TFA & Neon! From left to right: Kent Wolf, Lucy, Marin, Hannah This year, The Friedrich Agency made its way to our first ever AWP! Woooo! We’d been wanting to attend for ages, so getting to experience everything it had to offer was surreal, exciting, aaaand slightly overwhelming. But truly, it was heartwarming and serotonin-boosting to be in the same space with fellow literature lovers, writers, publishing professionals, booksellers—you name it, every single member of the book ecosystem. It was a literary lovefest and intoxicating to be a part of! In addition to our various meetings (and ..read more

Graphic Credit: Hannah Brattesani Molly ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ Molly ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ Molly ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ MOLLY: I know I have a reputation for fictionfictionfiction, with a particular weakness for debut fiction but this past year, my head and heart were drawn to non-fiction.  My personal reading goal is to actually finish M.F. K. Fisher’s essays, THE MEASURE OF HER POWERS.  W.H. Auden once said that he could not think of anyone writing in the United States who wrote better prose that Mary Frances Fisher and that’s a good enough recommendation for yours truly!  I also have a we ..read more

We’re saying goodbye to one of our fantastic interns and wanted to share a mini blog post with her thoughts on the internship. We’re so thrilled for Anna as she continues on in the industry in her new role as an editorial assistant at S&S and will miss her desperately! If you had told me in February that, come October, I’d still be an intern at The Friedrich Agency, I would have probably made a gently horrified expression. If you’d clarified, though, that I would feel totally at home in the company of five whip-smart agents (who also happen to be wonderfully kind women) and fulfilled by my ..read more

Graphic Credit: Hannah Brattesani Hannah ☆ Hannah☆ Hannah ☆ HANNAH: It’s funny, that route you take to pick up a book. It’s not the linear cartography of choosing, say, a cheddar or laundry detergent. It’s circuitous, and as informed by mood as it is by all the other factors that have led you there: 1. It’s 36 hours until I set off for a four-day trek through Death Valley and I’m standing in Shakespeare & co. invoking some desert muse, asking that she choose my campfire reading for me. I think moonscapes, I think isolation, I think nothing too scary because rustling juniper and rattlesnak ..read more

Let’s set the scene: Lucy has just gotten back from LA; it’s near midnight and she’s dying for a slice of pizza ?. But oh no! With a groan, she realizes she’s forgotten her house keys back on the other side of the country. Screw it, she checks into a shady motel around the corner, wakes up to blinding sunlight and a call that lets her know… We have not one, not two, but THREE authors on the Booker longlist!!! Eureka! Congratulations Elizabeth Strout (Oh William!), Karen Joy Fowler (Booth), and Leila Mottley (Nightcrawling)! To add even more excitement: Leila is also the youngest author ever to ..read more

I don’t know about you, but all of us at The Friedrich Agency are so glad that this heat advisory has broken. And with the cooler, much longed for summer breeze comes news that’s equally longed for:    Ruth Ozeki has WON this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for The Book of Form and Emptiness! There was not a single dry eye in our office that day as we crowded around Lucy’s laptop to listen to Ruth’s acceptance speech. A long-deserved triumph!   'I'm a very good runner up, but I don't win things' Ruth Ozeki reacts to being crowned the 2022 #WomensPrize winner and discusses thi ..read more

A very happy International Women’s Day! I’ve basically spoiled this entire blog post, but we’re BEYOND thrilled and honored to announce that our own authors—Violet Kupersmith (Build Your House Around My Body) and Ruth Ozeki (The Book of Form and Emptiness)—are both longlisted for the Women’s Fiction Prize (formerly known as the Orange Prize), the UK’s most prestigious annual book award celebrating and honoring fiction written by women! The shortlist gets announced at the end of April, with the winner in mid-June. All of us here at TFA will be nervously biting our nails come April 27! These bo ..read more

Last Friday, all five of us at The Friedrich Agency donned our glitziest and glammest (but not too glam, y’know? Got to keep it chic) outfits that were collecting dust at the back of our wardrobes to trot over to the Center for Fiction to celebrate not one, BUT TWO of our authors! The lovely Jackie Polzin and Violet Kupersmith were shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize for Brood and Build Your House Around My Body respectively. Woooo! It was a wonderful night filled with cheer and lots of hugs. The air felt electric as we came together, for what seems like the first time s ..read more

Graphic Credit: Hannah Brattesani Following last year’s post, we thought we’d keep the tradition and briefly report on the reads that kept us sane as we traversed Year 2 (!!) of the pandemic. These are the books we reached out to for comfort, for pleasure, and to make sense of the rapidly-changing world we live in. HANNAH: You can keep your new book smell. Give me goooood book smell. In our house, a good book is a crime scene. A bath-wrinkled-subway-stinking-bagel-crumbed-greasy-thumbed crime scene. The most bedraggled looking paperback on my shelf from this year? Easy. NOTES ON A S ..read more

Graphic Credit: Hannah Brattesani In the past 18 months, I’ve spent a lot of time lamenting the brokenness of… literally everything. The other day, I had dinner with a friend who was told by a colleague that she was going to die of mercury poisoning (she loves eating fish). I told her we were all going to die of something—my CoD could be microplastics, a 3rd avenue sinkhole, or maybe heat exposure on the subway platform… How horrid! How morbid!  For a really long time, my default was to rage at the state that the world is in, of the Earth that’s been bequeathed to my generation ..read more