Laura McGrath, assistant professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, in Middlemen reveals the critical role in the making of American literature, from the famed three-martini lunch to the Frankfurt Book Fair,  and shows how agents influence what we read and explains why many debut novelists never publish another book, why agents champion short story collections even though they sell poorly, and how agents advocate for writers of colour in a system that values whiteness, and why there are so many New York novels. Middlemen demonstrates that agents-eighty percent of whom are in fact … Continue reading Jackal and gatekeepers to the world of American literature