The eye-catching photo, taken from the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building by Scott Peterman, shows a city that is churning and gleaming ominously. Every light in every office window appears to be on, as if every building in the frame is coursing with electricity. Mr. Peterman said the photo, titled Surge, was conceived specifically for the Portfolio cover as an homage to a similar shot taken during the Great Depression from the exact same spot on the observation deck, by Berenice Abbott.

The obvious question: Is it a bad omen that Mr. Lethem’s new novel dons artwork that was commissioned for the inaugural issue of a magazine that imploded after just two years?

Nah, says Doubleday director of publicity Alison Rich. “We’ve heard nothing but excitement and enthusiasm for this book among booksellers and critics,” she said in an email, “and we’re tremendously excited for its publication in October.”

There is something different about the image as it appears on the front of the Lethem book, and according to Mr. Peterman, that’s no accident.

“The one that was on the Portfolio cover was sort of turned gold—it’s got a Photoshop gold wash on it,” said the photographer. “Everything was golden then.”

As Portfolio’s former editor in chief, Joanne Lipman, put it when asked to describe why Mr. Peterman’s photo was chosen for the magazine’s debut: “We knew we were in the midst of a bubble, and we knew we were in the middle of this new Gilded Age. Our photo was intended to be a commentary on the times. It was beautiful, but it was also supposed to be ironic.”

The designer Rodrigo Corral, who worked on the Lethem jacket for Doubleday, said he was aware of the photo’s origins. “When I saw this photograph of the skyscrapers I thought it was perfect for the book,” he said in an email. “It creates the illusion, facade of golden Utopia.” Though the photo was originally used to illustrate New York City’s might as a business center, he said, it “now feels quite the opposite: a vulnerable city.”

Ms. Rich confirmed in an email that Mr. Peterman’s photo—for which the publishing house bought rights directly from the photographer—was altered in the course of the design process, using “shadowing and other special effects.”

According to several sources, Mr. Larabell has spoken with publishers about a book Mr. McGinnis has been wanting to write about former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the subject of a cover story he wrote for an issue of the now-defunct Portfolio back in March. Mr. Larabell declined to comment on what Mr. McGinniss—best known for the 1983 true-crime thriller Fatal Vision and the groundbreaking campaign book The Selling of the President 1968—is currently working on, but said that at the moment, “there is no deal in place.”

The last time Mr. McGinniss was in talks with New York publishers, he was being represented by Mr. Vigliano, who shopped the author’s proposal for a book on the last days of the Bush administration and, more recently, for one about Alaska and the oil industry that was seen as a sort of spiritual sequel to his 1980 Going to Extremes. Sources said Mr. Vigliano was in talks with the William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins on this second book, but those talks were derailed when John McCain announced that Sarah Palin—who, as the governor of Alaska, would have been a character in the book—would be his running mate in the presidential race. Mr. Vigliano also discussed the project with Rodale Books, but could not come to terms.

Early in his career, Mr. McGinniss was represented by the literary agent Sterling Lord, before signing with Mort Janklow in the early 1980s and reportedly staying with him for 15 years. That relationship dissolved in 1996, shortly after Mr. McGinniss decided to abandon a million-dollar book he’d been planning to write about the O. J. Simpson trial, in favor of a much less commercial project involving soccer and a small town in Italy.

In 2001, Mr. McGinniss hired the lawyer Dennis Holahan, who helped him sell two books to Simon & Schuster over the next several years. Following the publication of 2007’s Never Enough, Mr. McGinniss went back to Mr. Lord, who unsuccessfully shopped a proposal by his on-again, off-again client for a book he wanted to write about the 2008 presidential campaign. 

“Look, he has a reputation for being difficult,” said Mr. Holihan, who continues to serve as Mr. McGinniss’ lawyer. “But that’s just because he’s passionate about whatever book he’s writing. Most artists who are really strong people have run-ins with their representation from time to time, and Joe is one of those. Anybody who has gotten to know him and has represented him for a long time loves him. Certainly Sterling loves him. I love him. We know he’s passionate and can be emotional about the things he’s working on, but you know, so what? I don’t care.”

Mr. Larabell indicated in an email that Mr. McGinniss’ track record with agents had not made him hesitant to work with him..

“Joe McGinniss is one of the most important authors of the last forty years,” Mr. Larabell said in an email. “My goal is to help him continue to write good books. My feeling is that Joe has confidence in me; I sure have confidence in him.”

Mr. McGinniss did not return a phone call or an email on Tuesday. Neither Mr. Vigliano, Mr. Lord, nor Mr. Janklow could be reached for comment.

lneyfakh@observer.com

And so, having conducted interviews with a number of publishing people who began their careers in the magazine world, we’ve come up with the following crib sheet for Mr. Ward and anyone else who follows in his footsteps:

1. At least initially, the slow pace might make you miserable.

Martin Beiser, a senior editor at the Free Press who worked at GQ until 2003, said his “knees buckled” when he realized upon winning his first book at auction that it would take three years to see the result. Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal, who worked at New York and Rolling Stone before coming to Random House in the mid-1980s, recalled once getting a call from Manhattan Inc. founding editor Jane Amsterdam in 1987, shortly after she took a job at Knopf: “She said something to the effect of, ‘Where do you get your satisfaction from here? It takes so long from the time you sign something up to the time you actually see it. Where does the rush come from?' And I remember saying to her—and her agreeing—that you had to get a big part of the adrenaline rush, the high, from the pursuit and the signing of the book.” Added David Hirshey, who was the longtime deputy editor of Esquire before joining HarperCollins in 1998: “In a monthly magazine, you work four to six weeks out. In books, four to six weeks are some people’s idea of lunch.”

2. Being a book editor means being a salesman.

Daniel Menaker, who spent 25 years at The New Yorker before taking a job as “senior literary editor” at Random House in 1995, was stunned when he realized how much of his new gig consisted of pitching and hawking the books he wanted to publish, starting when he got them in on submission and ending when he wrote the catalog copy. “I knew it would be like that in the abstract, but not in the concrete,” Mr. Menaker said. “And the concrete was very hard when I hit it.”

3. There are way more meetings in publishing.

Barbara Jones, who left MORE magazine for a job at Hyperion last year and has since become the editorial director there, said the number of meetings was, and continues to be, the biggest culture shock to her. “I’m always conscious of it: Am I supposed to be in a meeting? Am I supposed to be in a meeting? Am I supposed to be in a meeting right now?” she said.

4. Though your extensive contacts and relationships with writers are part of the reason you got hired, don’t expect everyone who wrote for you to automatically sign with you.

“No matter how close the relationship you have with somebody at a magazine very often what’s ultimately going to determine-- and rightfully so-- where they’re going to publish a book is not only the closeness of your relationship but money,” said Mr. Rosenthal, who said his contacts from Rolling Stone did nevertheless help him woo Hunter S. Thompson to Random House and indirectly helped him in the acquisition of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. “One of the biggest hurdles, at least for me,” said Mr. Hirshey, “was that all the marquee writers I worked with for the past decade at Esquire already had books deals in place. So your Rolodex, as we used to say back in the day, doesn't always cross over.”

5. You're going to be more responsible for making sure the things you edit make money.

"The bottom line is closer to the top of what you're doing," said Mr. Menaker. "When you edit a magazine piece, unless you're the editor-in-chief, you don't for the most part have to think about whether the piece you're working on will increase ad sales. Whereas with a book you have to think: is my list going to have the proper balance between stuff that will be successful commercially and other books that may bring mainly literary recognition to the house? It's like tectonic plates grinding against each other." This can take a lot of getting used to, particularly because, as Mr. Rosenthal said, "As a magazine editor, you don’t have any idea, really, of the economics of book publishing."

6. You’re going to get proposals that sound like great books but are actually just magazine pieces.

As Mr. Hirshey put it, “You have to learn that some ideas are bigger than a magazine story but smaller than a book. I think this is a trap that every magazine editor falls into early on. You read a great magazine piece and think, ‘Wow, this could be a great book,’ then you turn it into a book and you think, ‘Wow, I just published a bloated magazine piece.’”

7. Coming up with titles for books involves a different art form.

Mr. Hirshey again: “A great magazine headline does not necessarily work on a book. Esquire’s most famous headline, ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,’ would probably be given the artful book title ‘Sinatra.’”

8. If you’re a failure, it’ll be much easier for others to tell.

“In many ways, a lot of publishing companies are like bazaars in the Middle East,” said Mr. Menaker, who left publishing in 2007. “You go to work as an acquiring editor and you set up your own stall, so to speak.” Mr. Rosenthal said the self-reliance inherent in book editing makes it that much easier for people to tell how you’re doing. “It’s so much more straightforward than it is with magazines,” he said. “You have an individual book. You paid X amount of dollars for it. You sold so many copies of it. You sold so many dollars in rights. It’s a stand-alone product, and you can tell when you’ve fucked it up.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

For a little while there, it was easy to let your imagination run wild. Honeymoon cut short as famously difficult author splits from new agent after just mere months! Wylie loses prized catch! Et cetera. But alas, it turned out this was just an error—apparently there was some confusion with the .html file that’s supposed to feed the most current version of Wylie’s list onto the agency Web site—and by Monday morning, Mr. Naipaul’s name had been restored to its proper place, sandwiched happily between the Kafu Nagai Estate and the Kenji Nakagami Estate.

That same morning, the list grew again, with the addition of the Kingsley Amis Estate. A person answering phones at the Jonathan Clowes agency in the U.K., which handled the Amis estate previously, told The Observer that Mr. Wylie took over the account in May. Mr. Wylie himself did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Mr. Weil was not wholly mistaken: Dancing in the Dark was originally signed up in 1980 by the late, great editor Erwin Glikes, who was then Simon & Schuster’s president and publisher. But years of delays and distractions had left the book in limbo, and although technically Mr. Dickstein, who teaches English at the CUNY Graduate Center, was still under contract with S&S, Mr. Borchardt had managed to shake the project loose. “It was a summer gift,” Mr. Weil said Monday. “I acted immediately.”

When he first signed the contract with Glikes back in 1980, Mr. Dickstein figured he’d get the book done in about five years. Instead, he got bogged down with teaching, and writing book reviews for The New York Times and film criticism for various magazines. “You get hooked on publishing regularly and constantly seeing your name in print, so the long-term projects tend to slip onto the back burner,” Mr. Dickstein said. To make matters worse, he added, he “foolishly” agreed to write a labor intensive monograph on postwar fiction for the Cambridge History of American Literature series, a project he said he felt more compelled to finish on time.

Mr. Glikes, meanwhile, left Simon & Schuster in 1983 for a job at the Free Press, leaving Dancing in the Dark behind. In the wake of his editor’s departure, Mr. Dickstein was reassigned to Alice Mayhew. But he interacted with her only minimally, and insofar as he continued working on Dancing in fits and starts, he did so without her input. “It languished at Simon & Schuster, but I’m not sure they were terribly aware of the fact that it was there,” said Mr. Dickstein’s agent, Mr. Borchardt, of the project. “I think they just lost interest. I don’t think anybody was really keeping track of it.” Mr. Dickstein remembers sending Ms. Mayhew a chapter at some point during the ’90s and getting a nice note back, but that was about as far as it went. “I live in Sag Harbor for part of the year, and she does also,” he said. “I’d run into her occasionally but, you know …”

During these long years, as Mr. Dickstein wrote other books, taught classes and fiddled with Dancing on and off, Mr. Borchardt was patient with his client. “Georges has a very wry sensibility, so his form of pressure was making these gently ironic and sarcastic comments about how long the book would take, and whether any of us would live to see it,” Mr. Dickstein said. But the agent never gave up hope that his client would complete the book. “I was really fairly confident that he would get through it sooner or later,” Mr. Borchardt said.

It was about six years ago, once the postwar fiction monograph was behind him, that Mr. Dickstein resolved to commit himself full time to Dancing in the Dark. He stopped accepting freelance assignments and got to work. “I said, ‘This is ridiculous. Either I’m going to make a big push to finish, or it’s never going to get done.’”

And so it did. The question then was, who would publish it? Sure, there was the Simon & Schuster contract, but the thing was 29 years old, and by all accounts, no one involved was all that enthusiastic about honoring it. Mr. Borchardt moved to dissolve it—he declined to be specific, beyond saying “it was arranged that we could give it to someone else”—and shortly thereafter, the manuscript was in to Mr. Weil at Norton.

Why did it take Mr. Borchardt so long to execute the move? Because, the agent explained, “It’s very difficult to go to a publisher and say, ‘Look, I have this author here; it’s true he’s already 20 years late, but I think within the next 20 he really will finish this book.’ You’re in a much stronger position if you actually have a manuscript in hand, and you’re in an even stronger position if the book is brilliant, as it turned out to be in this case.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

For the most part, that is still true. But as book sales fall and publishing houses look for ways to cut costs, many literary agents are growing increasingly worried that publishers looking to trim their lists will start holding authors to deadlines and using lateness as an occasion to renegotiate advances and, in some cases, terminate contracts altogether.

“Publishers are looking at their books and saying, ‘O.K., this book is two years late. Do we want it anymore?’” said Eric Simonoff, an agent at WME Entertainment. “If the answer is no, they’re saying, ‘We don’t want it anymore—we’re calling our loan.’”

He went on: “Sometimes people have buyer’s remorse, and it’s a very convenient way of rectifying your buyer’s remorse after the fact. It’s safe to say that delivery dates are more meaningful now than they ever have been before. I think everyone’s putting their clients on notice and saying, ‘This is serious.’”

Most publishers are well acquainted with the feeling of regret that comes with realizing that a book they signed up years ago is no longer worth publishing. Sometimes this happens because the subject of the book has become irrelevant or the market for it has become oversaturated. Sometimes it happens because the editor who bought it has left or been fired. Other times it’s because the sum that was paid for the book at the point of acquisition has come to seem exorbitant and ridiculous.

Historically, such regrets have led to action only in rare circumstances, as the practice of canceling contracts has been regarded in the industry as supremely unsavory and damaging. Publishers by and large have been unwilling to risk earning a reputation among literary agents as being mercurial and untrustworthy. (To this day, agents bristle when reminded of the great purge of HarperCollins, when in the summer of 1997 CEO Anthea Disney ordered 100 books canceled in an effort to “clean house.”)

But like so many other practices associated with the “gentleman’s business” that the book business used to be, eating advances in the service of good humor has become a luxury most publishers do not indulge in as readily as they once did. 

“What has happened is that in the cold light of morning, publishers are looking at all these expensive deals they made based on the inflated marketplace, and now the bill is coming due and they don’t want the contracts anymore,” said one top agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I buttoned up all my contracts—I amended all of them way before the due dates came. Once the author delivers on time, then the publisher has to find something unacceptable in form and content, and that’s a much more serious thing to do. At that point there’s a whole process that they have to go through, and it’s much more challenging for them to find something in breach.”

As a result, authors are under unprecedented pressure from their agents to stay on schedule. Most of the literary agents interviewed for this article said they have tried to impress on their clients that if they want to make sure they don’t lose their contracts and find themselves having to pay back an advance that in many cases they’ve already spent, they had better be vigilant about turning their manuscripts in on time. 

“I don’t want my authors to be in that situation, so I’ve been reminding them all year long to not treat their deadlines lightly,” said the independent agent David Kuhn. “Everyone’s paying attention to their contracted deadlines more than they used to, for sure—at least publishers are, and therefore agents are, and therefore authors should.”

“Publishers are going to look at every opportunity to save money in this climate,” said Simon Lipskar, an agent at Writers House. “Most of them aren’t being quite as venal as calling to cancel a day after the due date, but my standard recommendation to my authors at this time is to just deliver their books on schedule.” In so doing, Mr. Lipskar said, “they remove one major contractual ‘out’ for the publishers.”

None of the agents interviewed for this story would provide actual examples of late books that have been canceled recently on the basis of late delivery, even as they asserted with total confidence that the practice is becoming more common. Many noted that cancellations are so traumatic and embarrassing for everyone involved that extra care is taken to prevent them becoming gossip fodder.

Publishers, for their part, aren’t copping to the charge (at least not when The Observer asks them about it), and while many of the editors and executives reached for this story said they’d heard about other houses canceling books because they were late, all of them emphasized that they themselves had not been party to any such incidents.

Speaking on background, though, one publishing executive at a New York house confirmed agents’ fears, saying that authors—especially those without a rock-solid reputation—must be conscientious about honoring their contracts if they want to avoid the possibility of having to pay back their advance.

“People ruin their writing careers by not taking this stuff seriously,” the executive said. “Usually they decide to take legal advice from some friend who says the publisher will never ask for the money back. Well, they frequently do. And nowadays, repaying the publisher is going to be harder, because a writer can’t get the money from Condé Nast. Now is the time for you to be really nice to your publisher.”

The executive said the best thing authors who are having trouble can do is be honest with their editors about their progress (or lack thereof), thus avoiding a situation in which a publisher has budgeted for a book on the assumption that it would come in on time.

“Even if you’re late, be collaborative and communicative,” the executive said. “We just need to know what’s going on, and if it’s not coming, we need to know. Because, you know what, sometimes people have trouble, and we can help. But often when authors know they’re late and they know they’re in trouble, they hide. And that’s exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Of course, authors with established track records and promising projects in the works don’t have much to worry about. Spiegel & Grau won’t be dropping Sara Gruen’s long-delayed Ape House anytime soon, just as Doubleday was never going to cancel Dan Brown’s follow-up to The Da Vinci Code. 

As Mr. Simonoff said, “The reality is, you don’t have to worry about lateness if they want your book. You only have to worry about lateness if they don’t.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

In publishing, this signals the start of a season that many believe has the best chance of any in recent memory to redeem the industry after one of its darkest years, and to show that, even in 2009, big, beautiful hit books are still possible. 

Many publishers are saying their fall catalogs are their strongest in years, and after last fall, an unqualified disaster that left the industry demoralized and diminished, much is at stake as their hopes are tested. As one publishing veteran put it, “if this fall doesn’t work out, a lot more of us will not have jobs next year.”

Scribner has it all on the line for Audrey Niffenegger’s new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, for which they paid $5 million in March. HarperCollins has Michael Crichton’s posthumous pirate book. Knopf Doubleday is preparing for blockbusters by Pat Conroy, Jon Krakauer, and of course, Dan Brown--whose Lost Symbol will be a marathon of a publishing job by itself, but one that promises to pay the division’s rent for years and bring stability to the entire Random House castle.

Such foolproof commercial juggarnauts help publishers and booksellers sleep at night, but the literary-minded among them can cheer too-- holy autumn! What a bunch of novels!

Thomas Pynchon has a new book coming on August 4, as does Richard Russo. Random House is publishing a novel by E. L. Doctorow on September 1st. A week after that, Knopf brings out Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, Nan Talese follows with Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux comes in a little later with Richard Powers’ Generosity: An Enhancement. In October there will be memoirs from Edmund White and Michael Chabon, and new novels from Jonathan Lethem, John Irving, A. S. Byatt, and Dave Eggers. November (think: holiday gifts) will see the publication of new works from Philip Roth, Barbara Kingsolver, and even Vladimir Nabokov. 

Such moments of confluence are rare. Depending on your metric, truly memorable ones tend to come around once every decade or so.

The start of 1985 saw Don Delillo’s White Noise and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian published in the space of a few weeks. The next time it happened was 1997, when Delillo’s Underworld, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Haruki Marukami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Roth’s American Pastoral were published within months of each other. The last instance any of the people interviewed for this article brought up was the fall of 2006, which saw the publication of Eggers’ What is the What, Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, Powers’ The Echo Maker, Atwood’s Moral Disorder, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

Such windfalls stick in one’s memory, and having lived through one, you look forward to the next. 

“It was exciting,” said Granta editor John Freeman of fall 2006, who until recently was a full-time freelance book critic. “It’s sort of like Christmas come early. Suddenly there was a period like: big novel, big novel, big novel. I had this slightly neurotic sense like, surely all these books can’t be this good-- but they were! Which was quite nice, because normally you get one good one, and then, you know, some other books.”  

Even in historical context, the fall of 2009 strikes some as extraordinary.

“I have never seen another year like this,” said Sarah McNally, the owner of the popular Soho bookstore McNally Jackson. “I can hardly bear to think about fall’s books, it’s like looking bare-eyed into the sun.”

“I can’t really think of any time since I’ve been in the business, when I had a sense of the degree of anticipation for upcoming books, that would equal this fall,” said the Gernert Co. literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb.

With optimism, however, comes worry—particularly because shoving every major release into the same three months could very well result in a traffic jam that will benefit no one.  

“Given that the odds of all the books living up to the author’s and publisher’s expectations are quite slim, it’s a little intimidating,” said Martha Levin, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Free Press imprint. “There will be books that get buried in the crush and will not sell as well as did the author’s previous book. It’s inevitable. As a publisher, you stick with the attitude that your books will prevail—until proven to the contrary.”

“But yes,” she added. “It is exciting. Just kind of scary too.”

Predictably, there are some who say this fall is nothing special-- that book publishing whips itself into a frenzy every year around this time. 

“The notion that a killer line-up of books is headed to the stores is a fantasy that big corporate publishers entertain every year starting in spring,” said one editor at a major house. “After they’ve dug out from the post-Christmas returns and begun to face the fact that their spring titles aren’t working.”

“We’ve got a lot of ground to make up,” he said. “And if we can’t do it with books like this, that’s a bad thing.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

—Additional reporting by Eliza Shapiro and Molly Fischer

Mr. Wylie is known—and in some cases, hated—throughout the publishing industry for routinely and unapologetically pursuing prestige authors who already have agents, and recruiting them for his ever-expanding client list with promises of more money and better representation overseas.

His play against Mr. Aitken for the Naipaul account included an extra bit of drama, in that he was seeking to usurp not just a competing agent but a former partner who served as something of a mentor to him when, starting in 1986, the two of them worked together as part of the international agency Aitken, Stone, and Wylie. It was during those 10 years, which ended when the firm broke up in 1996, that Mr. Wylie got his first taste of working with Mr. Naipaul, selling his U.S. rights while Mr. Aitken handled the rest.

Though it’s tempting to trace the roots of Mr. Naipaul’s defection to those days, Mr. Aitken says his old partner would not have had much personal exposure to the author back then.

“Each of us remained the primary agent for his clients, and to that extent—also bearing in mind the geographical distance between the UK and the US—relations with the other’s clients were pragmatic rather than close,” Mr. Aitken wrote in an email Tuesday. “I do not know, since 1996, to what extent Andrew Wylie ‘actively’ or indeed otherwise ‘pursued’ Sir

V. S. Naipaul. Certainly, in the thirteen years that have elapsed, Sir V. S. made no mention of it.”

Asked whether he had been a mentor to Mr. Wylie during their time working together, Mr. Aitken demurred, saying he would “leave it to others to judge.”

“Certainly, when I agreed financially to back the US corporation we formed in 1986,” he wrote, “my experience of the publishing/literary agency business was substantially greater than his. I like to think that he benefited from that.”

Mr. Wylie did not answer questions about why Mr. Naipaul made the decision to change agents or reveal how many years the courtship went back.

“I think Vidia felt that it was, simply, time to move on,” Mr. Wylie wrote in an email. “I can’t say with any authority what considerations were involved, but I do believe there is work to be done on the foreign rights side, as well as in the UK & US, and we’re well suited to do that work.”

“A prospectus is always more intriguing than an account summary,” said Mr. Naipaul’s editor at Knopf, George Andreou. “It’s always the case: ‘What I will do for you’ is always more exciting than ‘what I’ve done for you.’”

Asked whether he expects to be paying more for the privilege of publishing Mr. Naipaul in the future now that Mr. Wylie is behind the register, Mr. Andreou replied, “I don’t think he was cheap before, but I don’t think the attraction to Wylie at this point had all that much to do with the American market.”

Mr. Wylie’s calling card, Mr. Andreou explained, is his global reach, meaning his pitch to Mr. Naipaul probably had more to do with foreign rights. But, Mr. Andreou said, the 76-year-old author’s reputation in some foreign countries may not be so easy to develop.  

“It’s no small task Wylie has set himself, because although Naipaul is universally admired as one of the finest writers in the world, I don’t think that the selling of Naipaul in every market has always been as much a thing to be presumed as one might imagine,” Mr. Andreou said. “I would say his greatness very often inheres in subtleties that are specific to English—they’re not that easy to carry over. It’s not rollicking plots and so on—it’s perfectly wrought expression that puts an incredible burden on the translator. … To get it to do in another language what it does in English, despite the simplicity of the surfaces, is a translational task of degree-of-difficulty ‘10.’”

Patrick French, whose biography of Mr. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, was published last year by Knopf (and edited by Mr. Andreou), said in an email that he was not surprised by his subject’s decision to sign with Mr. Wylie.  

“This is all prefigured in The World Is What It Is,” said Mr. French, who himself recently left his previous agent for Mr. Wylie. “Vidia likes to cut off and move on—it’s how he works. Gillon Aitken managed to remain in the hot seat for 30 years.”

According to Mr. French’s book, Mr. Naipaul’s agent before the start of his long association with Mr. Aitken, in 1979, was Curtis Brown’s Graham Watson, who took him on as a client at the end of 1955.  

“Looking back,” Mr. French wrote, “he called [Watson] ‘a very bad agent’ who ‘kept me in poverty for at least ten years.’” According to the book, Mr. Naipaul severed ties with Watson in 1979, writing him a note that said Curtis Brown was not giving him “the overseas representation I should be getting.”  

News of Mr. Naipaul’s move to the Wylie Agency was first reported by the London Evening Standard.

lneyfakh@observer.com