Six questions with Liz Parker

August 04, 2015 | News about

What’s your favorite book store?

My favorite bookstore is Books, Inc. in San Francisco – I think I attended about a reading a week for a good two years there and those shelves started to feel like my living room.

OK, but you’re in New York now…

Still Books, Inc. Though I also like the Housing Works Bookstore.

What are you looking for?

What I’m looking for – My reading mind is split: I am a glutton for the beach read almost much as I crave a thought-provoking narrative account of history I haven’t heard before. I have always been attracted to women’s commercial fiction, spanning from chick lit all the way up to cozy stories, with a penchant for aspirational fiction. In terms of nonfiction, I want it to make me think and I want to learn something. I will read anything related to medicine and psychiatry and I will always make time for narrative history, science, addiction and recovery, drug reform, biography and memoir.

And what grabs you in a query?

A succinct pitch and ability to imagine where the book fits in the marketplace. Once I got a query that said a novel was a cross between THE ODYSSEY and THE BIBLE. That was a tough one.

What are you not looking for?

What I’m not looking for: literary fiction (with the extreme exception of a persuasive referral), historical fiction, poetry, political science, children’s, young adult, sci-fi, steampunk, or historical romance.

But if you were looking for historical romance… which era?

The 1990s are good.