Zando CEO on her literary meet-cute with SJP
Plus book giveaways and party photos
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the first letter from Yours, SJP Lit. We’re so happy you’re here.
Perhaps because they are narratively complex and emotionally resonant, SJP Lit books are the sort that inspire conversation. That’s why we’re exuberant about this newsletter, which will provide a space for just that. To kick things off, Zando CEO Molly Stern joined us for a chat about how the imprint came to be, why it’s an especially exciting time for SJP Lit, and a couple of forthcoming books.
SJP Lit: How did you and Sarah Jessica Parker first meet, and how did you come to work together?
Molly Stern: We think of it as a literary meet-cute. It was 2013. Gillian [Flynn] had just published Gone Girl, and she and I were invited to the Cosmopolitan Power 100 lunch. We were scared and felt that if we went together, we’d feel brave. Because Sarah Jessica had just been photographed carrying a copy of Gone Girl, we felt comfortable going up to her and introducing ourselves. She was so admiring of Gillian, and so curious about life as an editor and publisher. We instantly fell into a conversation about what we’d been reading and loving, and she was very in the know and on-trend despite not really having any relationships in the book space. She knew of this Dutch novel called The Dinner and had been calling around trying to get an English translation of it. I told her that, in fact, Hogarth was about to publish the book in English, and she gave me every possible piece of information I could use to reach her, basically, except her social security number. So, I began sending her galleys. She fell very much in love with one book in particular—a debut novel set in Chechnya called The Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra—and felt it was really important for her to participate in communicating the gorgeousness of this book. I was beginning to see that her enthusiasm, focus, commitment, and authenticity around books was like lightning in a bottle.
From there, she and I started a book club whose aim was to read books in galleys and find ways to talk about them. We invited a reporter to one of the dinners—they eventually joined the book club themself—but that led to a piece in The Wall Street Journal that just confirmed Sarah Jessica’s influence. Eventually, I invited her to run her own list and be the editorial director of SJP for Hogarth. Nowadays, collaborations are pretty commonplace, but they were less so back then. I’d seen one between Stella McCartney and the Gap, and it seemed so delightfully unlikely. I thought, “Why can’t we do that in books and use her brand as a platform to communicate her fascination with literary fiction?” We had a couple of great years there together before I left. When I was starting Zando, the first person I called was Sarah Jessica, and she said, “Well, of course.”
SJP Lit: What do you think makes SJP Lit special and how do you describe the imprint?
MS: I’ve come to know over the years that Sarah Jessica is instinctually attracted to big stories that are told in the most expressive, beautiful language—it isn’t just about plot or momentum, per se, which I think is really admirable. She loves family stories and those about cultures different than her own. She loves young women characters reckoning with their history. She loves coming-of-age stories. She loves fiction in translation. She has a wide range of interests but most of all, I think, she’s looking for books with heart and a literary spirit.
SJP Lit: What has the imprint taught you about the state of literary fiction?
MS: Well, literary fiction is really distinctly about a writer’s approach to the material and the culture, and to the story they’re trying to tell. It’s not genre-based, per se. It doesn’t fall into a neat lane, which makes it exquisitely fun to try to think about how to publish and talk about, but also very hard. Sometimes a book is so experimental or stylistically daring that there’s only a very small community of readers who’d be seriously interested in reading it. But my basic belief is that if you can communicate why these books matter, the audience will expand, and that’s what Sarah Jessica does so well. Her passion and her ability to communicate that passion are persuasive. The goal is to expand the reader base for these unique, special books, and she’s absolutely up for it.
SJP Lit: How has the community of SJP Lit readers grown since the imprint’s launch?
MS: It takes a long time to establish a literary identity. That’s just the reality of publishing. Sarah Jessica has accelerated the usual pace by demonstrating her taste, building a community and choosing the right books, but I’d say the identity of her list is really coming into focus because she’s had these three or four years to curate the list. When you line them up and look at them as a group, you see a commonality between them. It’s a reinforcing cycle of meaning for agents, authors, and people who want to participate. They say, “Oh yes, I understand what an SJP Lit book is.” It’s not theoretical—it’s actual, and that builds power over time. Now, people really expect her to talk about what she’s reading and are excited to hear about the next SJP Lit book. The engagement is real, and we’re not surprised by it, but we are proud of it. This Substack will allow for even more engagement, and for readers to talk to one another. I think readers have an appetite and a patience for discursive writings and ideas, and this feels like the perfect place to exercise that.
SJP Lit: Are you hoping that the newsletter will garner some of the same sort of energy and camaraderie that you had in the galley book club?
MS: That’s a nice way to think about it, as though it will be like the book club writ large. The thing about a book club is that everybody gets their say, right? Provided they’re doing their job, which is simply reading the book and thinking about its meaning for them. Nothing connects people like an assessment of a book that’s really meant something to them. Also, there were books that we read in our book club that we all hated, and it was really fun to talk about why the book didn’t seem to be working for us.
SJP Lit: Can you share the story of how I Am You came to be an SJP Lit title?
MS: The literary agent Bill Clegg texted Sarah Jessica directly about the book, and she wrote to me after she’d had a look and said, “I cannot wait for you to dig this fictionalized story of this little-known, gorgeously talented painter.” She understood immediately that it was intense and original. Our editorial team had the same instant reaction to it. Victoria, the author, really brought these two women to life, and they feel both contemporary and of their time.
SJP Lit: What can you tell me about the other forthcoming titles?
MS: I feel quite excited about both of them. Someone who read Room 706 by Ellie Levenson said, “This is a woman’s story.” And it really is. The intensity of the position that this woman and her lover find themselves in when the hotel they’ve rendezvoused at is taken under siege forces her to reckon with her entire life and what the choices she’s made mean about her devotion to her marriage and her family. It’s such a clever way into these big questions. In the UK, where it also will be published, everybody’s talking about it, and that’s what we want for any SJP Lit title, to stimulate conversation. And then there’s a gorgeous book called The Radiant Dark by Alexandra Oliva that also has a family at its center, and that follows them across time. It also has a lightly speculative quality. In the book it’s understood that life beyond Earth has been discovered and will eventually make its way here. The novel has all these layers and ideas, and the writing is just incredible.
Last week, to celebrate the upcoming publication of the SJP Lit title I Am You—an imagined story about the real-life Dutch Golden Age painter Maria Oosterwijck and her servant-turned-subject, Geertje Pieters—publishing on September 30th, Victoria Redel, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Molly Stern had a conversation about the book at Happy Medium, an art cafe in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. The trio discussed what first drew Parker to the story, the ways in which the power dynamic between the characters and their senses of themselves shift throughout, how Redel thinks about the book’s title, and a surprising cameo made by Rembrandt.
Afterward, the crowd, which included the novelist Mary H.K. Choi, the painter Maura Spain, who’d recently made a vibrant painting inspired by I Am You, and the TikTok book critic and Substacker
, availed themselves of the arts and craft options the cafe offers. Some braided friendship bracelets, some cut up old magazines for collage works, others bravely experimented with watercolors (Happy Medium’s tagline is “Be brave enough to be terrible”), and still others channeled Oosterwijck and sketched still lifes of the flowers and fruit laid out on the worktables with crayons or oil pastels.
The moodily lit room, which featured cheese platters for snacking, wine bottles for drinking, and the smell of Astier de Villatte’s Opéra incense, with notes of beeswax, sandalwood, and resin, engaged the other senses too. Making their own art seemed to increase the participants’ desire to dive into the novel, though a few, like Bossard, already had, tearing through it in a weekend. “I’m someone who loves reading about toxic female friendship…and on top of that, it’s historical fiction with a pulse,” she said, adding, “all of the SJP Lit titles I’d read are just so full of an authentic feminine condition, so I had high hopes and they were met.”
We’re also gifting SJP Lit’s full collection of titles to three lucky readers. To enter, comment with your favorite recent read below. Good luck!
Currently re-reading The Diary of Anne Frank
I loved reading The Idea of an Entire Life by Bill-Ray Belcourt! Beautiful poetry!