Manuscript Consultation

I’ve published three novels with Big Five publishers, with my books translated into numerous languages. My most recent, The Perfect Man (Random House), was long listed for the Man Booker and won the Commonwealth Prize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia, among other awards. A new novel, Bye-Bye Palestine, will be published by Norton in 2025. I’ve taught fiction writing at the graduate level for over twenty years, critiquing, line editing, and advising on the novels, story collections, and stories of MFA students, most of whom have gone on to publish these works. I have also won several teaching awards, most recently the SPS Distinguished Teaching Award at Northwestern University. Over these decades, I’ve been both an editor of other people’s works and a writer of my own, and I’ve developed an acute and comprehensive understanding of the issues writers need to address to elevate their manuscript to a publishable level. 

I should add that my instruction at the graduate level is all focused on craft, from how to write beautiful, efficient, impactful sentences and paragraphs, to how to effectively develop and structure an entire work.

Novel Manuscript Consultation

This is for a writer with a complete draft of a novel.

Fee: $3,500 for a novel up to 80,000 words.

For anything over 80K, I charge 5 cents a word.

To find out my approach and what I offer for this, please click on or touch the image.

Short Story Consultation

This is recommended for people who want help developing a story they have drafted, or who want to take a good draft of a story to the next level.

My approach for critiquing an individual short story is similar to my approach for a novel, so click on the image above to read about this.

Fee: $150/hour. (A typical short story of 5000 words will end up being approximately $450.)

Short story Collection Consultation

These I critique story by story, with each story priced the same as an individual short story consultation.

Fee: $150/hour. (A typical short story of 5000 words will end up being approximately $450.)