Who

Golomb is the founder of the boutique literary agency that bears her name.

Backstory

The daughter of a doctor and an actress, Golomb grew up in New York and attended Penn. She worked in film and TV before changing direction and becoming a literary agent; her reputation was minted when she took a chance on a then-unknown writer named Jonathan Franzen. Both have now become stars: Franzen's novel The Corrections won the 2001 National Book Award and Golomb has signed and sold numerous successful authors.

Of note

Golomb's high-profile clients include William T. Vollman, whose Europe Central won the 2005 National Book Award, and Glen David Gold, whose historical epic Sunnyside was snapped up by Sonny Mehta at Knopf in February 2008. Janelle Brown's debut novel All We Ever Wanted Was Everything—which Golomb sold to Julie Grau as part of a seven figure, two book deal—was published in May 2008. Other recent major deals include the December 2007 sale of Harry Dent's The Great Crash of 2010, which predicts a 12-year economic depression, to Simon and Schuster/Free Press; and Tanya Egan Gibson's novel A Book for Carly, pitched as similar to Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics and sold to Dutton in February 2008 for an advance in excess of $250,000—which is perhaps some consolation for the fact that in 2007 Pessl dumped Golomb for Queen Bee agent Binky Urban.

On the job

Two other agents work with Golomb: Kim Goldstein, who handles both literary and commercial fiction and some non-fiction, and Sabine Hrechdakian, who does mainly non-fiction.

For the record

In 2001, two of Golomb's authors were Oprah picks: Gwyn Hyman Rubio for Icy Sparks and Franzen, notoriously, for The Corrections. Franzen didn't bother to conceal his opinion that his high-literary novel was an odd selection for middle-brow Oprah viewers, and an offended Oprah swiftly pulled the book from inclusion.

Personal

In 1999, Golomb married Gregory Thomas Martin, a landscape and architectural photographer. They live in the Village, in the same building as Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan.