the artistic envelope, no rabblerousers who shine their penlights on dark and murky social issues, no literary prodigies able to hold their own against ascendant nonfiction writers who are telling true tales in stylish and entertaining ways (what fiction writers used to do during their glorious heyday).

Ridiculous!

This is the kind of piece that makes me think someone’s more interested in being provocative than making sense (and, really, the piece itself is somewhat incoherent). I love reading Michael Lewis’ work and thoroughly enjoy the political narratives that pass for nonfiction these days (Game Change comes readily to mind) as well as all the Gladwellian theory-of-everything books and the edge-of-your-seat adventures that routinely dot the bestseller lists. But c’mon! What about Dave Eggers? Jonathan Franzen? Jhumpa Lahiri? Joshua Ferris? Junot Diaz? What about Stieg Larsson and Alexander McCall Smith? Is Mr. Siegel really saying that to be “culturally relevant” you have to live your life in the press and stir up more controversy because of your public bouts of immaturity than your writings? (As far as I’m concerned, Norman Mailer’s art was all too often obscured by his life.)

In an age when reality is too much with us, today’s great fiction writers allow us to escape the oppressiveness of the literal while putting our life and times into digestible and often brilliantly entertaining context. What’s more culturally relevant than that?

June 16, 2010   DG&B   fun, lists, Miriam, reading  
34

Reading can be not fun

by Miriam

Reading this fun piece about books that have been “described, whether by critics or the authors themselves, as the Ulyssi of their respective cultures” made me remember how much I loathed James Joyce’s masterpiece when we spent what seemed like five years studying it in a graduate school seminar. Maybe it was our professor’s vaguely fascist insistence that this was a masterwork surpassing all others, or my exhaustion at the tautological discussions of the gorgonzola theme in the book, but this class may have influenced my decision to forgo getting a Ph.D. and venture into the publishing business instead.

We’ve all come across books that other people consider the most, the best, the greatest and that we found unreadable. Here are my top five what-are-people-thinking-when-they-rave-about-them-or-force-you-to-study-them-in-school books (the list is, of course, subject to change):

The Iliad
The Scarlet Letter
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Catcher in the Rye

What are yours?

June 09, 2010   DG&B   bestsellers, fun, Miriam, opinion, our clients, trends, vampires  
10

From Vlad to RPatts

by Miriam

Around these parts, everyone knows that my love of vampires long precedes the Twilight phenomenon. Robert Pattinson was probably still in diapers when I was falling in love with Anne Rice’s Lestat and I remember then-starting-out agents at DGLM rolling their eyes at me when I suggested that they fill their lists with vampire books. One who took me seriously was Jim McCarthy and he’s got the delightful and talented Richelle Mead and her Vampire Academy series, among others, to show for it.

Thing is, it made sense for people to be skeptical. Before Stephenie Meyer re-energized the vampire tale with her sparkly bloodsuckers, this was a tired literary standby. As Meg Cabot reminds us vampires have been around longer even than Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, and, throughout the ages, they have preyed on our imaginations precisely because they traffic in the two most powerful human preoccupations: sex and death.

I’ve been hearing a lot about The Passage, Justin Cronin’s contribution to vampire lit (the description of which makes me think of a cross between 28 Days Later and The Road), including Stephen King’s over-the-top praise of the novel. It’s expected to be one of the summer’s blockbusters. We publishing people are forever trying to predict trends (a fool’s game in the best of times), and we at DGLM often ask ourselves whether the vampire mania is subsiding or getting ready for yet another resurgence. Is it too late to be signing up yet another vampire novel? Or am I right in thinking that this genre will, ahem, never die?
What do you all think?

June 02, 2010   DG&B   fun, Miriam, nonfiction, opinion, why we are agents, writing  
7

The right match….

by Miriam

One of the myriad things we do around here is come up with book ideas. Then, we try to match those ideas with the appropriate writers, help them develop the concept, and hopefully sell the resulting proposal to a publisher for big buckaroos.

“Well, duh!” you might be thinking right about now. “That’s what you agent types are supposed to do.”

And, yes…well, yes. But creating this perfect match between idea and writer is harder than you might think. It can be immensely frustrating to come up with an idea that could be the next Tipping Point only to come up empty in terms of who will be the next Malcolm Gladwell. When we look to our client list to create a match, we often fail. The client in mind might have the right credentials but is probably working on his/her own book and won’t be available until that is delivered. He or she might also just have no interest in the subject we’re so excited about. The other approach is to go out and find journalists, professors, bloggers, etc., and pitch the idea to them in the hopes that it sparks their interest. And, of course, they have to be available – not represented by another agent or busy with another book project.

This type of matchmaking is time consuming and often fruitless but when it works, it’s immensely gratifying. There’s nothing better than seeing your brain child go out into the world and make good.

Right now, for instance, I’m looking for someone who can write lucidly and anecdotally about mathematics and philosophy to do a book on “guesswork”. Any takers?

May 26, 2010   DG&B   BEA, bestsellers, fun, galleys, marketing/publicity, Miriam, reading  
4

Galley tales

by Miriam

It’s BEA week (check this out for an overview of the conference if you’re not familiar with it) which means that some of us are at the Javitz Center checking out publishers’ exhibits, schmoozing with authors who are in from out of town, and loading up free tote bags with galleys of books that are already generating buzz.

For me, the point of BEA has always been collecting those galleys. Invariably, I find myself walking the huge expanse of the Javitz arena ridiculously bogged down by the weight of too many of these advanced readers copies only to realize when I leave the building that getting from 11th Avenue to civilization requires a very long walk to the nearest subway or an endless wait for a cab. No matter. It’s still a thrill to read something in this vulnerable, unfinished format (complete with typos and mostly exaggerated promotional information on the back cover) and then watch the published book race up the bestseller lists, win a huge prize, or both.

I just came across this old piece from New York magazine and was delighted to see how many of those galleys I’d picked up at the 2007 BEA went on to gaudy sales and great acclaim.

Are any of you attending BEA this year? What galleys are you walking away with?

May 19, 2010   DG&B   Miriam, opinion, reading, writing  
10

Literary pablum…

by Miriam

This NPR piece about aphorisms and proverbs, made me think of the acquaintance who frequently utters the phrase “a fine tooth and comb” (as in “I went over that document with a fine tooth and comb”) to my endless chagrin and secret delight, or my four-year-old whose impressive vocabulary sometimes stalls on him and who ends up asking for a “drum ball” before an important announcement instead of a “drum roll.” But it also reminds me how much I hate the tired, meaningless cliches that authors occasionally resort to out of laziness or haste.

Do you ever find yourself reading something and being so put off by the author’s use of throwaway platitudes that you put the book down and turn on the tv? Or is it just me?

May 12, 2010   DG&B   fun, Miriam, reading  
23

Words, words, words

by Miriam

Looking back it’s amazing I survived my childhood without much in the way of bullying or even name calling. I was a humongous geek with a penchant for reading the dictionary (and the World Book Encyclopedia) and then holding forth on my discoveries about everything from glaciers to Millard Fillmore or using words like “sesquipedalian,” just because they rolled so trippingly off the tongue.

To this day, I can pick up a dictionary and get hopelessly lost in definitions. When I found this piece on one of my random Google searches that led to other searches I was delighted to be reminded that other people enjoy the dictionary as an entertainment, not just reference, source. Lots of us geeks out there, huh?

‘Fess up! Do you read the dictionary for fun? What are your favorite “finds?”

May 05, 2010   DG&B   children's books, favorites, fun, lists, Miriam, reading  
13

A horse is a horse, of course, of course….

by Miriam

Sometimes, when watching NickJr. with my four-year-old, certain imponderables are raised: How come there’s a preponderance of cartoon pigs? Why do Little Bear’s parents wear Victorian clothing while LB himself walks around stark nekkid? Why is Dora the Explorer so irritating? One thing that always comes up with either the tv shows or when reading a book with my precocious little fellow is the fact that there are lots of animals who walk, talk, and think like humans. When we recently added a standard poodle puppy to our household, it was funny to see my son addressing himself to her as if she were another kid, explaining why she had done something wrong and he was annoyed or trying to make her understand the rules of a game he wanted to play with her. I wonder whether these interactions were informed by the expectation that Cleo the dog would suddenly respond not with an “Arf, arf” but with a perfectly formed sentence in the Queen’s English.

This lovely piece in the Guardian discusses animal characters in literature. But it doesn’t explain why Little Bear’s parents wear clothes.

May 04, 2010   DG&B   advice, fun, future of publishing, Miriam, opinion, why we are agents  
22

We all just wanna have fun…

by Miriam

Jane and I were meeting with a prospective client yesterday, a lovely young woman with a great book idea and lot of good questions about the agent-author relationship. In the midst of explaining who we are as an agency, and why and how we do things, Jane mentioned that few authors, even those who are successfully published, end up getting rich from their efforts. So, the goal, she said, should really be to have fun with the process. The comment stuck with me. Even though “Have fun!” may seem to be as much of a platitude as “Have a nice day!” the sentiment is one that I wish more people in our business would take to heart.

In the midst of gloom and doom predictions about the industry as a whole, flagging book sales, the terrifying juggernaut that is the electronic revolution, and the fact that readers are dumber, more distracted, cheaper, unable to read more than a couple of Twitter feeds at a time—fill in the blanks with whatever the wags are wagging about at any given moment—it’s hard not to take what we all do as seriously as a migraine. Happily, we at DGLM are lucky in that, as a group, we’re fairly sophomoric in our sense of humor and more delighted than most by the absurdities and ironies inherent in the publishing process.

Yes, we do keep a binder with samples of the worst query letters ever sent, we treasure anecdotes about authors behaving badly and editors throwing office furniture at their assistants, we are inveterate gossips, and we spend way more time than we should chortling over pictures of the Mr. Romance contest at the Romantic Times conference. Does this mean that we don’t consider our work and that of our clients and potential clients important? Not at all, it means that in order to be good at what we do, we have to have perspective and even a sense of play. A potentially disastrous conflict between an author and a publisher can be defused by reminding both sides to “Lighten up! It’s not brain surgery.” And, our jobs are infinitely more engaging when we remember that before we were agents, editors and “serious” writers, we picked up books because they provided a world of fun.

Bottom line is that if we allow ourselves to forget how much joy there is in the vigorous exchange of ideas, in the beauty of a perfect sentence, and in the collaboration with brilliant people to create content that inspires, instructs, and entertains, then we might as well cash in our chips and leave the table. Meanwhile, we’ll keep doing what we do until it’s no longer fun.

April 28, 2010   DG&B   marketing/publicity, Miriam, opinion, our blog, social networking, writing  
27

Is blogging killing writing?

by Miriam

Being the chatty bunch we are here at DGLM, we spend almost as much time talking about whether we should be blogging as we spend actually blogging. For us, the issue is the time it takes to come up with a blog topic on our allotted blogging day each week, the time it takes to find an interesting story to comment on, the time it takes to write our post, the time it takes to read the ensuing comments and respond, if appropriate or necessary…. In short, all of us are conflicted about how much time away from our always reproducing piles of work blogging demands. And, yet, we do it because you can’t be a forward thinking outfit in this day and age without a blog presence (secretly, some of us even enjoy the interaction with our readers and followers).

This piece in the Daily Beast is interesting in that it raises another topic. Is blogging making writers less able to write anything with more substance than a People magazine article? Is it imperiling long, satisfying narratives, replacing them with the literary equivalent of gossipy chit chat?

Obviously a lot of people are worried about the fate of the publishing business. But what about the fate of literary works and the actual craft of writing?

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