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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Feeling Anxious?



Anxiety is the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation 
and everything that is finest in human history.  

--Charles Frankel

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Acknowledgments:

This book couldn't have been written without the help of Pepto, Prilosec, my psychotherapist, and of course Xanax.

Anonymous said...

I'm feeling quite anxious and I have a request for you, WR.

Been a while since anyone has had any good agent gossip but some time back there was a discussion about how no agents today were like Binky Urban or The Jackal Andrew Wylie or even tried to be like them. Cynic that I am, I (alas) have to agree with that sentiment. I feel that "serious" writers are basically SOL right now.

And when I see stuff like the newest agent at Lippincott, Massie, McQuilkin who is responsible for "The Handjob Handbook: A Work of Non-Friction " (sorry) or the agent at Levine Greenberg who herself is writing some kind of "diarrhea cookbook" (sorry) or the young agent whose "cutting-edge" interests includes a new dictionary for descriptions of the sex act (sorry), well I get more than anxious.

So if you're soliciting another Ask LROD, I would like to know: who are the best serious literary agents out there now (under 65, please, but preferably under 50)? Any up-and-comers worthy of note, agents who wouldn't be caught dead peddling the above tomes? Or are all agents (especially the young ones) basically incompetent, rude idiots now, too?