YOUR CAREER ON THE LINE
IF THERE is one milestone in a writing career capable of launching a thousand daydreams and anxieties at once, it’s when a literary agent calls to discuss representation. Known among writers as simply “the call,” this phone conversation could potentially change a writer’s life by leading to representation and, if all goes well and the stars align, a book deal.
The call has attained such mythic importance that authors who have experienced it can often recount, with perfect clarity, where and when it all went down. I fielded my first agent call for my novel, , published in March by Dutton, during my lunch break at work, where I reserved an entire eighty-person conference room to ensure I’d have privacy. Vera Kurian, whose debut novel, , will be published in September by Park Row Books, invited two writing friends to her apartment so they could listen in on her end of the conversation. “Like we were in middle school and I was talking to a boy,” she recalls. And when Julie Carrick Dalton, author of (Forge Books, 2021), received her agent call on Halloween, she fixed her gaze on a bowl of Kit Kats to ground herself. “It felt like the earth was moving under my feet for a few
