I first started following Yahdon Israel through the Instagram feed of his Literaryswag Book Club, which he describes as New York City’s best-dressed book club. For almost ten years, Israel has convened a group of curious and stylish readers who have read over a hundred books together in an effort to reconcile the love of fashion with intellect. Or, as he puts it, “There’s always this dichotomy between ‘if you’re smart, you can’t really care about being fly. And if you’re fly you’re vapid.’” As an editor, he has worked on many acclaimed and well-known books, including Jaleel White’s Growing Up Urkel and Aaliyah Bilal’s Temple Folk, which was shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. He is currently a senior editor at Simon and Schuster. His career draws together intelligence and glamor, the love of making art and the love of building communities, and a profound care for writers and readers alike. We talked about the psychology of luxury, editors as the creative directors of publishing houses, and how to make good books under capitalism.
Tell me the story of how your career began.
The place I’ll start is freshman year, Pace University. I was writing a paper and using Wikipedia, which was like AI for us in 2008. I always started my papers with a quote. I remember stumbling upon this James Baldwin quote on Wikipedia: “Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how expensive it is to be poor.” I hadn’t read Baldwin before—so I started reading his essays. And anything I read of his felt like this man couldn’t miss. Encountering Baldwin in undergrad gave me my first impression that I wanted to work in books, but I thought that the only way you could work in books was to write them. So I applied to Columbia and the New School for an MFA. I chose the New School because the New School felt very much in the heart of something.
Second semester of my first year at the MFA program, I took a workshop with John Freeman, who was then just starting his literary journal, Freeman’s. The way he taught workshop was transformative. At that point in my life, it had been my experience that when writers ran workshops, there was a lot of, “Here’s what I would have done it.” It’s like a player trying to coach another player about how they play, but assessing them based on their own talent level, not what the player is actually trying to accomplish. But because John Freeman is an editor by trade, he led with questions. We weren’t allowed to talk about what we liked, what we didn’t like, what was working, and what didn’t work. We had to ask the writer questions.
At that time, my only understanding of an editor was as more of a referee. They were the ones who got you in line. After that class, I remember asking John, “Is this what an editor does?” What he modeled was a collaboration that was more reminiscent of the way a producer works with an artist. They understand themselves as contributing to the work as opposed to sanctioning or validating the work. The editor comes in with the assumption that what a writer is working on is already a valid thing. So, they’re getting you to interrogate and become aware of decisions that for many writers, at least for me at the time, were largely unconscious.
Ironically, I was in an MFA program where there’s no trajectory for an MFA in editing. My mindset then became: maybe I graduate with this degree and then figure out how to shoehorn it into an editing trajectory. This became the five-year sojourn from graduating with an MFA in Creative Writing in 2016 to becoming a senior editor at Simon and Schuster in 2021. Around that time, I had launched the Literaryswag Book Club.
Your curation of the book club is incredibly thoughtful, in part because its emphasis is on the reader. Tell me why the reader is as important, if not more important, to you than the writer, in an industry that remains writer-centric?
There are practical reasons for that, and then there’s a philosophical theory. When I started the book club, it was a joint venture with the Strand bookstore. This was in August 2015, when Between the World and Me came out. There wasn’t a time I got on the train where someone didn’t have that book with them. So, I was like, Oh, I’m gonna use this book to launch the book club. And the people at the Strand were like, Can you get Ta-Nehisi Coates to come? And I was like, No, I don’t know him. He had achieved, like, writer fame, which is not like real fame, it’s like indie-artist famous. The most famous writer can still take the train and most people still wouldn’t know who he was. But in the context of what they wanted me to ask, I didn’t know him in that way.
I remember going into these literary spaces, and feeling cold, cold to the touch. Everyone would talk about a book that no one had read. I can’t tell you how many times I lied about a book that I didn’t read simply to move the conversation forward. I internalized this fear of not looking literary. That prevented people who were in that room, in their capacity as readers, from being able to engage with the parts of literature that are pleasurable and enjoyable. People weren’t having fun at these events. What I recognized was that most of the people who were in the audience were also practitioners of the art. Anyone who has ever gone to a concert with a friend who’s a singer knows it can be an exhausting experience. “Oh, that note was flat.” “Oh, they missed their cue.” I didn’t spend $300 to hear you critique the show. I’m just trying to enjoy the experience.
When you have writers in a room, everyone’s sizing the author up. The questions can often come from this antagonistic place. It was as if you filled a stadium with a bunch of people who could have made it to the NBA but didn’t, and asked them to watch NBA players. You’re creating a hostile environment. But when you put someone in the room who can’t make a layup, they’re like, Wow! I can just enjoy this.
I wanted to infuse an ethos of joy into literary events. I don’t want the writer to attend, because the writer is going to bring other writers out. If Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t here, and you still show up to talk about the book, that means you’re not there for the author; you’d have to be there for the other readers. For our first event, twenty-nine people showed up and were talking about the ideas of the book. After a five-month hiatus, where we separated from the Strand and returned in February 2016, we have never missed a meeting.
I cultivated a room where readers felt that their position was important, not because they were smarter, or studied literature, but because they had a position. When you enter as an author into that space, you’re not walking into hostile territory where writers are trying to pick apart your arguments. In book club authors hear, “Yo, your book made me think about my relationship my mother and I called her.” We forget that writing is the only art where appraisal has nothing to do with the immediate reaction to it. If you’re a comedian, you have to make a room laugh. You don’t do an hour special and then wait a year to know if your jokes are funny. But as a writer, you can get an agent, you can get an editor, and you can have a product in the world with no audience. I understand why writers are anxious. Imagine telling a joke and waiting a year to hear if it was funny or not?
How do you bring a generous mind to a book club that might want to judge characters morally or simply talk about relatability?
I think it’s about getting people to become aware of why they think the way they think. As the facilitator, I’m not here to tell you what to think or how to think. I’d rather be in the rooms in which a person hates a character, because there is a lot to learn from how a person responds to an imagined circumstance. In having this scaffolding conversation about fiction, we challenge each other about the way we think about what that imagined situation may reflect in our lived experience. People are bringing their real biases, their phobias, their anxieties, and their ambitions to these conversations, and that matters.
Oftentimes when a reader is talking about a character and I approach their response with curiosity, I learn they’re not really talking about the character. There’s something the character is drawing out of them. That’s a moment of confrontation. These are the moments when change can occur. The thing I loathe the most are characters who are not detestable. I love the bad mother; I love reading and thinking, I can’t believe this character did that, because now we can actually have a real conversation about it. When you start having a real conversation, real things start coming out: “I remember my mother did this,” “I have to call my mother.” A book inspired that change.
When everything about a book is as it should be, I do not find that to be transformational. In my experience of running a book club for close to ten years, I’ve learned that the book becomes real to the person when they close it. Oftentimes, for the average person, a book isn’t real when they read it. It only becomes real when they talk about it, because now it’s extended beyond their solitary experience. When you’re in a room with thirty other people, you know you’re not the only one.
You describe it as “the best-dressed book club.” How do you think about the relationship between fashion and literature? People sometimes seem astonished that those two domains can be brought into contact with each other.
There’s no way to really talk about that without looking at the shift in America’s divestment from intellectual culture. When you look at the Dick Cavett Show, you had Truman Capote or James Baldwin sitting next to Lena Horne. There was an understanding that intellectuals were part of the zeitgeist. I want to historicize this, because we didn’t just get here. There was this understanding that materialism was here, and if you wanted to be materialistic, you could not have a conscience. And to have a conscience meant you had to be anti-materialism. If art is cool, it cannot be of substance. If we make it of substance, it cannot be cool. People in positions of power do not necessarily want a thinking society. They want a consuming society. The President used to refer to the “American citizen,” and then it shifted to the “American consumer,” changing our relationship to our country and other people. Instead of asking what you’ve done for your country, people want to know what you’ve bought lately. What are you purchasing? What kind of consumer are you? Are you somebody who pours yourself into the life of the mind? Are you somebody that puts things on your body? I know a lot of geniuses, and I’ve never seen them naked. We’re all putting something onto our bodies.
In literary spaces, I’ll wear leather pants, and someone will think, “He can’t possibly be serious about literature. He has on leather pants.” There’s a whole aesthetic to not looking like you care too much, but that’s not seen as a kind of performance or posturing. There’s a “literary” look: the neck scarf with the blazer. It’s a question of how you have to dress to be taken seriously in these spaces. If I sit at the table and people see the trucker hat and glasses, they think, “Oh, he’s all flash and no fire.” And then I light your ass up.
In a space that’s supposed to be invested in what’s happening on the page and what people actually engage with, I found these literary spaces to be as critical and judgy as the ones where Radhika Jones would be told not to wear those stockings with the cartoon foxes. For me, it became important to walk into a room of fashion people and talk about books, or walk into a room of book people and talk about fashion. I’m going to disrupt both as a way to get those rooms to remember the other parts of their own humanity—because when you choose that room, you’re also choosing against parts of yourself existing in that space.
If we look at the literary culture of the 1950s and 1960s, the look was part of the package. Other Voices, Other Rooms sold copies largely because of the provocative pose of Truman Capote. With the whole notion of the literary male novelist—your Norman Mailers, your Gore Vidals—there was an understanding that if you were a writer, you were supposed to have swagger.
When you’re acquiring books, are you thinking about acquiring for swagger?
When I say swagger, I mean influence with integrity. What I mean by influence with integrity is conviction. I am making an investment in a community of readers who need to know that there is someone in these institutions thinking about them. And that swagger, that conviction, you talk about is about publishing a book with the integrity of saying, We are not compromising the book by trying to make it as “universal” as possible. The notion is that everyone has to write for this imagined center. I’m very much in the school of Toni Morrison. What she said was, “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.” As I edit, I am always challenging my writers to stay at the margin—and to make people come to them.
Like Temple Folk by Aaliyah Bilal, my first acquisition, which became a National Book Award finalist. It’s a short story collection about Black Muslims living in America. It imagines what happens to a community of followers under the Nation of Islam who convert to Sunni after the death of Elijah Muhammad. Now, the reader for that book, in my mind, is a Black Muslim woman. That was the reader in Aaliyah’s mind, too. We both understood that this book was written to a Black female Muslim reader. Now, what happens when you work in a capitalist enterprise who wants to sell the most of a thing? You’re looking at what demographic will buy the most books. And so it has to serve a middle-class, middle-American white woman. That doesn’t just harm Black and brown books, that harms white books, too. What happens is you’re explaining things that the reader who would buy that book, who would feel affirmed by the purchasing and the reading of that book, already understands. They think, “Why would you explain that unless I know you’re not talking to me?”
But those reading experiences on the high end, where you feel so validated that you have to stop everything you’re doing and your body is having a physiological reaction to the book, and you’ve got to call somebody, to tell them about it—for me, that’s what swagger is. It’s visceral, it’s emotional. When we talk about joy and pleasure, that is what I think many of us as practitioners in these elite practices forget. That the joys of the body are a luxury, and one of the Faustian bargains of existing in an elite space is pretending as if we do not have bodies.
How do you square the pleasures of the body and your love of swagger with the numbers guys, the bean counters, at a Big Five publishing house?
I want to challenge the framing of the question. When you frame it as a tension, it creates a conflict that’s not there. So much of the narrative about publishing is conveyed by writers. And writers do not work in publishing. There are writers who have worked in publishing, yes, but when a narrative about how an industry works is written by people who are independent contractors, and they’re not dealing with day-to-day operations, all they have to describe the industry is their understanding of how publishing works, which is true to their experience, but also incomplete.
One book that, for me, elucidated how the logic and logistics of publishing functions is Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson. One of the most comprehensive books about how publishing works. And when I read that book, it gave me an understanding of how everyone working in the house is committed to the same thing. They want the best book. How the sales team understands what that looks like and how marketing understands what that looks like might be different. But we all want the same thing. I think that if you don’t understand that first, then you look at your collaborators as conspiring against you.
As many critiques as there are about capitalism, I don’t think there’s enough critique of the ways we commodify other people’s jobs when they’re not ours. We talk about publicity because we’re not in publicity, as opposed to thinking, “That’s another human being doing a job.” Capitalism turns that person into a function in my life. Their job is to make a cover; it’s not like a human being who, when they clock out, has a life. The way that I went into my job is that I met with every key person in every department that I knew I would have to work with, and I asked them, “How do I make your job easier?” Every answer that came back was, “No one ever asked me that before.” It shows that there is a lack of empathy. And everyone wants to be empathized with, but I believe you have to give to get. So I have to give, to understand what makes you look good in your department, and I also make that my job. What makes your job easy in sales? Okay, I’m going to make that my job.
What is hard to talk about is that this is a volume industry where, in the last five years, three million new titles come out every year. One million from majors alone and two million self-published. We’re talking about a saturation issue. And we’re talking about more books being published when there is a divestment in the humanities. Book coverage has gotten cut down. Some of the best book criticism you’re going to read is now on Substack, because it’s self-funded. The ecosystem that has supported the talking about books and how people discover books has been defunded in such a way that now we are relying on celebrities. And I’m not critical of that, because thank god for celebrity. There’s at least some kind of push.
I say this without judgment, but if the celebrity model is one that is increasingly reliant on celebrities not only promoting the books but purchasing the film rights for the books, so that production companies can turn them into television series or into feature-length movies, that’s going to create a different set of incentives for the publisher. Different kinds of books are going to be published. Let’s zoom out, then: What happens to the industry as a whole under the celebrity model?
No book is the same. There are certain books that, because of the advance, are looked at as more of a commodity. So with a book that comes in at $50,000, the chance that Reese Witherspoon finds that book is unlikely. That book is not being looked at that way, and there is a lot more freedom. Freedom has a price. But when a book comes in to the tune of $500,000, you’re making different kinds of assessments, because success for that book has a different threshold. The investment is different. It’s a reconciliation and an integration of values. I have to make sure that this thing does what we paid for it to do, and I have to make sure it honors this thing. And that’s really what an editor’s job is.
I will say that when you read Merchants of Culture, you’ll see that these houses—FSG, Simon and Schuster—were literally people’s houses. People ran publishing houses out of their homes. Publishing was a gentleman’s industry. Everything was a handshake. But when these big companies started coming in and buying them, they had to run like businesses. But they weren’t really businesses, and the industry had to become an industry. It had to make several different adjustments in a very short amount of time, in a world that makes this assumption that it has always functioned like it does now.
There’s a parallel here to fashion as well—the transition from the atelier to the corporate model of fashion. When we were talking before, you said you think of yourself as a creative director at a fashion house. That’s one of the analogies that you use to bring your love of clothing and your love of books into contact with each other.
Part of what I think about is how to make my role legible and visible to people who don’t understand what the editor does. An analogy, if you think about the imprint or the publishing house as a fashion house, is Louis Vuitton. Any editor who gets hired there would be a creative director, which means that the house believes enough in some version of your vision to give you the resources to see what you can bring to life. But the way so many of my colleagues navigate the industry is they just see themselves as an employee of the company. They’re being hired simply for their taste. But, instead, it could be like hiring Tom Ford to take Gucci into the 1990s. Where does Gucci want to go? Otherwise, it ends up being like the Spider-Man meme where we’re pointing at one other. I’ve watched editors who want to be told what they should do, because they don’t know what the function of their work is. You’re sanctioning ideas, you’re legitimizing stories. You’re saying an audience deserves to have access to what I believe has a right to exist.
So what Virgil Abloh did, as the artistic director of Louis Vuitton, is what I’m doing here at Simon and Schuster, and what Chris Jackson does when he goes from one publishing house to another—a sensibility follows the editor. There are writers who want to be published by FSG, and really want to be published by Jackson Howard, or who want to be published by Pantheon and Erroll McDonald. As a writer, you want to be looking for the visionaries who share a vision. You can look at their vision by looking at the acknowledgments. Seeing which names keep coming up in books you love. The challenge is to think of your role in society as being an agent of change.
In this analogy, couture collections are books.
They’re a mix. They’re a mix of ready-to-wear and couture. Your first printing is your couture. Depending on the advance, there’s a certain number of copies we want to print because its commensurate with the cost of what it required to make the book. There are some first printings that are as small as 500 to 1,000 copies. And then there are some first printings that are as large as 100,000 copies. Sometimes we make 20,000 dresses or 20,000 books, and we realize that the demand was 3,500. The challenge is figuring out how many people I believe need access to this idea. And sometimes you make a thing, and it’s something that 500 people are going to get.
The galleys are the sample sizes, and critics are models.
There you go. The analogy extends. It’s about who gets access first, whose ideas and positions we value. One of the things I did to expand this model was think about the “advanced reader copy,” or ARC, which typically goes to insiders in the industry: reviewers, editors, influencers, critics, professors. When you work in the industry, you see how many of these books get thrown away. It made me think about anybody who works in the service industry, and how your heart would hurt to see how much food is wasted, just thrown into the garbage. For me, it’s about access. If you send these ARCs to the same six people, they’re either going to review them or not. But there are so many more people who can get access.
What I did with the sample size is give it to the person who usually waits for it to go on sale first. Because usually the person who gets access to it last is the person who, ironically, needs that thing the most. So I created the Advanced Readers’ Club, where you don’t have to have a large following, you don’t have to have a blue check, you don’t have to be in the industry. You just have to want to read the book and talk about it in a month’s time. I’ve been able to get these ideas out to the intended audience first, and they get to be the forward-thinking person to their audience, where they’re like, Yo, I read this book that’s about to come out in six weeks. And if someone is like, How’d you get that book? You’re not in that world. Then they can be like, Oh, I just signed up. That’s the way I think about power, about influence—making sure that I am challenging everybody to think about their positions in the world through a lens of agency. We have a capacity to change a room, even when we’ve just become a part of it. And even if we’re not thinking about changing that room, we deserve to be a part of it.
English (US) · 