Despite the publishing recession, literary agents have been the focus of the Internets lately: rejecting failed queries, being rejected by angry authors, and most recently, letting readers be agents for a week.

Author Jean Hannah Edelstein wrote an article for the Guardian defending agents against the storms public opinion. Edelstein has worked as an agent's assistant, so she brought a unique perspective.

Here are her thoughts: "many agents spend a majority of their time in the office ... sorting out the crucial, but picky and tedious, administrative issues that often make not one iota of difference in terms of their own income, but which are crucial to authors. The fun literary reasons that agents take their jobs, the reading and editing, tends to happen in the evenings and on the weekends." (Via TeleRead)