While browsing in search of an agent who accepts e-mail queries, I stumbled into the website for Dystel & Goderich, but Michael Adelman was not there any more.
What's happening at Jane Dystel's firm? Kate McKean disappeared into a black hole when she went there, and now Michael Adelman has been erased from the staff list. Are they floating out in space, along with Lynn Whittaker and Kristen Auclair from the old Graybill and English agency?
Publishers Marketplace is always running notices for job openings in publishing. Can one presume that these disappearing agents turn up at the big houses, transforming into acquisitions editors so that they can be the ones to dispense the rejections? Can you blame them? After getting turned down on manuscripts they love, don't you think they'd like the chance to be the ones discovering those hidden gems?
Then again, maybe they've had it with the whole business, where rich girls hire book packagers to put together something that nets a hefty advance while good writers get ignored because they aren't 'marketable' or celebrities.
Anyone with information on the whereabouts of all these agents who have gone missing? Have they been seen on the sidewalks of New York, willing to work for food as long as the labor does not involve publishing or books? Begging for loose change, living in flophouses - or possibly backpacking across Europe, in search of themselves and wondering what ever possessed them to get into the literary agent game.
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