About

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 Boston, Los Angeles, London, Shanghai, and beyond, licensing primary and derivative rights to publishing partners around the world. The agency has guided dozens of book projects from the earliest stages of editorial development through the publishing process, always aiming to expand readership in all available media. Areas of interest include biography, criticism, history, memoir, and reportage, in areas including art and design, business, food, music, science, sports, travel, and urbanism.

More than half a dozen titles handled by the agency are under option for tv/film (as of 2026). Marshall Jon Fisher’s A Terrible Splendor is in development with Ink Factory (The Night Manager) and Marc Platt Productions (La La Land), as reported by Variety. In 2010, the agency licensed 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. 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., and made his first editorial acquisition at Ballantine Books. He moved into subsidiary rights at Alfred A. Knopf, handling reprint rights in titles reaching back to the company’s founding in 1915, and conducted a record-shattering auction for large print rights. He subsequently worked at Henry Holt (John Macrae Books) and Harcourt (Helen & Kurt Wolff Books, with Drenka Willen), where he acquired fiction by Amélie Nothomb, George V. Higgins, and Jean Thompson. He moved to Boston and and served as deputy editor of DoubleTake magazine, leading the magazine to a nomination for a National Magazine Award for general excellence in 2001.

He is the volume editor of The Essential William H. Whyte (Fordham University Press, 2000) and coeditor (with Robert Coles) of Minding the Store: Great Writing about Business, from Tolstoy to Now (New Press, 2008). His translations from French include 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); The Beatles and the Sixties, by Claude Meunier and Michka Assayas (Holt, 1996); and an excerpt from a novel by Amélie Nothomb (Two Lines: A Journal of Translation). He has contributed articles and interviews to American Way, Antiques & the Arts Weekly, CommonWealth, DoubleTake, Publishers Weekly, and The New York Times; in 2002, he originated the “Off the Shelf” column of weekly “microreviews” for the Boston Metro. He also originated The Official Directory to U.S. Flea Markets (Ballantine, 1987; eight editions) and other guides (Avon Books, 1992, rev. 1996; St. Martin’s, 2000).

Albert has edited the work of authors including Noah Adams, Monica Ali, Isaac Arnsdorf, Rick Bass, Ann Beattie, Eliot Berry, Jason Berry, Michael G. Carew, Robert Coles, Michael Connelly, Karin Cook, Shelby Cunningham, Gioia Diliberto, David James Duncan, Adam Fairclough, Ronan Farrow, Melissa Faliveno, Robert Galbraith [J. K. Rowling], James F. Gill, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Rob Gurwitt, Robert Hellenga, Joshua Henkin, Kate Hennessy, Homer Hickam, George V. Higgins, Erin Hildebrand, Douglas Hobbie, Lori Jakiela, Leslie Jamison, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Sheila Kohler, Michael Koryta, 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, David Sedaris, 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.

Albert has provided editorial services to 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.)

with Lolly

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 in 2001; at Harvard Extension School (“Principles of Editing,” 2008–9); in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University, where he has been an outside reader since 2012 and on the advisory board since 2021; and at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design (MassArt), where he has taught more than fifty courses in Humanities and Liberal Arts since 2012. (View Albert’s c.v.)