The hidden tastemakers of the literary world Literary agents are more important than readers give them credit for June 4th 2026 COCKTAIL PARTIES have seen worse pickup attempts. In 1989 Andrew Wylie, a literary agent, set his sights on Philip Roth. (“Every time I turned around, there was this guy,” the novelist later said. “I discovered what it was like to be a pretty girl.”) When Mr Wylie made his move, he declared that he could get Roth a three-book deal worth $2m. Later, over lunch, he formally wooed him. Roth was underappreciated by his publisher, Mr Wylie asserted, and his potentially lucrative foreign rights were being neglected. He could handle the rights to Roth’s 14 novels in 30 territories, which amounted to 420 contracts renegotiated every seven years. Roth’s revenue could increase by up to 500%. It was an offer the writer— who had a mighty reputation but a puny bank balance—could not refuse.
Mr Wylie is famous, infamous even, in the publishing world: he earned the nickname “the Jackal”, after persuading several authors to ditch their agents and join him. When he wanted to expand his network of contacts in China, he went so far as to call Henry Kissinger to suggest that he could become his agent and that Kissinger should write a book on China. That book went on to sell well, and Mr Wylie gained footing and a stronger Rolodex for future business there. Mr Wylie’s strategy of focusing on foreign rights and sales “not only changed the fortunes of the writers on his list, but the shape of American literature abroad”, writes Laura McGrath, an assistant professor of English at Temple University, in a new survey of literary agents. Agents, Ms McGrath argues, have many functions. They are spotters, identifying promising writers. They are confidants, helping those writers to produce their best work. And they are negotiators, doing deals on behalf of authors and getting them more money so they can have more time to write. That means agents are often controversial figures within the publishing world. In 1897 a British publisher described agents as “generally a parasite”. (They take a commission of around 15% of an author’s earnings.) They retain an aura of mystery. The literary agent’s job is to “be invisible”, Ms McGrath contends, working behind the scenes to create a star and thereby shape what gets written and what people read. “Middlemen” is one of a pile of recent books offering a behind-the-scenes account of how literature comes to people’s shelves. Ms McGrath is a lively writer, eschewing academic jargon in favour of anecdotes. She heads to the world’s largest book fair in Frankfurt. She watches a group of agents evaluate the unsolicited manuscripts in the “slush pile”. (Every agent’s dream is to find a “Harry Potter”-like gem among the dross, as J.K. Rowling’s agent did.) She describes the evolution of the “publishing lunch”: Candida Donadio, who found Joseph Heller in the slush pile, once joked that she took three lunches in a day. (Today there are fewer stiff drinks and more talk about limp sales.) Agents try to devise creative answers to marketing problems. For example, how do you sell a book by an unknown writer? Sterling Lord, Jack Kerouac’s agent, started a trend when he worked with publishers to build hype around “On the Road”; they advertised Kerouac as “the voice of a new
age”. Agents ever since have hoped their debut novelists can make waves: first novels now account for between 15% and 25% of the fiction published every year. Many of these books fetch high advances that sales cannot recoup. Most American novelists now publish only one title. Literary agents are never objective, and their personal preferences shape what is printed. Because most agents and editors live in New York, in 2000- 22 more novels were set there than in the next 30 most populous American cities combined. And certainly the proliferation of agents—there are now more than 1,500 in America—has something to do with the proliferation of mediocre books. Many should have never have been printed. But what is striking, at a time when taste is increasingly shaped by algorithms, is just how much an individual agent’s judgment still matters. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/06/04/the-hidden-tastemakers-of-the- literary-world
Why you should never skip a TV intro Title sequences shape the way you watch television. They are dwindling June 4th 2026 Technology forges new art forms and destroys them. The printing press galvanised literature and rubbed out illuminated manuscripts. Cinema killed the music hall. Today a popular gizmo is threatening another intricate craft. The art form is the TV title sequence; the menacing tech is the little “Skip Intro” button that you reflexively click. The outcome is changing the way stories are told and watched on screen. Once upon a time, TV titles were simple cards displaying static text. By the 1950s they served as prologues, introducing characters and catchphrases: “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!” say the wowed onlookers in the opening of “The Adventures of Superman”. Titles incorporated cutesy animations (as in “Bewitched”), split-screen effects (“The Brady Bunch”)
and stunts (like the much-emulated bonnet-slide in “The Dukes of Hazzard”). Many came with earworm tunes, like the finger-clicking theme for “The Addams Family”. The form peaked in the era of prestige TV at the turn of the millennium. In the titles for “The Sopranos”, the protagonist, Tony, is glimpsed through cigar-smoke and in a rear-view mirror. He is close yet elusive, as he remains for six seasons. The falling figure in “Mad Men” (pictured) embodies both glamour and mental disintegration. Finest of all is the ghostly imagery in the first season of “True Detective”, a concise montage of its Louisianan themes: sleaze, pollution, faith, guilt and downright weirdness. Such ingenious sequences are at once a compliment and a brag. Your time is so valuable, they flatter the audience, that even the credits will be exquisite. The brag is about the show, for which, implicitly, only a sublime introduction will do. They are summaries, mood-setters and advertisements, deft enough to intrigue new viewers and resonate with returning ones. Like the overture to an opera, they are an integral part of the drama. Some of these shows aired without adverts, freeing up minutes for luxuriant openings. But the exigencies of streaming are changing. Adverts are creeping back, making time scarcer again. Meanwhile title sequences are an obstacle to binge-watching. Gorging fans do not need to be reintroduced to a story every hour. Many just want to get on with it. Thanks to Skip Intro, they can. Noticing that users were fast-forwarding manually through titles themselves, Netflix devised the button in 2017; other streamers followed suit. By 2022 Netflix viewers were clicking it 136m times a day. Since then intro-skipping has snowballed. Across all the output on the BBC’s iPlayer, use of Skip Intro in March was roughly double the level two years earlier. It has soared in the past six months. The underlying impatience is bad news for elaborate opening titles. “It sucks,” says one exponent of this haiku-like genre. Extended sequences are still airing. The cleverest are games or puzzles, such as the opening credits for “The White Lotus”, in which the lewd images flit away just before you decipher them. But briefer alternatives are on the rise. In “Pluribus”, a sci-fi parable, the title is formed by eerie, swirling dots; that
is all. Some shows are reverting to the plain cards of yore. In “The Pitt”, a hospital drama, this approach fits the air of austere verisimilitude. “Steal”, a heist thriller, has only a brief flash of its title. In the best known sequence of all, a tuxedoed man is tracked down the barrel of a gun. The James Bond titles will endure, as will others in cinema, where the audience is captive. But as they dwindle on TV, something is being lost. It isn’t just that—as in the new series of “The Night Manager”— they may be the best bit of a show. Shrinking them undermines cliffhangers: roll straight into the next episode and you can’t dangle in tingly anticipation for long. More than that, titles can be a kind of spell; discard them and you may miss the magic. Like the flight to a holiday or dressing for a party, a title sequence is an in-between moment. It eases you from your own world, slumped on the sofa after putting the kids to bed, into the imaginary world of the show, whether that is a louche office in the 1960s or a Cajun crime scene. It is a crossing on which you suspend your disbelief. Like making phone calls and shopping, watching TV has become immeasurably easier. These days you can see an abundance of programmes on a whim. Somehow, though, speeding things up has only made people more impatient; the yen for instantaneity is insatiable. If you are always hurrying, boundaries are skipped and nothing is special. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/06/01/why-you-should-never-skip-a-tv-intro