In Our Authors' Own Words

"There is a particular kind of quiet that surrounds a small novel once its first season has passed. For a long time I assumed that quiet was simply the shape of the book's life. What Avery and her colleagues did was patient in a way I had not seen before. They did not translate the novel into a slogan. They did not ask me to become anyone else. They read it, then read it again, and slowly began placing it into the hands of the readers most likely to sit with it. A year later, the letters I receive still surprise me. Many of them begin, 'A friend told me about your book.' I know now who those friends are, and how carefully they were chosen."

"Practical note, for anyone weighing this: they do the work, and they do it without theatre. My book is not an easy sell. It never has been. Most people who take it on end up trying to smooth its edges until it sounds like something else. Avery's team refused that entirely. They wrote about the novel as the novel is, plot, city, weather of the thing, and they wrote it in language that respected the reader. The result was straightforward. Readers arrived who had never previously bothered with a book of mine. They arrived with their own words for what they had found. That is the whole measure of it for me. Good, unshowy work, well delivered."

"I want to try to say this honestly, because I have not had many chances to. My novel came out a long time ago. It found a small, devoted readership and then, as these things do, went quiet. I had made a private peace with that. Writers learn to. So when Avery & Co. spoke about a revival, I braced for the usual language, launches, campaigns, momentum. None of it came. What came instead was a slow, careful reintroduction to readers who, it turned out, had been waiting without knowing it. The reprints followed. The letters followed. And something inside me that I had put away, some belief about the book's life, quietly returned. I am grateful, in a way I don't quite have the words for, that they treated an old book like a living one."