Dani Segelbaum began her publishing career as an editorial assistant at HarperCollins Publishers, focusing primarily on highly designed non-fiction titles. She ‘s worked as a literary assistant at New Leaf Literary & Media, working with established and debut authors. Dani joined Arc Literary in 2024 after three years at the Carol Mann Agency. Born …

Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of seven novels and one collection of short stories. Her books have been on many “Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into 30 languages. Romantic Comedy is her latest. It was picked for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club in 2023 and it’s now out in paperback. She joi…

Tracy Sierra was born and raised in the Colorado mountains. She is an attorney who currently lives in New England in an antique colonial-era home complete with its own secret room. When not writing, she spends time with her husband and two children. Nightwatching is her debut novel and was the Spring pick of the Jimmy Fallon Book Club. Tracy joins …

Ann Leary has led an extraordinary life. Married for over 30 years to actor and comedian Denis Leary, Ann has walked red carpets, partied with stars, and traveled the world, all while sustaining her own rich career in writing. But she’s also relatable to the everywoman. She’s struggled with alcoholism. Struggled in her marriage. Struggled with her …

Roxana Robinson is the author of eleven books—seven novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The Southampton Rev…

Megan Miranda is the New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls; The Perfect Stranger; The Last House Guest, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick; The Girl from Widow Hills; Such a Quiet Place; The Last to Vanish; and The Only Survivors. She has also written several books for young adults. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from MIT…

A.J. Jacobs is the author of nine books including the NYT bestsellers The Year of Living Biblically, The Know It All, Drop Dead Healthy, and The Puzzler. His latest, in the spirit of The Year of Living Biblically, is The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning. A.J. joins Marrie Stone to…

Hank Phillippi Ryan is the USA Today bestselling author of 15 novels of suspense. She has won multiple prestigious awards for her crime fiction, including five Agathas, five Anthonys, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. She’s the on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, and has won 37 EMMYs, 14 Edward R. Murrow awards, and dozens o…

Debut novelist Ela Lee is author of the breakout novel Jaded, published in the US by Simon and Schuster and in the UK by Vintage. Prior to becoming a novelist, Ela was a litigator who grew up in London. Ela joins Marrie Stone to talk about a lot of writerly topics, including writing about sexual violence and misogyny in the post #metoo movement, wr…

Alexander Sammartino was born in Rhode Island, grew up in Arizona, and now lives in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Syracuse University. His debut novel, Last Acts, was published by Scribner in January and was selected as a New York Times’ Editors Choice. Last Acts has been described as “hilarious and wrenching,” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune,…

Jill McCorkle is the author of seven novels, two which came out on the same day in 1984 and, her most recent, Hieroglyphics, to great acclaim. Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books and four of her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories. Her essay, “Cuss Time,” originally published in The American Scholar, was …

Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, and These Women, a The New York Times best thriller of 2020. These Women was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The Edgar Award, California Book Award, The Macavity Award, and the International Thriller Writers Award. Wonder Valley won the 2…

Steve Almond is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. You can check those out here. His recent books include the novel All the Secrets of the World, which has been optioned for television by 20th Century Fox, and William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Lif…

Hannah Sward, daughter of the late poet Robert Sward, is the award-winning author of Strip, her debut memoir. Hannah has appeared on NBC CA Live, C-SPAN BookTV, dozens of podcasts, and panels, and has published essays in the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost (forthcoming), Arts & Letters, and more. Hannah lives in Los Angeles where she is working on her …

Katherine Heiny has traveled one of the more interesting roads into publishing we’ve heard in a while. She was published by The New Yorker at the incredible age of 25. Praised as a prodigy, her work appeared in an anthology alongside Alice Munro, Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie. And then she disappeared. She popped back up two decades later when she…

Madeline is an agent and assistant at Janklow & Nesbit looking for fiction that bridges the gap between commercial and literary, upmarket thrillers and grounded speculative stories that explore the ideas of family and home, and queer stories. She's also looking for select narrative nonfiction. Madeline began her agenting career in 2018 as an intern…

Téa Obreht is the international bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award when she was only 25. Her second novel, Inland, was an instant bestseller, won the Southwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Téa’s latest is The Morningside, ou…

Grant Faulkner, the former Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the co-founder of 100 Word Story, and the co-host of the podcast, Write-minded. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. His stories have appeared in The Southwest Revi…

Mona Simpson is the bestselling author of seven novels including Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, Casebook and, most recently, Commitment. Mona studied poetry at Berkley. She got her MFA from Columbia. During grad school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademo…

CeCe Lyra, a literary agent at P.S. Literary Agency, represents adult fiction and nonfiction. She is especially looking for clients with whom she can build fruitful, lasting relationships. CeCe believes that stories are empathy-generating machines capable of healing, connecting, and enacting true change. As a mixed-race Latinx immigrant, CeCe under…

Louise Kennedy may not have been a name you’d heard five years ago. Since 2021, she’s had both a debut novel and a collection of short stories published. Trespasses was named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her story collection The End of the World is a Cul De Sac came out to great a…

Andrew Ewell, the author of the new novel, Set for Life. He’s received fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and VCCA France. His stories and essays have appeared in Salon, the Chattahoochee Review, Five Chapters, and TriQuarterly, among others. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Boston University and taught creat…

Kristin Hannah is the award-winning and bestselling author of more than 20 novels including the international blockbuster, The Nightingale. She also authored the NYT bestsellers The Great Alone, The Four Winds and, most recently, The Women, which shares the largely untold tales of women in the Vietnam War who served in the nursing corp. Warner Brot…

Literary agent Emma Dries is a writer and editor, and an agent at Triangle House Literary, where she represents literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, and academic crossover, with a special interest in climate writing. She began her career in editorial, working with bestselling and award winning authors at Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday, Ecco, and Fla…

Pulitzer Prize winning author Hisham Matar’s debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and The Guardian First Book Award and won numerous international prizes. His prize-winning memoir, The Return, published in 2016, received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. It was one of The New York Times' top 10 books of the year. He’s…

Melissa Broder is the author of the novels, Death Valley, Milk Fed, and The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and five poetry collections, including Superdoom. Her books are translated in ten languages. She has written for the New York Times, Elle.com, and New York Magazine’s The Cut. She lives in Los Angeles. Melissa chats with Barbara De…

Bonnie Jo Campbell, known as the “master of rural noir,” is the author of eight books. Her story collection, American Salvage, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. Her 2011 novel, Once Upon a River, was made into a film in 2020. In this episode, Bonnie chats with Marrie Stone about her h…

Kathleen Schmidt, founder and CEO of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations, has experience in all aspects of the industry, including as a publicist, literary agent, acquisitions editor, and ghostwriter. Her career encompasses 30 years of creating and directing impactful and strategic global media, marketing, and branding campaigns for politicians, A-Li…

Lisa Gornick has been hailed by NPR as “one of the most perceptive, compassionate writers of fiction in America…immensely talented and brave.” She is the author of four previous novels—most recently The Peacock Feast and Louisa Meets Bear. In this episode, Lisa chats with Marrie Stone about her latest novel, Ana Turns. Ana is turning 60, which is c…

Matthew Carnicelli is the president of Carnicelli Literary Management, located in New York City and the Hudson Valley. He represents bestselling and award-winning authors publishing books in the areas of history, current events, sports, business, memoir, biography, health, literary fiction, and graphic novels. Since becoming an agent in 2004, he ha…

Jayne Anne Phillips’s first book of stories, Black Tickets (published in 1979 when she was only 26), won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Featured in Newsweek, Raymond Carver pronounced Black Tickets “stories unlike any in our literature…a crooked beauty” and establishe…

Mark Tavani started his publishing career in 2000 with Ballantine Books and spent more than 23 years with Penguin Random House, Bantam, Del Rey, and G.P. Putnam's Sons. He edited bestsellers and award-winners across numerous categories of fiction and nonfiction, including books by Jim Abbott, Steve Berry, C.J. Box, Justin Cronin, Clive and Dirk Cus…

Nathan Hill first came on the show in 2017 with his ­best-selling debut novel, The Nix, which was named the #1 book of the year by Audible and Entertainment Weekly, and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate, and many others. Wellness came out this year. It’s also a New York Times bestseller and was sele…

Matt Coyle, author of the new novel, Odyssey’s End, is the author of the best-selling Rick Cahill crime novels. He knew he wanted to be a crime writer when he was 14 and his father gave him The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler. He graduated with a degree in English from University of California at Santa Barbara. His foray into crime fiction…

Back in the 80s, literary agent Susan Golomb plucked Jonathan Franzen’s manuscript from her slush pile. They’ve worked together ever since. She founded the Susan Golomb Literary Agency in 1988 with Franzen as her first client, and joined Writers House in 2015. Susan represents other notables such as Glen David Gold, William T. Vollmann, Rachel Kush…

Kim Foster is the author of the memoir The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City. Kim is a James Beard Award-winning food writer who writes about people at the intersection of food and mental illness, family separation, poverty, addiction, trauma, and incarceration. You can read her work on her weekly newsletter on Substack and find he…

Betsy Amster is the principal agent of the Betsy Amster Literary Agency, which she opened in 1992. Located in Los Angeles, the agency handles publishing rights and all ancillary rights such as film, TV, audio, electronic, and foreign. They work with both first-time and established writers and represent literary fiction, upscale commercial women's f…

Clémence Michallon, author of The Quiet Tenant, was born and raised near Paris, France. She studied journalism at City, University of London, received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, and has written for The Independent since 2018. Her essays and features cover true crime, celebrity, culture, and literature. She divides her…

Angie Kim came to fiction in her 40s, after careers in both law and business, and some challenging years mothering three boys who each faced medical complications. Her debut novel, Miracle Creek, won the Edgar Award, the ITW Thriller Award, the Strand Critics’ Award and the Pinckley Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by Time, Th…

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of the novel, Thirteen Question Method. His other books include Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. For Library of America, he has edited Didion: T…

Shelley Read’s debut novel, Go As a River, published last February to instant international bestseller success. The story follows 17-year-old Victoria Nash through the mid-20th century as she endures grief, hardship, and loss in her western Colorado town. It’s a coming-of-age novel, an environmental novel, and a novel about displacement and reclama…

Ben Purkert is the author of the poetry collection, For the Love of Endings. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He is the founder of Back Draft, a Guernica interview series focused on revision and the creative process. He holds degrees from Harvard and New York University, and he currently teaches a…

Lisa Teasley is the author of two novels (Heat Signature and Dive) and two short story collections (Glow in the Dark and, most recently, Fluid). She joined Marrie Stone to talk about her latest collection, Fluid, which publishes on September 26th. Along the way, she shared why she gave up publishing for over 15 years (although she never gave up wri…

Ashley Audrain’s debut novel, The Push, was an instant New York Times bestseller. She has served as the publicity director of Penguin Books Canada, and prior to that, worked in public relations. She lives in Toronto, where she and her partner are raising their two young children. The Whispers is her second novel and a #1 international bestseller. A…

Anne Enright is the author of eleven novels, including the 2007 Booker Prize winner The Gathering. She’s written many short stories and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. She also served as the first Laureate of Irish fiction from 2015 – 2018. Anne joined Marrie Stone from Galway, Ireland to talk about her latest no…

Halley Sutton is a writer and editor who lives in Los Angeles. She graduated from Otis College of Art and Design with a master's degree in writing, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in creative writing. Her first novel, The Lady Upstairs, was published by Putnam in 2020, and was nominated for a Lefty award. Her second nove…

Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter (My Favorite Year, Welcome Back, Kotter), Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist whose work with creative people has been featured on CNN, NPR, and in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. He’s also the author of the popular nonfiction book, Writing From The Inside Out. His mystery fiction has appeared in…

Julie Schumacher is the author of nine novels, including five for younger readers. Three of her adult novels follow Jason Fitger, an English professor at an obscure midwestern liberal arts college known as Payne University. Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement and, now, The English Experience all shine satirical light on academia and…

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of thirty books of fiction, including, most recently, The Harder They Come (2015), The Terranauts (2016), The Relive Box (2017), Outside Looking In (2019), Talk To Me (2021) and I Walk Between the Raindrops (2022). He received a Ph.D. degree in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1…

Ellen Keith is the author of the international bestselling novel, The Dutch Wife and, most recently, The Dutch Orphan. Both novels take place during the WWII occupation of The Netherlands. Ellen joined Marrie Stone from her home in Amsterdam. They discussed finding new stories in saturated literary topics, why third person works well for historical…