Authors Lunch

Loan Le is a senior editor at Atria Books. She edits layered upmarket fiction and stylish, literary fiction with genre propulsion. Her talented authors have received recognition from the Scotiabank Giller Prize (Canada), the Center for Fiction, the New York Times, Thrillerfest, the Bram Stoker Awards, and more. When Loan is not working as a book editor, she is writing. Her most recent book is Solving for the Unknown, a companion novel to her debut A Pho Love Story. You edited this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, which has the unusual format of being […]

The Mortons. (Pamela Dorman Books, July 21. Editor: Jeramie Orton. Agent: Jill Grinberg.) Scott Westerfeld is the author of 12 New York Times bestsellers, including the multimillion-selling young adult series The Uglies. Westerfeld’s books have won many awards and been named New York Times Notable and ALA Best Books of the Year. Justine Larbalestier is the author of Liar, My Sister Rosa, and six other young adult novels. Her books have been named ALA, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year. She is also a vintage fashion obsessive and (very) part-time model. How was the publishing process for your first […]

Yahdon Israel is a cultural strategist, editor, and founder of The Compound Collective and the School of Cultural Stewardship. Formerly a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, he works at the intersection of literature, culture, and community to steward important ideas into use for the people they are meant to serve. He is the creator of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that brings literature and fashion into conversation to make books accessible and aspirational. Yahdon is also the creator of The Fiction Revival, a reading community inspiring heterosexual men to read more fiction, and the Advanced Readers Club, a cultural institution […]

Offseason. (Astra House, May 5. Editor: Emily Bell. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary.) Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and other publications, and has received support from Yaddo, the Granum Foundation, and the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She was the winner of the 2023 DISQUIET Literary Prize and a 2023–2024 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Avigayl received her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX, where she was the fiction editor of […]

Valentina Rice has been vp, sales and marketing at Bloomsbury Publishing overseeing sales, marketing, publicity and rights across adult, children’s and special interest since 2018. Before Bloomsbury, she spent 15 years in international sales at Penguin and left in 2012 to found an online marketplace for artisanal food. She returned to publishing in 2017 to launch Zaffre Books in the US, an imprint of Bonnier. It can be surprising for authors to realize how long the publication process takes, even when a manuscript is already completed. Can you explain what goes into that timing—selling to bookstores, planning marketing, pitching media, […]

The Complex. (Viking, March 10. Editor: Allison Lorentzen. Agent: Jin Auh, Wiley Agency.) Karan Mahajan is the author of The Association of Small Bombs, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His debut novel, Family Planning, was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He has been selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, […]