About the Agency

The LaFarge Agency was founded in 2003 as the New England affiliate of the David Black Literary Agency and has operated independently since 2006, providing comprehensive rights management for a select list of authors, literary estates, and cultural institutions. Founder Albert LaFarge works collaboratively with a team of seasoned agents and attorneys, based in Hollywood, London, and beyond, licensing primary and derivative rights to publishing partners around the world.

Our primary focus is nonfiction—biography, criticism, history, memoir and reportage, in areas including art and design, business, food, music, science, sports, travel, and urbanism. Our guidance begins in the earliest stages of a book’s editorial development and continues throughout the publishing process, always aiming to expand readership in all available media.

In 2010, we handled the sale of George V. Higgins’s Cogan’s Trade (1974) to Plan B Entertainment for adaptation as Killing Them Softly (2012), directed by Andrew Dominik and co-starring Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Ben Mendelsohn, Scoot McNairy, and Sam Shepard. More than half a dozen titles handled by the agency are currently in development for tv/film (as of 2022). For more information or to acquire film/tv rights, visit the agency’s rights/permissions page.

About Albert LaFarge

Albert is the agency’s founder and principal agent. Born and raised in Manhattan, he started his publishing career at Random House, Inc., where he made his first editorial acquisition almost immediately, and created The Official Directory to U.S. Flea Markets (House of Collectibles/Ballantine, 1987; eight editions), before shifting to subsidiary rights at Alfred A. Knopf. There he handled reprint rights for titles reaching back to the company’s founding in 1915, and conducted a record-shattering auction for large print rights. He shifted back to editorial in the 1990s, at Henry Holt and then Harcourt, acquiring fiction by Amélie Nothomb, George V. Higgins, and Jean Thompson, among others. In 1999, Albert was hired as deputy editor of DoubleTake and, with founding editor Robert Coles, led the magazine to a nomination for a National Magazine Award for general excellence (2001) and coedited Minding the Store: Great Writing about Business, from Tolstoy to Now (New Press, 2008). Albert is editor of The Essential William H. Whyte (Fordham University Press, 2000), and translator (from French) of Arabia Felix from the Time of the Queen of Sheba: Eighth Century B.C. to First Century A.D., by Jean-Francois Breton (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), and The Beatles and the Sixties, by Claude Meunier and Michka Assayas (Holt, 1996). He has contributed articles and interviews to American Way, Antiques & the Arts Weekly, CommonWealth, DoubleTake, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, and Two Lines: A Journal of Translation; he originated the “Off the Shelf” book column for the Boston Metro in 2002.

Albert has edited the work of many and diverse writers, including Noah Adams, Monica Ali, Isaac Arnsdorf, Rick Bass, Ann Beattie, Eliot Berry, Jason Berry, Michael G. Carew, Robert Coles, Michael Connelly, Karin Cook, Gioia Diliberto, David James Duncan, Adam Fairclough, Ronan Farrow, James F. Gill, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Rob Gurwitt, Robert Hellenga, Joshua Henkin, Kate Hennessy, Homer Hickam, George V. Higgins, Douglas Hobbie, Lori Jakiela, Leslie Jamison, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Sheila Kohler, David Leavitt, Phillip Lopate, Mike Lupica, Howard Mansfield, Walter Marks, Andrew McAfee, David Means, Franco Mondini-Ruiz, Roger G. Morris, Candida Moss, Stephen O’Connor, William O’Shaughnessy, James Patterson, Octavio Paz, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Sidney Perkowitz, David Petersen, Andrew Potok, Francine Prose, Walter Reich, Bob Reiss, Michael Rips, Robin Robertson, José Saramago, Fernando Savater, Joanna Scott, Jim Shepard, Carly Simon, Dan Slater, Clint Smith, Michael Farris Smith, Nina Solomon, Julius Taranto, David A. Taylor, Steve Tesich, Lynne Tillman, Tatyana Tolstaya, Eliot Weinberger, Joseph Weisberg, Lawrence Weschler, Alec Wilkinson, Daniel Wolff, Peter H. Wood, and Stephen Wright.

with Lolly

Albert has worked as a freelance editorial consultant for publishers and institutional clients including Ballantine Books, Boston College, D.A.P. (Distributed Art Publishers), Fordham University Press, Grand Street, Harvard University, Henry Holt, Houghton Mifflin, La Martinière groupe (Hachette Books & Little, Brown), Literary Imagination, The New Yorker, University of Notre Dame Press, Odyssey Publications, Prentice-Hall, Princeton Review, Publishers Weekly, Simon & Schuster (Scribner & Touchstone), Taschen Verlag, and Whitney Radio. (View a list of projects.)

Albert holds degrees from the University of Vermont (BA, philosophy & music), Columbia University (MA, classics), and Boston University (PhD, editorial studies; dissertation supervised by Christopher Ricks). He has taught courses in writing, editing, and literature at Harvard College, where he earned a certificate of distinction from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, and at Harvard Extension School; in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University; and at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design (MassArt), where he has served as visiting lecturer in Liberal Arts since 2012. (View Albert’s c.v.)