It’s Your Everybody-But-China, Tariff-Free BookWag!
Great Reads From Penn Jillette, Katie Kitamura, David Denby, Joanna Miller, and More...
Dear Wags,
Book publishing is an easy industry to romanticize. It’s not quite the business that once employed and indulged Ursula Nordstrom, Maxwell Perkins, Sonny Mehta, Judith Jones, or Robert Gottlieb. Then again, it was never the cozy haven generations of liberal arts majors have imagined.
Whether you're hawking words or making widgets, there’s a bottom line—and publishing margins are notoriously unforgiving. Long before this parlous economic moment, the New York book world had already winnowed itself down to something flinty and spare. If it ever was a tweedy club for eccentrics, that era ended decades ago.
Like all media industries, publishing became huge, globalized, and corporate—then splintered and shrank with digital disruption. Today, it fights for relevance in a pitiless arena, hoping a handful of celebrity authors and iffy social media metrics can goose profits. What makes the book trade exceptional isn’t these transformations—it’s that, despite them, gifted writers still write, here, there, and everywhere.
Every writer knows their vocation is irrational. Alongside its loneliness and pain, they’re now prodded to become mini–Sheryl Sandbergs: lean in, build your brand, and shill on every platform. But they also know that memorable books defy formula. If publishing is necessarily a business, writing remains an imperfectable human art.
Great writing—regardless of the author’s follower count—hinges on vulnerability and sacrifice. Even the most successful books rarely deliver on their authors’ wildest expectations. As Ursula K. Le Guin put it, “Writing makes no noise except groans.”
Beneath that groaning—even from the most hardened writer—is something more poignant: the hope of being discovered and cared for. What writers seek isn’t just compensation. It’s something closer to love.
Galactic want fuels great creativity—but it lies beyond what publishers can fulfill. Even the best agents and editors can’t deliver what so many writers secretly long for: to be lifted into an untouchable stratosphere, beyond terrestrial hurt.
Intellectually, the writer understands the agent is a mercenary looking for a piece of the action—that’s the job. We accept that a realtor doesn’t love our house the way we do, that she works on commission and is eyeing the next hot neighborhood. But we expect the agent not just to see commercial potential, but to slay an endlessly regenerating army of doubt.
No wonder these relationships are so fraught. A friend of your correspondent has a big-time agent—let’s call her Alessandra. She is rich, glamorous, and a known name in the book world. She swept into her client’s life when the writer was young. Their partnership has limped along for decades—a project here, an abortive proposal there—without the breakthrough either of them hoped for.
The writer, a serious artist in an impossible market, crafts short stories. Alessandra, a harried businesswoman in a collapsing industry, needs to sell a book about Bravo’s Below Deck. The writer bears her marginalization with grace. At least she can say her agent is Alessandra—or someone polite in Alessandra’s office.
Would it have been different with another agent? Would someone less high-profile have championed her off-center ideas more tirelessly, fighting harder to make her name—for a slice of a modest advance? Does the writer want a bestseller, or a more elusive kind of validation? With each year, the odds of a cinematic ending get longer. An artist, no matter how successful, would do well to let those fantasies go.
Writers will always look for love in all the wrong places. If the future still makes room for literary stars, traditional agents and editors will likely play a diminished role in launching them. That won’t stop dreamers from hoping a well-meaning stranger might change their lives simply by believing in them. It’s hard to shed a belief in fairy godmothers. But whoever represents you, do be careful with your heart.
Yours ever,
Stewart Swinton
Big Chief by Jon Hickey.
American politics was supposedly healthier when more power rested with small communities. Hickey explodes that idea in his crackling debut.
The Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe may number only a few thousand souls in northern Wisconsin, but there’s no shortage of betrayal, backroom deals, or moral compromise. Mitch Caddo, a weary family court lawyer, finds himself helping his old buddy, tribal president Mack Beck, hold onto power by any means necessary. That includes smearing critics and doling out favors funded by the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino.
Enter native activist Gloria Hawkins, who challenges Mack’s regime with the help of his estranged sister Layla—Mitch’s ex-girlfriend, naturally. As election day looms, the dirty tricks escalate into threats, violence, and federal scrutiny. Hickey populates his political noir with a vivid, sympathetic cast, each grasping for control as the reins slip through their fingers.
—Bernadette Manuelito
Audition by Katie Kitamura
Kitamura’s new novel is a tense, elegant meditation on family, performance, and the unknowability of those closest to us. A celebrated actress meets Xavier, a handsome younger man, for lunch in Manhattan. At first, the nature of their connection is ambiguous—possibly romantic. Then he claims to be her son. She has questions. And a devilishly difficult play to rehearse—one that eerily echoes her divided loyalties and tangled past.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to CultureWag to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.