Merve Emre

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Zakiya Harris

What happens when editors become the subject of satire? Zakiya Dalila Harris, who began her career as an assistant editor at Knopf Doubleday, is the author of the 2021 novel The Other Black Girl, a work of speculative fiction whose protagonist, Nella, is the only black girl, or OBG, to work as an assistant editor at a prestigious publishing imprint—until one day she notices a colleague she hadn’t before.

3 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre

I Am Charlotte Simmons, which many people believe to be Tom Wolfe’s crudest and most offensive book, played an important part in my moral education. When I think about the novel now, I think about a girl who used to go to the college bookstore for the express purpose of reading it. She would pick it up from the front display table, climb to the balcony, and sit on the floor behind a large white column that was broad enough to hide her from the clerks and the customers below.

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Fergus McIntosh

Fergus McIntosh is head of the fact-checking department at The New Yorker. He is also the first fact-checker I ever worked with at the magazine, for an essay about Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through. Working with McIntosh and the members of his team over the last five years has taught me how attentive, precise, and probing fact-checkers can be. Their department has also taught me what, exactly, a fact is.

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Jackson Howard

Jackson Howard, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is known for his vanguard taste in both fiction and nonfiction, a taste that has brought an array of new styles and voices to the forefront of the publishing industry. At FSG, editors are hired not just for their experience but for their distinct sensibilities, and a “Jackson book” can be recognized by its blend of playfulness and depth.

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Meghan O’Rourke

Meghan O’Rourke is a best-selling, award-winning poet, memoirist, and critic who also happens to be my neighbor. She is the person whose door I knock on when I want to discuss an idea for a book or rehearse the argument of an essay, or to gossip, or to propose a crazy, impractical scheme like opening an independent bookstore in our college town.