AGENTS & EDITORS BEN GEORGE

BEN George’s arrival in big publishing was more of a vault than a climb, and it surprised him as much as anybody. “Being a New York editor,” he says, “was never something I was aiming toward.” Remarkably, what brought George’s editorial acumen to the attention of Manhattan publishers was a book with a small initial print run and no commercial hook—a singularly unpresuming volume of short stories by a seventy-four-year-old self-professed “amateur.” That author was Edith Pearlman, and the book was a collection of new and previously published stories titled Binocular Vision (2011), which George had solicited and edited as the inaugural title for Lookout Books, the tiny imprint he cofounded while on faculty at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington.

Pearlman was relatively unknown, but she had been writing for forty years and since the 1990s had quietly published three story collections with small presses. Her work was cherished by a coterie of writers who looked to her as an unheralded master. Among them was Ann Patchett, who, in an introduction for Binocular Vision, called Pearlman a national treasure on par with John Updike and Alice Munro. That, says George, “was like catnip for a certain kind of literary reader: ‘What? A seventy-four-year-old master I’ve never heard of being published by a small press I’ve never heard of?’”

landed on the cover of the January 4, 2011, edition of the , a triumph in itself went on to collect the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.