In August 1978, Raymond Carver drove his rattletrap Ford station wagon from Plainfield, Vermont, to the University of Texas at El Paso, where the twice-bankrupt writer had been offered a badly needed job. He arrived by Greyhound bus, the car having broken down 120 miles from campus.
Not long after he had settled in, the phone rang. “Is Raymond Carver there?” asked the voice on the other end. “No,” Carver said. Only once he had been assured that the caller was an editor with Random House’s Vintage Books division named Gary Fisketjon, and not a debt collector, did Carver respond in the affirmative.
Fisketjon had just reviewed Carver’s second story collection, Furious Seasons, for The Village Voice, calling it a “considerable achievement.” His admiration for the book was matched only by his frustration with the author’s declining fortunes. Carver’s stories, which earlier that decade had run in Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, were now relegated to “various and sundry little magazines.” His first book, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, a finalist for the 1976 National Book Award, was published by the textbook giant McGraw Hill; the current volume by a small press in Santa Barbara.
“Publishing had hit a kind of stone wall,” Fisketjon, now 70, says from his home in Oregon. Inflation was raising the price of books while reducing demand. Mass-market publishers were buying less literary fiction, and trade publishers had cut their publicity budgets. A book which received little promotion and sold poorly in hardcover might not appear in paperback at all. Emerging writers such as Carver—or Don DeLillo, or Richard Ford, or Cormac McCarthy—were being set up to fail.
“There were no living fiction writers on the Vintage list when I got there,” Fisketjon says, still with a trace of astonishment. His plan to buy Furious Seasons for Vintage came to nothing, but in 1984, Fisketjon reprinted Carver’s fourth book, Cathedral, in an in-between format—better produced and more reader-friendly than mass-market, cheaper and less cumbersome than hardcover—known as trade paperback.
Cathedral was the first book in Fisketjon’s new series, Vintage Contemporaries. Its mission, as the oxymoronic name suggests, was twofold: to dress up current books as future classics, and to give older ones a stylish makeover. Of the seven titles on the inaugural list, three were new in paperback, three were reissues, and one—a debut novel by Jay McInerney, a friend of Fisketjon’s from Williams College and a student of Carver’s at Syracuse—was straight-to-paperback, or, as they called it, a Vintage Contemporaries Original.
“Initially, Jay wasn’t delighted by the idea of not coming out in hardcover,” Fisketjon recalls.
“I just thought, Shit, Hemingway didn’t do it that way,” McInerney says. “I didn’t want to be a second-class citizen. But I think it was probably the right decision, because the book went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.”
According to Gerald Howard, then an editor at Penguin, “the week after Bright Lights, Big City hit, all around town, people in editorial meetings were asking, ‘Where’s our Jay McInerney?’”
Fisketjon, meanwhile, continued his streak with two more breakouts in paperback original: Richard Russo’s Mohawk and Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. “My agent told me that I was ‘toast’ if this third novel didn’t work,” Ford recalled in The Writer magazine. “With Gary’s effort, it turned out well.”
“For a generation raised on baseball cards and Barbie costumes, Vintage Contemporaries have become the latest thing to collect,” AIR MAIL Co-Editor Graydon Carter reported in Esquire, and to many it was more than a passing fad. “While I know that a corporate brand isn’t necessarily a meaningful literary identity,” A. O. Scott wrote of the series in 2020, “I want to insist that, for some of us whose tastes and sensibilities were formed in the 1980s, this particular brand kind of is.”
Designed by art director Lorraine Louie, Vintage Contemporaries had a uniform look, somewhere between De Stijl and Memphis, involving white space, brightly colored modernistic type, a floating grid of Ben Day dots, and an illustration that wouldn’t be out of place on the cover of a prog-rock album. At the back of each book was a series checklist, which Simon & Schuster’s executive editor Sean Manning once likened to “a ballot for some Cooperstown of late-20th-century fiction.”
By the time Esquire put Fisketjon, then 33, in the “Red Hot Center” of its 1987 “Literary Universe” power chart, he had left Random House for Atlantic Monthly Press. In 1990, Fisketjon moved to Knopf, where he spent the next few decades working with Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Peter Carey, Annie Dillard, Bret Easton Ellis, Patricia Highsmith, Michel Houellebecq, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane, Haruki Murakami, Mona Simpson, Donna Tartt, Joy Williams, Jeanette Winterson, and Tobias Wolff, to name a few. “It’s almost easier to name the great writers he hasn’t edited,” Clay Risen noted in a 2006 profile for Nashville Scene.
“He’s arguably the greatest literary editor of our generation,” says Morgan Entrekin, the president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic. McInerney goes even further: “There aren’t that many editors who really had a hand in shaping the tastes of their times, and I think Gary was one of them. He’s up there in that Max Perkins cohort.” McInerney wasn’t the only one who thought so: in 2006, Fisketjon received the Center for Fiction’s Maxwell E. Perkins Award.
Then, on May 17, 2019, the industry newsletter Publishers Lunch revealed that Fisketjon had been fired for what a Penguin Random House spokesperson called a “breach of company policy.” The item was picked up by The New York Times and other outlets, but none of the follow-up stories contained any additional information.
“People I admired more than life itself all died in the saddle,” Fisketjon says. “So I didn’t waste any time wondering, What will life be like when I don’t have this job? To say I was ill-prepared for retirement would be an understatement.” He and his wife, Diana, an art dealer, sold their apartment in Lower Manhattan along with their house in Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee, and bought a place in Salem, Oregon, overlooking the Willamette Valley, about 10 miles from Fisketjon’s childhood home.
He kept in touch with his writers. He did a little freelance editing. He read a lot of books. He started renovating the new house. And that was about it, until September 15, 2024, when he received an e-mail from David Samuels with the subject line “Panamerica Books.” After introducing himself and Walter Kirn as co-editors of County Highway, an alternative newspaper founded in 2023 to cover non-metropolitan America, Samuels informed him that they were launching a new publishing house and hoped to bring Fisketjon on board.
“Some large percentage of the books that I’ve loved since I was 16 or 17 years old were edited or published by Gary Fisketjon,” Samuels says. “So when I thought about who I wanted as the sort of North Star of this enterprise, there was only one name that came to mind, and it came to mind immediately: What if I could get Gary Fisketjon? There was no second choice.”
More e-mails followed, then a series of long phone calls. On September 30, the two met for lunch in Portland, after which Samuels spent the night at Fisketjon’s before returning East. “He joked at some point, ‘Well, this is the end of the road,’” Samuels says. “It was a proud man’s joke. I don’t know that he expected to be living back in Salem, Oregon, at his age. On the other hand, the last thing he did was jump at the opportunity that I offered him, because he didn’t know who the fuck I was.”
“Good Training for Publishing”
Fisketjon grew up on a mink ranch. “It’s good training for publishing,” he says, “because you work very hard, long hours, and you don’t make any money.” His parents were of Norwegian descent, “Lutheran to the bone.” After graduating from a local public high school, he attended the University of San Francisco on a partial scholarship based on good grades and a knack for golf. His three woods were sheathed in mink covers made by his father from damaged pelts.
At the suggestion of a teacher who thought he might get more out of a liberal-arts education, Fisketjon transferred as a sophomore to Williams, in Massachusetts. “I remember Gary throwing a cigarette into my pitcher of beer at the Purple Pub, and me getting up to fight him,” McInerney recalls. “The next thing I remember, we were best friends.” It was at Williams that Fisketjon first encountered great books by writers who weren’t already dead. American literature, he realized, was still being written.
The summer after their senior year, Fisketjon and McInerney went on a cross-country road trip, with stops in Oxford, Mississippi, to visit William Faulkner’s house, and Lynchburg, Tennessee, to tour the Jack Daniel’s distillery. Then Fisketjon went back to Oregon, where he worked at a cannery and a convenience store before applying to the Radcliffe publishing-procedures course. “They made you sit alphabetically,” says Entrekin, who was also in the program. “I’m an E and he’s an F, so we were fated to be friends and partners.”
In September 1977, Fisketjon got his first publishing job, at William Morrow. The following spring, he was hired as an assistant to Jason Epstein, then the editor in chief of Random House, and in 1980 he was promoted to editor. The first book he acquired, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
“In those years, the New York literary-and-media world was run by mainly men from the Northeast Corridor who had all gone to the same prep schools and Ivy League colleges,” says Entrekin, a native Tennessean. But Fisketjon never bothered to disguise his origins. Visitors to his office sat in a Mission rocking chair. Manuscripts were held down with a bear skull. “It was always very clear that he was a man of the West,” McInerney says. Author Jim Shepard notes that Fisketjon “had pretty good clothes, but he always looked like he might have just rolled down a hill.” As Howard puts it, “I don’t think he had a charge account at Brooks.”
Fisketjon was a regular at Odeon and Nell’s. He hosted book parties at Area (for McInerney), Limelight (McGuane), and the Palladium (Ford). Bret Easton Ellis cast him as the Peter Lawford of the literary Brat Pack. “Gary was glam,” Howard says. “How many book editors are glam?” Even so, “Gary wasn’t as wild as we were,” Entrekin told The Oregonian. “You couldn’t produce the body of work he has if you were staying out all night.”
By all accounts, Fisketjon is nothing if not thorough. He works on one manuscript at a time, with a green pen, at a rate of five pages an hour. Not every writer appreciated the sheer volume of these notations. Some, notably Ford and Tartt, eventually dropped him as an editor (though each sent a statement praising his abilities). The many more who stuck with him valued his attention to detail, however forcefully they disagreed with some of the particulars.
“Occasionally it gets very heated,” says McInerney, whose next novel is dedicated to Fisketjon. “But in the end, Gary always says, ‘It’s your name on the cover,’ so I get the final vote. Although he has saved me from a few dubious choices.” Fisketjon’s motto, according to Tobias Wolff, is “I propose, you dispose.” Author Joshua Furst remembers him laying down two rules up front: “He said, ‘If you reject all my edits, I’ll never work with you again. And if you take all my edits, I’ll never work with you again.’”
Unlike Gordon Lish, the former fiction editor of Esquire, who saw in Carver’s early stories something he could “fuck around with,” Fisketjon approached each new effort on its own terms. “I don’t really have a notion of what a good book should be, except that it should be good,” he told Nashville Public Television.
“There was never a page of mine that didn’t have this green spiderweb of edits,” Russo says. “But it wasn’t with the intention of making the book more like something he thought it should be. Gary wanted to be the champion of your book, not its co-creator.”
Old Habits
When Fisketjon got his start in publishing, Entrekin notes, “Scribner was owned by a Scribner. Macmillan was owned by the Macmillans. Random House had been sold to RCA in 1965, but [co-founder] Donald Klopfer was still around.” Very soon, though, “all these mid-size independent companies started to either merge, acquire each other, or be acquired by large media businesses.” Random House was sold again in 1980 to the Newhouse family, and then once more in 1998 to Bertelsmann, which merged it with Penguin in 2013 to create the biggest of what were now the “Big Five” publishers.
Established in 1915, Alfred A. Knopf had been acquired by Random House in 1960. Yet well into this century, even though its offices were located inside the global headquarters of its multi-national parent company, itself a line on the balance sheet of an even larger conglomerate, it was run by publisher and editor Sonny Mehta like the house it was founded as. “There was a sense of longevity being useful,” Fisketjon says, noting that when he first joined Knopf, the editor in the next office over had been there for 57 years. “Publishing certainly did change,” says former managing editor Kathy Hourigan. “Knopf didn’t change.”
The old ways were maintained, for better or worse. Smoking was prohibited at Penguin Random House, but you wouldn’t know it in Mehta’s office, or Fisketjon’s. Drinking at lunch, a long-ago publishing tradition, was still the custom for a few veteran editors, Fisketjon in particular. In the late afternoons, he could often be found roaming the halls, sometimes visibly intoxicated, looking for a colleague to drop in on.
Fisketjon’s habits were frowned on but tolerated, partly because everybody knew he had done so much for the company, and partly because of Mehta’s hands-off management style. But when Penguin Random House adopted a new, zero-tolerance policy for complaints of workplace harassment, the fuse was lit.
Fisketjon is legally prohibited from talking about his firing, and the employee who filed the complaint against him declined to be interviewed. To fill in the missing details, I spoke to six of their former colleagues, none of whom wished to be named or quoted directly.
On a spring Friday in 2019, Fisketjon came back from lunch noticeably drunk. Instead of buttonholing one of his peers, he stopped by the cubicle of a young woman in the publicity department. I was told that she felt trapped.
At some point, Fisketjon put his hands on her shoulders. This was something he had done many times before, to men and women alike. His older colleagues were emphatic that it was always a friendly gesture, and never a sexual one, but Fisketjon was woefully out of touch with evolving professional norms, and for this employee, the contact was decidedly unwanted.
She reported the incident to her supervisor, who notified human resources, who informed management, who called legal. When the word came down the following Monday from Madeline McIntosh, the head of Penguin Random House U.S., that after 29 years Fisketjon was out, Mehta refused to deliver the news himself, so the job fell to someone in H.R. “Sonny was distraught,” Entrekin says. “I know he was, because I talked to him.”
There was broad acknowledgment among the former Knopf employees I spoke to that Fisketjon’s drinking has become a liability, not to mention a growing risk to his own health. At the same time, they were critical of the company, whose decision struck them as rushed and unnecessarily punitive, a reflection of its desire to avoid a lawsuit at all costs. Nobody told me the young woman was wrong to have spoken up. They felt, instead, that Fisketjon should have been allowed to keep his job if he agreed to go to rehab. (Penguin Random House did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)
After Mehta, who died that December, the deluge. Reagan Arthur was named publisher of Knopf in 2020 and fired in 2024, but not before several of the imprint’s longest-serving editors, a group that included Ann Close, Kathy Hourigan, Andy Hughes, Jonathan Segal, Victoria Wilson, and Shelley Wanger, were offered an early-retirement package, part of a company-wide cost-cutting initiative. (Segal continues to edit for Knopf on a year-to-year-contract basis.)
A bid to buy Simon & Schuster from Viacom was blocked by an anti-trust suit, leading to the resignations of several senior executives, including McIntosh and Penguin Random House C.E.O. Markus Dohle.
“It might not have been his intention, but Gary got out at the right time,” says Paul Bogaards, Knopf’s longtime publicity director, who left in 2021 to start his own P.R. firm. “Publishing is not what it used to be. The problem today is there’s no esprit de corps. At Knopf, it died with Sonny.”
Fast Forward
Fisketjon is now sober. Alcohol “wasn’t something my diabetes particularly cared for,” he says, adding, “If there’s something I can do perfectly, I want to do it perfectly, and that was a complication that fell short of perfection, certainly.”
“Do I enjoy it? No, not as much,” he concedes. “But I don’t think that radically changed my life in any respect. I’m smoking my fifth cigarette since we started talking, and occasionally I even think about that. But there’s knowing it and there’s doing it. Until then, you’ve got to retain some pathetic little vice.”
Very quickly, Fisketjon discovered that freelance editing didn’t suit him. Getting paid by the book incentivized him to say yes to everything, against his better editorial judgment. “And if you don’t really love the book you’re editing,” he says, “you’re a terrible editor for it.”
When Samuels contacted him about Panamerica, Fisketjon confessed that he wasn’t familiar with County Highway, so a box of back issues was delivered to his doorstep. Fisketjon says he was “strongly impressed” with the paper, even if he didn’t go along with every contrary opinion espoused in its pages. “Is it a plus? It’s fine with me,” he says. “I think it’s a healthy thing, because we have the total all-in-or-all-out thing going on—politically, socially, and in every other respect—and you can see what good that’s done this republic.”
Fisketjon is now the literary editor of Panamerica. Its publisher is Donald Rosenfeld, the Missouri-born film producer and former president of Merchant Ivory Productions. Alex Perez, a onetime college-baseball player and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the imprint’s associate editor.
“I could tell in his voice when I talked to him the other day, he is so happy to be back editing books again,” Segal says of Fisketjon. “I don’t know the people involved in it very well, but I know who the beneficiaries are going to be: the writers he works with and the readers who read those books.”
Earlier this week, Fisketjon joined Shepard, who has a short story in the current issue of County Highway, and Lee Clay Johnson, whose second novel, Bloodline, is the first to be published under the Panamerica imprint, for a sold-out event at the bookseller McNally Jackson’s South Street Seaport location. Fisketjon appeared leaner than before, but he was easily recognizable in a white snap-button shirt and blue jeans, his perennially longish hair grazing the collar of a loose-fitting striped jacket. It was the ninth of 35 stops in a two-month roadshow to promote the new venture. Fisketjon will be along for about half the tour, in a rental car with Johnson behind the newspaper’s all-purpose white van.
“I think this is an interesting experiment,” Entrekin says, “and getting Gary to do it is a complete coup for them. In a way, it’s not that far from what he was doing with Vintage Contemporaries, addressing that problem of branding—because the ways that we’ve used to bring readers to our books for decades aren’t working much anymore.”
Given that in this country there are between 500,000 and one million books commercially published each year, one might reasonably wonder whether there is any unmet demand for their product. But as Shepard says, “People are worried not so much about are there enough publishers out there, but are there enough publishers who haven’t been gobbled by the same conglomerates?” With Panamerica and its sister imprint, Hard Cider Press, which will publish mostly nonfiction, he says, “you’re going to get some off-the-wall theories, but at least you’re outside of the homogeneity.”
For Fisketjon, the advantages of independence are self-evident. “We can do what we want,” he says. “Nobody will be asked to undergo … I think they’re most often called ‘sensitivity readings.’ Um, I published American Psycho.”
What about the widely reported and endlessly dissected death of the novel? “You know, I got so inured to being in marketing meetings, hearing somebody who might have worked in publishing for four years saying, ‘This is a really hard time for literary fiction.’ I just want to say to them, ‘Well, I started in publishing in the late 70s. I heard that then, and I’ve heard it every minute since.’”
Ash Carter is a Deputy Editor at Air Mail and a co-author of Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
