Last year, the literary magazine Tin House conducted an interview with Daniel Menaker, the former Random House executive editor-in-chief who hosted the online literary talk show Titlepage last year. You’ll have to get a copy of the print edition for the full conversation, but the online excerpt does offer Menaker’s reflections on how he came to find so many great new writers as an editor, with a nod to his roots as a fiction editor at The New Yorker
“In 1987, when Robert Gottlieb arrived as editor [at the magazine], that’s when a good many of those new names began to appear, and the reason they began to appear is that the thumb of caution on the fiction department was lifted. Bob would read anything. He took the handcuffs off language and content in a way I thought was long overdue. Bob didn’t care. If he liked it, he’d say, ‘Let’s go ahead.’ His sensibility about new voices happened to be similar to mine, and that was the most fun.”
He also admits that he wasn’t quite prepared for just how different his job at Random would be from his magazine position: “The ratio of my editorial work to other work—meetings and positioning and so on—went from 80/20 at the New Yorker to 30/70,” he recalls. “That’s 30 percent editing, 70 percent other stuff.”