What are some upcoming trends?

Wouldn’t you know, my crystal ball just broke this morning! But I’m happy to speak to one trend that we seem to be in the middle of, and it’s one that I’m hopeful will not disappear anytime soon. There has been a spate of books recently, written by women, that don’t overtly subscribe to the conventional rules of the novel—searching, probing voices that are emotionally acute, unabashedly cerebral, and shot through with bold humor and self-awareness. I’m thinking of Jenny Offill, Rachel Cusk, Heidi Julavits, Roxane Gay, Nell Zink, Elisa Albert (whose novel After Birth we published this winter). When Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers came out, Laura Miller had this fascinating piece in Salon, where she quoted Jonathan Franzen saying of Kushner: “I had the sense that she came from a place where nobody had told young women what they could and couldn’t be.” The novels I mentioned are different in texture and mission than Kushner’s in many ways, but that line comes to mind nonetheless.

Maybe it’s because I’m the mother of daughters that I’m especially attuned to, and grateful for, this trend, if it is one. I find this boldness and entitlement refreshing, if somewhat overdue. Last week my 10-year-old daughter was reading the middle-grade edition of I Am Malala and she looked up from it and asked, “I don’t get it. Why would men think they’re superior to women? It makes no sense.” To laugh or to cry? I sort of did a little of both.

What book/genre/topic would you like to see cross your transom?

There’s no one genre or topic I’d like to see more of, necessarily, but I would love to see more books that take existing topics/genres and combine them in a new way. When I’m reading submissions, here are two truths that often compete for dominance in my mind: 1.“There’s nothing new under the sun” —Ecclesiastes; and 2. “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond / any experience” —e.e. cummings. How to reconcile these things? I believe readers want to be taken somewhere new when they pick up a book, but hasn’t everything already been said before? I tend to seek out novels that call up different traditions, categories, worlds, cultures, vocabularies, and registers and set them down in a common space. Sometimes that can go terribly wrong! But when it’s organic and right and guided by a hand that is equal parts searching and knowing, that friction—or fusion or confrontation or whatever it is—sparks something that feels completely fresh, unexpected, alive.

What topic don’t you ever want to see again?

My first instinct is to say anything dystopian and anything that fictionalizes the life of a famous writer. However, look at Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: a dystopian novel that worked on so many levels and pushed past the conventions of the genre, making it feel completely new. And then there’s the fact that we just published Norah Vincent’s novel Adeline, which is about Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries and which I expected to look at and turn down after a few pages, given my love for Woolf and my resistance to fiction about writers. And yet, despite my misgivings, I was immediately drawn in, thanks to the authority and bravado of Vincent’s treatment of this sacrosanct subject and her success in using Woolf as a jumping-off point to explore so many ideas and topics beyond the expected fare. The bottom line is you have to try to be suspicious of your own blind spots and try to stay open to the unlikely. You should never say never in this line of work.

What is unique about your corner of the industry?

Publishing is always a crap shoot, but I guess the grass is always greener, because it seems to me that there are certain categories of nonfiction where there are known markets—celebrity memoir, sports books—and that you can more or less predict a certain level of success. In general, literary fiction—and especially debuts—have no built-in fan base. Neither an author’s past performance nor the success of another book in a given category can predict the success of the novel you’re about to publish. It’s that elusive alchemy of literary achievement, cultural moment, context, and—most importantly!—which famous person is photographed reading it in the doctor’s office that makes all the difference. That’s what makes it all so infuriating and maddening. But then there are the times when you get a review that the book-gods themselves might have written, or a novel you love gets shortlisted for an award, or you see a stranger on the subway reading a beautiful bound edition of a book that was once a pile of Post-it–crazed pages on your desk, and you’re filled once again with the ferocious, foolhardy determination of a zealot or a pioneer.

The terrible and wonderful thing is that with literary works, you’re often creating the market with the book itself. Consider Helen Macdonald’s New York Times bestseller, H is for Hawk. I don’t imagine that the good people of Grove Atlantic were sitting around saying, “You know, what we really need for our 2015 bottom line is a memoir about the taming of a goshawk.” There is no real precedent for that book succeeding as it has, but that’s what great writing and great publishing can do. Which brings to mind yet another line, this one from Antonio Machado: “Traveller, there is no path. Paths are made by walking.”

Lauren Wein is a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, where she focuses on literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, and translation. Her recent titles include After Birth by Elisa Albert, Florence Gordon by Brian Morton, Norwegian By Night by Derek B. Miller, Adam by Ariel Schrag, Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone, The Answer to the Riddle is Me by David MacLean, and For Today I Am a Boy by Kim Fu. In the coming months, she’s looking forward to publishing Language Arts, the new novel by bestselling author Stephanie Kallos, and the debut novels Dietland by Sarai Walker and Maud’s Line by Margaret Verble. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughters.