Kevin Duong
Tuesday March 26, 2026 | 5:00PM-6:30PM
Rifkind Center, NAC 6/316 (available via Zoom)
Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (forthcoming in April from Princeton University Press) takes readers behind the scenes to show how agents influence what we read. Weaving together archival research, data analysis, and interviews with scores of publishing professionals, it shows the work of agents–eighty percent of whom are in fact women–as advocates, matchmakers, negotiators, and tastemakers, who balance artistic values with the commercial imperatives of publishing conglomerates.
Laura B. McGrath is an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University. Prior to that, she works as the Associate Director of the Literary Lab at Stanford. She has written on books, publishing history, and data for academic venues as well as for The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
