2 April 2018
Working as a literary agent means being privy to a full canon's worth of submitted novels that the world will never see. Naturally, a good many of these pitches will always be chasing the news. Writers want their stories to seem timely, so if there's a debate happening in real-world headlines that somehow mirrors the conflict in their book, I'll hear about it in the query letter. In past years we now retrospectively call "normal," these tie-ins were scarce or partial, with the political parallels presented merely as subtext or metaphor; maybe the government in the otherwise fully fictional story looks a little like our real one, or the plot's inciting tragedy feels reminiscent of some recent national trauma.
