Cindy Spiegel
Discovering Distinctive Literary Voices
By Susan Josephs
Cindy Spiegel will never forget when her creative writing teacher at UC Berkeley threw her out of his class. “He said I was being disruptive. But the truth was, I just disagreed with a lot of what he said,” she recalls. “It was really crushing at the time, but later I realized I understood the teacher’s students’ writing better than he did.”
Learning to trust her judgment has paid off for Spiegel, 45, who sits at the top of her field as senior vice president and publisher of Spiegel & Grau, a new division of Random House’s Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group. Formerly publisher of Penguin’s Riverhead Books, where she edited a formidable list of bestsellers and critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction, Spiegel seized the opportunity last winter to launch her own book division with her former Riverhead co-publisher, Julie Grau.
“I’m always looking to break new ground,” she says. “I want to publish the kind of books that ask questions about who we are and what makes us human and open us up to new experiences.”
Spiegel has published bestsellers like Khaled Hosseini’s
The Kite Runner and James McBride’s
The Color of Water and has nurtured the careers of ZZ Packer and Chang-rae Lee. She has also discovered a number of prominent Jewish writers, including Pearl Abraham, Aryeh Stollman and Gary Shteyngart. “I’ll read a lot of Jewish books that are not interesting to me, because I’ve seen it before,” she observes. “I’m always looking for writers with distinctive voices who are trying to do something new and stand out from the very beginning.”
Raised in New York City, Spiegel always knew “my life would be about writing.” She also straddled “multiple worlds” as a student at Brearley, the prestigious private school; at the public Bronx High School of Science; and as a member of both her temple youth group and the Zionist-Socialist youth organization Hashomer Hatzair. “I grew up intellectually engaged with Judaism,” she says. “I loved pretending I was a pioneer in Palestine. It put me in the position of seeing the world with an outsider’s eyes.”
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Spiegel spent three years working in the now defunct College Division of Random House, where she learned “about every aspect of publishing. Even though I didn’t want to edit college textbooks, I realized I was a good editor,” she says. “To be a good editor takes a split personality. You need to be able to work quietly and intensively with a manuscript and at the same time, be out in the world hustling your books.”
Spiegel left Random House, earned a master’s degree in comparative literature at Berkeley and returned to New York at the age of 29, determined to start over in publishing. She worked as an editor at Ticknor & Fields before becoming a founding editor of Riverhead in 1994. “I’ve been very lucky,” she says, “both for the books that have come my way and for working with people who respected my judgement.”
Lamenting the increasingly corporate publishing climate, Spiegel believes that many editors today don’t have the opportunity to “develop their own vision and sensibilities because they’re always dealing with editorial boards and houses run by their publicity and marketing departments. My philosophy is just let the editors do their job.”
Spiegel feels that her 12-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son “can see I’ve found something I love doing. I hope it inspires them to follow their own passions to do things that make a difference,” she says. “Because I really do believe that books make a difference.”