Once upon a time Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon was part of a group that made literary publishing "the coolest of the cool." Amazing, isn't it? But those days are at least 20 years in the past, and now, as Nashville Scene reports, Fisketjon hasn't even lived in New York for a while - he's doing work from a farmhouse in Lieper's Fork, Tennessee.

Why? "Gary's always been more of a country boy than a city boy," says Jay McInerney, the author who made Fisketjon a literary star. "He has a real love-hate relationship with New York, one that skews toward the hate part despite his long residence in the city. But the real reason likely had more to do with publishing's changing face. "There is less time for editors to edit," says Maria Campbell, an international literary scout and friend of Fisketjon. "Everything has gotten more complicated. There are more marketing meetings, more promotional meetings, and there's more and more pressure to buy, react instantly. Everyone's drowning." In other words, to continue his success in the New York publishing world, Fisketjon had to leave.

Meeting his future wife, Diana Howard, also helped him settle in a place where he could "meditate" on editing one book at a time. "You have to get into a trance," he says. "Because an editor can only use the standards set by the book in hand. It’s not like, 'Why couldn't this work be like something else?' It can't work that way. So you've got to get into the vernacular of a book and see where the book is not living up to its best moments and try to point them out."