Read Muse: A Novel for Free Online

literature; or Dmitry Chavchavadze, the larger-than-life Georgian poet; and Australian Padraic Snell; and St. John Vezey, South Africa’s national bard, and … and … and … The list was practically endless. There was something about its homemade, familial—or was it paternalistic?—feeling forwriters that made the shabby-chic firm fatally appealing to Paul. Each of their books was a sacred object. Paul was in love with Caroline Koblenz’s elegant jackets and typography that paid subtle homage to the work of W. A. Dwiggins, the genius behind Knopf’s magisterial bindings and settings, which had long ago set a never-to-be-equaled standard in book design. He loved the heft of the books in his hand. He loved the colors of their bindings. He loved how they smelled.
    A few years later, after he had worked with a number of presentable if far from immortal novelists and journalists at HW, there had at last been an opening in Homer’s editorial department and, with yet another assist from Morgan, Paul had been able to make the leap. Homer took him out for a ceremonial lunch at his daily watering hole, the Soft-shell Crab, where they each downed a shot of vodka followed by the Crab’s popular wasabi tuna burgers. Paul reported for work two weeks later.

III

Home at Last
    Paul had felt at home the moment he’d walked into the boxed-in, ill-lit P & S lobby. The place looked more like his idea of the offices of a porn magazine (there seemed to be one upstairs, down the hall from the rehab center on the eighth floor) than a temple of contemporary literature. A broken couch and frosted glass dividers fought for attention with certificates for the National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and National Book Critics Circle Awards won by house authors appended helter-skelter over the receptionist’s rickety desk alongside less prepossessing announcements, like the American Book Designers Federation 1969 honorable mention for typography. P & S specialized in Nobel Prizes, in fact, but there were no plaques for them, just the gold medals that Paul had noticed on Homer’s desk during their interviews. Later that morning, he was given a cubicle on the south side of the hallway (Homer had called it “a nice office with a window” at lunch), equipped with a boxy Korean computer console and a telephone, both of which appeared to be in working order.
    Manuscripts from literary agents would show up in neatgray or powder-blue boxes on his pockmarked old school desk, or in battered manila envelopes if they were coming from writers without representation, and he’d read through them with the requisite show-me detachment. In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write. Ninety percent of the time, box or no box, he or she could not. Every so often, though, the words would cohere, the sentences would follow one on another with lockstep plausibility, and Paul would begin to feel an unsettling combination of elation and fear—elation at the linguistic and psychological aptness of what he was reading, and fear, as he went on, that this undeniably gifted writer would veer off and spoil her creation before he could finish the stack of pages.
    When, miraculously, the work was actually fine, Paul would run into Homer’s office half crazed with excitement, shouting, “We have to do this!” Which, remarkably enough in Paul’s experience, was music to Homer’s ears. “Go, go, go, baby!” he’d shout back, as if cheering on a two-year-old at the track. Paul would hondle, as Homer put it, with the writer’s agent over the advance—usually no more than $25,000 or $30,000 in those days—and often enough, mirabile dictu, the manuscript, and its author, would be theirs to coax and hover over and massage into a living, breathing printed and bound novel or book of stories or poems or essays or work of reportage that could be trumpetedto booksellers and reviewers and that increasingly endangered