Monday 8: 4 5 AM
■ Two eggs, scrambled; potatoes; toast; side of lox
■ French toast with mascarpone cream and mixed berry jam
■ Three caffe lattes
BEST-LAID plans indeed. The first interview I am able to set up takes place not over lunch, as I had planned, but rather over breakfast because Anjali Singh’s schedule proves more crowded than a Times Square subway platform, which I thankfully avoid on my way to Kirsh Bakery & Kitchen on the Upper West Side. A few days earlier Anjali returned from the Belize Writers’ Conference, where she spent a week meeting with about a dozen writers from all over the United States who had traveled to the tropical locale to talk with agents about their writing projects. She came home to a full house: She has two children, ages ten and seven; her husband is a professor of Chinese history at Lehman College in the Bronx. Tomorrow she’ll travel to Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, where she is scheduled to give a Q&A and talk with students in the undergraduate writing program at Susquehanna University. Such is the busy schedule of a literary agent. So, yes, breakfast it is.
Anjali spends the first ten minutes of our time together recount ing in remarkable detail the writers she met in Belize, all of them women—a retired fire chief from California; a police detective from Omaha; a
