Excerpt from Muse by Jonathan Galassi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Are you sure, because translating her will be so difficult, so expensive . . ."

"Maria, I don't know your market. All I know is that Ida Perkins is the American poet of our time. And her work is going to last. Ask Matthias Schoenborn if you don't believe me. He's bringing out her Collected next year. Ask Beltraffio. Ask Jean-Marie Groddeck. They're all convinced." The fact that certain prestigious publishers had an author on their lists often carried irrational weight with their foreign colleagues.

"Yes, but is she really, really good?"

"Really, really, really good, Maria. Really." He hoped he wasn't slurring his words, but feared he just might be.

"I'm doubtful," she said.

Paul threw up his hands and planted a smooch on the nonplussed Maria's forehead (most Europeans were deft practitioners of the air kiss, where lips never touched skin, but Americans often failed to carry it off). At least Maria really, really wanted to know if Ida was worth translating. The truth was, what was hot in New York was often dead on arrival in Reykjavik, and vice versa—that was the terrible truth, and maybe the saving grace, of international publishing. Paul sometimes had reason to wish there were a Frankfurt morning-after pill; but a deal was a deal, even one shaken on when one of the parties—or, better, both—was two or three sheets to the wind.

So Paul was feeling cautious when he sat down in Homer's stead at Matthias Schoenborn's table in the German hall the next morning for their annual discussion—lecture might have been a better word—about Matthias's prizewinning, best-selling Mitteleuropean authors. If Homer had been there, he and Matthias, who were mad about each other, would have spent their half hour telling off-color jokes and denigrating their closest collaborators, as happy as pigs in shit, but Paul knew he would have to settle for an actual business meeting. Experience told him that few or none of the writers Matthias would be pitching were likely to make an impact in America, just as he knew in his heart of hearts that Matthias, who was one of the shrewdest showboats among the international publishers, much admired for his ebullience and his nonstop promoting of his writers—a kind of latter-day European version of Homer—had no deep interest in the authors Homer and Paul published. Sure, Matthias would grumble about the fact that Eric Nielsen, now an enormous international presence, was published by Friedchen Bohlenball, though Matthias hadn't shown the slightest interest when Paul had buttonholed him excitedly about his discovery years ago. The truth was, Matthias didn't care about what Paul was doing any more than Paul cared about Matthias's Russian and Iranian émigrés eking out an existence as cabbies in Berlin. Still, they sat and talked animatedly every year—"He lies to me and I lie to him," as Homer put it—and went to each other's parties and were the best of Frankfurt pals, listening all the while for signs in each other's cascading verbiage of that rarest of things, the world-class author who could make a difference for both of them. How to listen, Paul had come to feel, was the real test of Homer's publishing "truffle hound." Many, unfortunately, listened only to themselves.

Still, over the years, Matthias and Homer and now Paul had shared certain core writers who had had an international impact, among them Homer's Three Aces. And Matthias, a respected avant-garde writer himself (Homer had published several of his dark, abstruse short novels before giving up the ghost), was Ida's German publisher, too, and he was well aware of Paul's passion for her and her work. Being the canny insider he was, Matthias often seemed to have privileged information about deliberations in Stock- holm, and this year was no exception.

"It's possible," he told Paul. "There are other currents afoot, but it's possible."

Excerpted from Muse by Jonathan Galassi. Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Galassi. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.