Rachel Kramer Bussel speaks with the 45-year-old Editor in Chief at Harcourt:

Mediabistro: What kinds of books to do you work on/are you looking for? Conversely, what kinds of books don't you want to see at all?

Saletan: I am pretty eclectic. I edit both fiction and nonfiction. In fiction, I like to say I care first about voice, second about character—though I might reverse those two—least of all about plot: I just like plot to take care of itself and not be a problem.

I'm a big champion of nonfiction, which I believe can be every bit as original and creative as fiction. (It always makes me a little sad when gifted nonfiction writers reveal that their true ambition—their highest ambition, as they see it—is to write fiction.) I am particularly drawn to books that gain impact by going deep rather than wide, and that have some personal thread of passion—or obsession—running through them. That encompasses a lot of "narrative nonfiction," though sometimes I think we've too narrative-obsessed, and not every little story is a window onto an entire era or universe, much as an agent or author will try to persuade you otherwise. I like books that shake up the status quo and get at the currents under the surface of daily life with imagination and force. So while I don't do many music books per se, I took on a memoir we're publishing in January, Jen Trynin's Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be, about the author's thirteen minutes of fame in the rock world, for its razor-sharp evocation of fame and failure.

I don't do self-help or how-to in the usual sense. I have a very low threshold for what I perceive as sentimentality or phony emotionalism—sometimes to the detriment of my commercial success, probably! I am not particularly interested in workmanlike books that dutifully troop through a given topic at full breadth—as I say, I tend to gravitate toward books that achieve their impact by going narrow and deep rather than comprehensive.