Jessica Lee

I’m an Associate Agent here at A.M. Heath, actively building a list of literary and upmarket fiction and non-fiction.

I’m drawn to a combination of formal precision and big feeling: works that package strong emotion with clarity of expression, that are textured, but not maximalist, on the level of the line. Story is important to me, as the thing that pulls you into new territory, as is character – the more finely-drawn, dimensional, and evolving, the better. In non-fiction, I’m looking for a devotion to what’s conceptually fresh – an expert’s eye, that turns a piece of received wisdom on its head – as well as the ability to fascinate and involve the reader. I would welcome approaches from academics, critics, journalists or researchers in the early stages of projects on the subjects of health, ecology, medicine, food, politics, art, and music. 

I would particularly love to see: 

Family stories – either droll and disarming, like Susie Boyt’s Loved & Missed, sweeping but tender like Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, or numinous yet deeply secular, like Harriet Clark’s The Hill

Romance, in particular the breakup or get-together novel: Ursula Parrott’s brisk but schmaltzy Ex-Wife, Jessica Stanley’s smart, warm Consider Yourself Kissed, or something campy and abounding in tropes, like Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue 

Expert psychology, shaped for the layperson: from the neuroscience / psychiatry-inflected (Rachel Aviv, Mark Solms, Andrew Solomon) to the more playful, but no less rigorous psychoanalysis of something like Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy or Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

Cultural writing that mixes sociological thought with vivid portraits of real people: Isabella Dixon’s The Bed Trick, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, Carlos Barragán’s The Yahoo Boys

Fantasy / the speculative: from the eerie eco-horror of Naomi Alderman’s The Strangers, to the quests, deities, and moral imagination of Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller, to the outrageous snark & well-developed magic system of Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth

And the properly funny, across fiction and non-fiction alike: Geoff Dyer, Helen DeWitt, Patricia Lockwood, Paul Beatty, Halle Butler, etc., etc.

Books I have recently enjoyed:

Anti-Zionism by Benjamin Moser

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

Golden Crumbs by Mary Ruefle

She Dies at Dawn by Roxane de Rouen

Out of Sight by Elmore Leonard

Switzy by Emma Cline