Faber & Faber Inc., the imprint Ms. Angel is now in charge of at FSG, opened for business in 1982 as the American colony of an old and historic British house of the same name. That house, unparalleled in the prestige of its backlist, was known for publishing the likes of Eliot, Joyce and Pound and, more recently, Günter Grass, Seamus Heaney and Orhan Pamuk. The U.S. offshoot, however, was a safety net by design, intended to step in and publish any Faber book that could not find a home with a proper American house. In 1998, Faber gave up on the project, and sold all but 20 percent of the company to FSG. A new senior editor named Denise Oswald was installed as its steward, and over the course of the next 10 years, the American Faber brand grew into a reliable destination for thoughtful books on pop culture, music and film.

Ms. Angel’s appointment marks the beginning of yet another new era for Faber, one in which FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi hopes the imprint will edge back toward its distinguished U.K. roots and grow into a more literary, more sophisticated boutique that publishes a lot of debut fiction and what is so tediously referred to by book people as “high-quality nonfiction.”

Which is, conveniently, precisely what Ms. Angel had so much success doing at 4th Estate. Her greatest publishing victory to date came when she took a chance on a debut novelist from Nigeria named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose second book, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Prize and sold hundreds of thousands of copies as a result of being featured on a British television show whose influence over book buyers is not unlike Oprah’s. Careers have been made on far less, as they say, and Ms. Angel went on to acquire and expertly publish books by previously unknown authors like Ishmael Beah, Alaa Al Aswany and Rivka Galchen. Between that and her exposure and familiarity with the rest of the 4th Estate list—which includes Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham and Annie Proulx—it was clear to Mr. Galassi that Ms. Angel, whom he met for the first time in New York about a year ago, had the very sensibility that he was after for the new Faber. Ms. Angel also had the blessing of Stephen Page, the CEO of Faber & Faber in the U.K., who worked with her when he was the managing director of 4th Estate.

Ms. Angel, 34, said the other day that everyone in America laughs at her when she tells them she’s happy to be in a country where book publishing is not so terribly gloomy a business.

“Here, to me, it seems like a dream in comparison,” she said apologetically. “It’s really bad over there.”

She spoke with the unsentimental dignity of a person who has escaped great suffering.

“The chains in the UK,” she said, “are competing with supermarkets. You know, where you buy your food—there are these big, huge places where everybody goes to buy their food. And now they also sell books, at huge discounts, and they buy them at huge discounts from publishers. They’re where you buy everything, these huge places—you go for your weekly shopping, and you buy your newspaper there, you buy a book, you buy a saucepan and you buy a kettle and you buy all your food. And most of the books are rubbish. They have a small number of sort of reasonably good books, but they sell them at the quarter of the price on the cover, slashed down. So the book chains feel very anxious about this, and they then try to copy what the supermarkets are doing. Browsing in some of these bookshops now is almost impossible. You see the same books over and over again, and most of them are celebrity biographies.”

At least over here, she continued, Knopf was able to convince the bookstores to carry Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. 4th Estate, which published that book in the U.K., did not have it so easy, according to Ms. Angel, and one of the major retail chains there didn’t grant it any shelf space until they saw what a big hit it had become in the United States.

“We didn’t even manage to get Netherland into the shops, despite the fact that we felt really strongly that this was an important book,” Ms. Angel said. “So you had 300 copies out there at the beginning, and it could have completely died had it not then gotten loads of attention here, which we then used to kind of ratchet up the orders and go back [to the buyers] and say, ‘You have to take this; this is crazy.’ But they’re worried about supermarkets!” 

None of this is to say that Ms. Angel was unhappy at 4th Estate—it’s just that now she has her own imprint at FSG, and before her lies the thrilling task of curating an entirely new list made up of books that reflect her personal enthusiasms and inclinations. It’s hard to imagine a better job in American publishing.

And to think, she might have ended up in graduate school! It was a close call, she told Pub Crawl—she gained admission into a program just as she was finishing up that internship at Random House UK and deciding whether to take a job at Vintage.

She chose Vintage, of course, though she could not say truthfully that book publishing was a career that she had grown up looking forward to. It’s not that she was ever not a reader, but there was a year after high school—she attended an enormous international high school in Brussels, where her family moved from London when she was 2—that she spent in a music program playing flute and piano and practicing four hours a day. A longing for friends who read more compelled her to drop out, though, and she spent the next three years studying William Faulkner and John Milton at Cambridge.

After a year of postgraduate temping, the Random House internship came about and Ms. Angel got going.

A few bestsellers later, and she’s got a sublet in the East Village with her psychologist husband—she married that boyfriend from London—and is preparing to move to an apartment in Park Slope just off of Fourth and Sackett. The other FSG people helped her decide where in Brooklyn to live!

lneyfakh@observer.com

Earlier this week, it was announced that he finally got his wish: Ms. Angel has agreed to leave her home to run her own imprint at F.S.G.. The imprint, which at this point specializes in thinky pop culture books, theater, and music, is called Faber & Faber Inc., and Ms. Angel has a mandate to change it quite radically. She will do this by supplementing the existing list with the sort of literary fiction and narrative non-fiction she worked on at HarperCollins—something the imprint has never really had—and working more closely with editors at Faber & Faber Ltd., the formidable British house that founded it back in 1982 as an American subsidiary.

At 80 years old, the British Faber & Faber is one of the oldest and most prestigious names in British letters. It is the house that published W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce and employed T.S. Eliot as an editor during the 1930s; indeed, in reputation it is something like the British equivalent of F.S.G..

Faber opened the American office in order to ensure that all the books on their list—including the ones that no American houses were interested in publishing—were available in the United States. The hiring of Ms. Angel, who has earned a strong reputation as an editor during her eight years at HarperCollins UK’s Fourth Estate imprint, signals a pointed departure from that original mission, and reflects a top-down reimagination of the American Faber operation as a boutique literary imprint more in line, spiritually, with the old British company that gave it its name.

Initially, Faber’s goals for the colony were modest: the aim was simply to provide a safety net for those Faber books that could not find an American publisher—to serve as a distribution arm, essentially, that also published some books of its own on the side. In the early 90s, the people who worked at Faber were restless and the London office responded to put some more resources into the operation, hiring two new editors responsible for aggressively acquiring previously unpublished books by American authors.

“It was quite effective as a distribution arm but the people working there… well, you start wanting to be a publisher,” said Graywolf Press publisher Fiona McCrae, one of the two editors who started working there at the time.

So it went until 1998: then the American experiment ended, and a majority stake in Faber’s US subsidiary was sold to F.S.G.. Under the leadership of editor Denise Oswald, F.S.G.’s new imprint started taking steps toward renovation, sweating its list of all the random books that had ended up there by way of the bargain bin and leaving only those that pertained to contemporary pop culture, film, music, or theater. This was supposed to bring coherence to the American Faber brand, to purify the list so that it wasn’t just an assortment of odds and ends, but an actual house with a relatively narrow specialty.

In the nearly ten years since, Faber has been operating independently of the parent company that gave it up for adoption, and has succeeded in publishing a healthy stack of notable books, including several plays by Richard Greenberg, Neil LaBute, and Tom Stoppard, a book of poetry by Billy Corgan, and the journals of Courtney Love. According to Mr. Galassi, the imprint even made F.S.G. some money.

So then why all the changes suddenly? If Faber was doing fine as a small pop culture and theater imprint, why would Mr. Galassi want to upend its publishing model by essentially restoring to it the eclecticism and disorder that had been so aggressively beaten out of it following the F.S.G. acquisition?

“Faber is one of the great names in English language publishing, and we’re not making optimal use of it right now,” Mr. Galassi said. “I think that we can do a lot more with them transatlantically by buying things together.” The point, he said, is to build the American brand “that’s useful for them and for us. It’ s a way of growing our business without growing F.S.G. per se, without throwing it off balance.”

Asked why he would want to create a competitor for F.S.G. right under his own roof, Mr. Galassi said in an e-mail, “I think F.S.G. can stand the competition; it's a little bit like Paul Stuart living next to Brooks Brothers—good for both. And I don't think Faber is in any danger of stealing F.S.G.'s particular brand of thunder. The idea is to make another brand shake, ratttle, and roll in its own way.”