The Stories We Tell And the Agents We Tell Them To (Essay)
Literary agents: can’t find one, wish you had one, wonder if yours is the right one. The web is full of complaints about agents, but fuller of questions about how to get one.
Anyone have experience with agent X, Y, Z? Is he/she trustworthy? Will they get behind my book and pitch it to publishers?
Then there’s the followup:
She loves my memoir but wants me to revise it.
He says my childhood needs tear-filled nights and more drugs.
They want Dad to swear and yell but he didn’t.
Those are harder changes for a memoirist than a novelist, who at least has latitude to invent. But how far should one go to meet an agent’s vision when it defies your own sense of the story you have to tell?
I must have been rejected by forty agents while querying my novel, Temper CA, about a woman, Joy, returning to the Gold Rush town where she grew up to attend her grandfather’s funeral. I wrote to agents who represented books like mine; agents recommended by a matching service (for a fee); agents I approached with recommendations from well-published friends.
Then I thought I’d found my soul mate. . . . Read More . . .
Literary agents: can’t find one, wish you had one, wonder if yours is the right one. The web is full of complaints about agents, but fuller of questions about how to get one.
Anyone have experience with agent X, Y, Z? Is he/she trustworthy? Will they get behind my book and pitch it to publishers?
Then there’s the followup:
She loves my memoir but wants me to revise it.
He says my childhood needs tear-filled nights and more drugs.
They want Dad to swear and yell but he didn’t.
Those are harder changes for a memoirist than a novelist, who at least has latitude to invent. But how far should one go to meet an agent’s vision when it defies your own sense of the story you have to tell?
I must have been rejected by forty agents while querying my novel, Temper CA, about a woman, Joy, returning to the Gold Rush town where she grew up to attend her grandfather’s funeral. I wrote to agents who represented books like mine; agents recommended by a matching service (for a fee); agents I approached with recommendations from well-published friends.
Then I thought I’d found my soul mate. . . . Read More . . .
Crossing the Street (Story)
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There was a day about four months after Harry's death when my grandfather Ben--Zadie to me--saw a boy who looked from the back exactly like his dead child. It was crowded where he walked along Roosevelt Road, with cars moving slowly in both directions, vendors lining the walkways. Stores extended out to the sidewalks, their pots and pans and chickens suspended on hooks, apples, lemons and lettuces in bins, socks and underpants still in the box. But it seemed the same beige jacket that Harry had worn for so many years, bought Zadie imagined off the same racks at Mandel Brothers. It looked like the same hair as his son, pale as hay, curling out at the ears. Even a little longer on the left side just like Harry's because of that nearsighted barber my grandma Ida (my Bubbie) took him to. And outside his jacket the boy was wearing what seemed like the same flimsy holsters weighted down low along his hips by two toy six-guns. The boy was ready for a showdown, though not quite ready at the moment my Zadie saw him. Just then he was staring down at his feet, balancing himself at the edge of the sidewalk as he dipped one foot up and down into the sludge of the gutter, his shoe dark with grime from the pool of winter snow below him in the street. . . . Read More . . .
The World Left Behind (Essay)
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I first met Saul Bellow on a dormitory wall. Pierce Hall, 55th Street, University of Chicago, September 1962. I was 18, the child of Jewish working-class parents who finished high school in the 1930s and left school behind to support themselves and their families. Mom was a secretary until I was born and again after I started high school. Dad worked for his uncle as what was called an "installment dealer." He sold goods to poor immigrant families like his own, mostly Spanish-speaking like his own. He drove all over the city, climbed to their fourth and fifth floor apartments to collect his payments––a dollar or two a week, on installments––and perhaps sell them more merchandise. When I learned to drive, I started working part of his route on Saturdays, and continued to go home periodically all through college to help when he needed me. . . . Read More . . .
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