- “Why, why, why would a company publish a book this good and then practically demand that people not read it?” he asks. “Why not put the heroine on the jacket… [and] “sell this baby a little?” – Stephen King on FIELDWORK by Mischa Berlinski, Entertainment Weekly
- “[H]ow do you sell someone as strange, original and indisputably non-American as Roberto Bolano in a U.S. market surrounded, as [Susan] Sontag once wrote, by a “wall of indifference to foreign literature” — a market in which…less than .5 percent of the books published are fiction in translation?” – Bob Thompson on THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES by Roberto Bolano, The Washington Post
The answer: You’re FSG! Your name does all the work! Media comes to you, not the other way around! You don’t have to worry about selling oodles and oodles of copies because your name is your brand (something that HarperCollins and Random House would probably kill for, by the way.) You sit in your ivory towers and ruminate on why the general population can’t possibly understand the virtues of poetry and highbrow intelligentsia and make very, very sure to state over and over that, no we couldn’t possibly publish chick lit in any way, shape or form. Can’t anyone understand? Won’t those mainstream media nincompoops get with the program?! You’re FSG! You rule the literary Britannia!