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This week, we guide you to an interview with Lorin Stein of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stein discusses FSG’s approach to acquiring, editing, and marketing books while taking a stab at his approach to finding new talent:

I get about a dozen manuscripts a week, plus maybe a dozen proposals and foreign books. Anything written in English, and not sent to me by mistake, I start. Unfortunately my rejection letters have been getting shorter and shorter the more stuff I get—and, especially, the more stuff I get by email.

Stein also weighs in on the Sam Lipsyte story, discussing Home Land and it’s long strange journey to publication:

For a long time it baffled me. Lipsyte’s novel made me weep with laughter. And not just me. I saw hardboiled critics almost reduced to wetting themselves at Sam’s readings. Critics and fellow editors. And I knew three out of four of my parents would like it, which is a very good predictor of mass appeal. It just didn’t make any sense that nobody wanted to publish the thing.

Then when we acquired Home Land as a Picador paperback original—after it had made rounds of the hardcover houses—I discovered that about one in every six readers didn’t think the book was funny. This I blame on genetics. Some people can’t tell the difference between cilantro and the taste of soap, some people don’t think Sam writes funny. The trouble with a book like Home Land is, if you don’t think it’s funny, you really won’t be able to find anything nice to say about it. It is—apart from being funny—angry, obscene, nostalgic, sentimental, outlandish, exhausting. I sympathize with that one reader. That reader feels the same way I feel about J.P. Donleavy. Puzzled, bored, and embarrassed all at the same time. And left out. Most of all, left out and humorless. Nobody likes to feel humorless.

For this reason, I can only guess, Home Land was vulnerable to the committee system. At each of the twenty-four houses where the book was turned down, I imagine a handful of junior editors turning toward someone at the head of a long table, their faces aghast, and one of these junior editors piping up—in shock and dismay—”You mean… you don’t get it?” And that being the end of that.

• From the Editors @ Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Lorin Stein – A champion of the “outwardly eccentric” on mass appeal, the Home Land saga, and the strange economics of FSG. (Subscription required)
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux