CURRENT CLIENTS
Jonathan Capehart
“Everything we do in life is an audition for something else.” – Jonathan Capehart
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart is widely known for his work focusing on the intersection of social and cultural issues and politics, and for being a steadying and empathetic voice in broadcast news. But long before meeting with success as a journalist and opinion editor, Capehart spent his boyhood growing up without his father, shuttling back and forth between New Jersey and rural North Carolina, contemplating the complexities of race and identity as they shifted around him. His was a life in two worlds; one where he was too smart, the other not smart enough; one where he was too black, the other not black enough. Capehart recounts his journey in his memoir, YET HERE I AM: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home, coming from Grand Central in May.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Robert Caro
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
It has been an eventful few years for Mr. Caro. The New-York Historical Society's permanent exhibition continues to draw record crowds, all of whom are coming to see Caro’s notes, letters, artifacts, and marginalia from his decades of work as a reporter and biographer. The Caro archives, in which readers will find unbounded treasures, officially opened in 2024, and their preservation is already proving to be a vast resource and inspiration to historians, reporters, and students alike. Also in 2024, The Power Broker celebrated a unique milestone: its fiftieth anniversary in print.
 
Turn Every Page, about Caro’s relationship with his longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb, directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, has become one of the most popular literary documentaries ever produced (note the glowing reviews.)
 
Amidst all this fanfare, Caro continues his work on volume five of his LBJ biography with limited interruption.
Laura Delano
“The more I suffered, the more medical treatments I was convinced I needed, but the more treatments I received, the more I suffered.” – Laura Delano, UNSHRUNK: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance
In 1997, as an angry, despairing, self-injuring fourteen-year-old, Laura Delano saw her first psychiatrist. At the end of their first session, he told her she had an incurable condition called Bipolar disorder and would need to take psychiatric drugs for the rest of her life.
For the next thirteen years, Laura became a something captive of psychiatry and prescription drugs, seeking treatment from the best psychiatrists and hospitals in the country, accumulating a long list of diagnoses and a cabinet full of medications. Delano had questions about her diagnosis and treatment but, given her struggles and suicidal tendencies, adhered to the pharmaceutical regimen (nineteen different drugs over time). When her symptoms only worsened, doctors declared her condition so severe as to be “treatment resistant.”
Demoralized by her circumstances and inability to get well, Delano went back to her lingering questions about her initial and subsequent diagnosis. . . .What if her life was falling apart not despite her treatment, but because of it?
Delano’s memoir, UNSHRUNK: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (coming from Viking in March), is a deeply personal and sobering account of her long struggle as a psychiatric patient and her subsequent road to recovery (I first came across Laura’s story in this piece by Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker).
Weaving Delano’s long personal struggles with medical records, doctors’ notes, an investigation of modern psychiatry, and research on the drugs she was prescribed, Unshrunk questions the dominant, rarely critiqued role that the American mental health and the pharmaceutical industries play in shaping in our wellness and what it means to be human.
“A must-read for anyone probing the dark side of mental health treatment.” — Anna Lembke, MD
The Didion Dunne Literary Trust
We had the great fortune of working with Joan Didion for two decades. She is a writer whose books we turn to again and again.
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We are working with the Didion Dunne Literary Trust to keep her work front and center for readers. We’ve designed a Joan Didion website—joandidion.org—that features writing, photographs, and ephemera from her archive, and we will be launching an Instagram account for Joan Didion that includes letters, notes, photographs, manuscript pages, artifacts, and memorabilia. 
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The New York Public Library recently acquired the papers of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. The dual collection comprises the couple’s literary and personal papers, offering a rich documentation of their careers and intellectual legacies. Our team will collaborate with the NYPL to share letters, photographs, screenplays, and other memorabilia from the collection with a wide audience when the archives open in 2025.
Sarah Hoover
Sarah Hoover is an art historian, writer, and cultural critic. She holds a master's in Cultural Theory from Columbia and a BA in Art History from NYU. She served as a director at Gagosian gallery for fifteen years. Her writing has appeared in ArtNet, New York, and Vogue, which is how I came to know her (this piece in Vogue hooked me). She also writes about art (and more) on Substack.
Sarah's memoir, The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood, about marriage, pregnancy, gynecologists, postpartum depression, bad men, and motherhood, is coming from Simon Element in January 2025. “For 11 months after my son was born,” Sarah writes, “I suffered a depression so pervasive and thick that it made my brain dim and heavy and practically unusable. I’d be tearful for hours, if not days, not quite understanding what was making me so upset, unable to climb out of the hole of despair I was hiding in. Yet I felt I was expected to smile and regurgitate platitudes about the beauty of motherhood and my love for my new baby. Of course, I felt none of that. I mostly felt disoriented, lonely, and like none of my clothes fit.”
All of this, and more, informs her memoir. Vaginas: “It’s complicated that the site of female pleasure is also the site of immense discomfort, pain, and trauma.” Children: “The kid was objectively a tiny worm, even worse, a worm with my nose.” Men: “Everything bad in my life is because of entitled, shitty men.” I didn’t think it was possible to write a memoir about postpartum that made people laugh and cry, but somehow, Sarah has done it.
When I asked her who she sees as the reader for this work, she replied, “Anyone interested in changing the traditional narratives about motherhood and the female experience. Postpartum sucked, but it gave birth to a whole new me. It opened all the cracks in the narratives around motherhood. I want women—and people who give birth, who are not all women—to feel like, whatever their narrative is, it’s O.K. That’s my goal with this book. And extra credit if you loved Valley of the Dolls” (I do, in fact, love Valley of the Dolls, and can’t wait for Sarah’s forthcoming memoir).
Literary Arts, Portland OR
“Every shared moment of curiosity, hope, and intelligent discussion is an antidote to the anxiety of the times.”
—Portland Book Festival attendee
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Paul’s work with Andrew Proctor, the Executive Director of Literary Arts, dates back more than a decade. Paul was always excited to bring authors to Portland because the events Literary Arts put together were extraordinary, as was the throughline to the community. The national footprint Andrew and his team have built in Portland means that readers and writers and publishers across the country now see it as an essential destination. It is a central resource in the Pacific Northwest for tens of thousands of readers and writers. The programmatic development over the past ten-plus years has reinvented the basic structure of the community-based work that is also national in scope.
Over the next several years, Literary Arts will be spearheading multiple initiatives in their community and beyond, and will be making several major announcements in the months to come. Paul is thrilled to be working with Literary Arts, and helping to spotlight these initiatives.
Roxana Robinson
Roxana Robinson is the author of ten previous books—six novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, and two as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Tin House, and elsewhere.
Her most recent novel, Leaving, a resonant and stunning story about love and desire, about parenthood, and the tether of family, was published to extraordinary acclaim early in 2024.
One of the things I love about this novel is that it places older lovers at the heart of the narrative—something few novels (novelists) do. “I’m interested in exploring life’s claims on us as we grow older,” Roxana told me. “Marriage. Children. Jobs. Home. We have responsibilities and others who depend on us. Our lives are no longer our own. But there is a moment when the texture of our life changes—children gone, wisdom gained—and we are free to choose what we want from life, as opposed to living up to others’ expectations.”
Leaving is a powerful work that reaches a shattering conclusion, and Roxana's appearances in support of the novel have galvanized audiences across the country. The paperback goes on sale in March 2025 with Roxana continuing to make appearances (check her website for the latest schedule).
Tertulia
Sometimes, clients find you, and boy oh boy did Paul feel lucky that the founders of Tertulia found him. When they presented the work they were doing on book discovery, Paul immediately recognized both the importance of the work and the potential for the app they were building.
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The Tertulia app enables readers to discover and purchase books in a new way—one that has the additional benefit of rewarding readers with a stake in the company. Publishers have been trying to harness the conversational energy about books taking place across the web for years.
Tertulia is the first company to have done this at scale. Using both AI and editorial curators, Tertulia is aggregating book mentions, tweets, posts, reviews, ratings, and conversations from across social media, podcasts, and the web, and condensing all the content into an information-rich bundle for readers. Tertulia provides book lovers with a clear signal from the noise, distilling “word-of-mouth” discovery (the holy grail of publishing) into an app.
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Our collaboration with Tertulia has been layered from the outset, providing wide-ranging advice on strategy, suggestions for the app, tactics in the run-up to launch, setting up preview meetings with authors, agents, and publishers, and landing a tentpole consumer story in the New York Times and a trade story in Publishers Weekly.
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Tertulia recently extended our contract work with them, and we are thrilled to be their partner in this exciting new chapter for readers, authors, and publishers.
Brenda Wineapple
“There are always more questions to ask and answers to discover.” – Brenda Wineapple
Brenda Wineapple is an award-winning historian, literary critic, essayist, and the author of eight books. Her work is widely acclaimed, and her ability to synthesize literature and history in narrative is without precedent. When writing, Brenda begins with a question she feels hasn't been answered in a way that satisfies her—or hasn't been asked at all. One of the things I love about her work is how she takes events from our past and contextualizes them in our present, and nowhere is this more evident than in her most recent book, KEEPING THE FAITH: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted America. Here, Wineapple examines a pivotal episode in American history—the 1925 trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a public school in Dayton, Tennessee. The trial exposed profound divisions in America over freedom, censorship, religion, individual rights, and the meaning of democracy (that was then, but it sounds like America now). “This new account of the Scopes trial and the forces that propelled it,” writes Linda Greenhouse, “is so timely as to be almost eerie in its relevance.” And Jon Meacham says, “This wonderful book sheds light not only on the battles of the past but on the unfolding struggles of the urgent present.” 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial.
