New Representation

io9.com has an interesting story posted about Dick's estate switching literary agents. Apparently, gone is PKD's longtime agent, Russ Galen, and in his place, The Wylie Agency (client list) - known for representing heavy hitters like John Updike, Philip Roth, and Nabokov - will take over. What does this mean for us? We'll just have to wait and see. Of course there's this rather annoying quote from the io9.com article: "[The agency change is] the literary equivalent of an outsider artist being shown at the powerhouse Gagosian gallery."

Now that's just plain inaccurate. An outsider artist is generally thought to be someone who knows nothing about the world of high art he is welcomed into because his naivety is read by cultured art snobs as groundbreaking. Dick was very much aware of the state of the art. We know he read Joyce, Stendahl, Flaubert, Faulkner, and other recognized purveyors of 'high art.'

Can a literary agency get Dick filed next to Dickens in the mainstream literature section, or is he forever banished to the stubby science fiction aisles, or are all genres breaking down around us? Or, perhaps we've reached the point in the PKD novel we're all living when the order of the Universe is subsumed by entropy and chaos?

Here's a picture of Andrew Wylie - apparently, they call him 'The Jackal'... (Not photographed: chrome eyes, arm, teeth...)

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