Today Rachel Kramer Bussel talks to Lorin Stein, former book reviewer and 7-year veteran at Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

Mediabistro: What do you look for in the manuscripts that you end up choosing? Is there a specific quality or characteristic that immediately grabs you? Along the same lines, what do you never want to see in submissions?

Stein: If someone recommends a book to me as lyrical or beautifully written or literary, it usually means I won't like it. Or I'll like it for reasons that have nothing to do with the recommendation. If you're going to pour your heart into publishing a book, it can't just be pretty, or "important;" it has to keep you up all night and make you neglect your loved ones; it has to be better and more fun than anything like it ever written, whether it's by Elmore Leonard or W.G. Sebald. What does "lyrical" mean, anyway? I say it's spinach, etc., etc.

There's no one thing I look for in submissions, but I prefer books that I know a few people will love the way I do to books that lots of people might be persuaded to like. Of course the best thing is to find a book that everybody loves, but in the kind of publishing we do, your enthusiasm is really all that you have, in the house and in the world, so you have to choose books that will make you proud to have published them regardless of how many copies they end up selling.

More here.