This post by Aasim Akhtar originally appeared on The News on Sunday on 4/13/14.
A literary agent in France, Marc Parent is to publishing what Edvard Munch was to painting
Good looks, comic brilliance, and career success have not prevented Marc Parent from doing what he does best: living life as an emotional basket case. More riddled with pain than an arthritic joint, Parent is to publishing what Edvard Munch was to painting — the ultimate scream.
Marc Parent has been working in international publishing for 28 years in the wake of his studies in French and Comparative Literatures at L’Ecole Superieure Normale and at the College de France in Nanterre and Paris, and at Columbia University, NYC. For the last 10 years, he has been a publisher of foreign fiction and non-fiction at Editions Buchet/Castel in France, where he put together a major Indian and Pakistani catalogue of writers, including Daniyal Mueenuddin and Padmasambhava’s Tibetan Book of the Dead.
In May 2013, he started one-of-a-kind literary agency, India Maya Literary in Paris representing writers from all around the globe, with a special focus on fiction and non-fiction writers from India and Pakistan.
His publishing behind him, Parent holed up in Beach Luxury Hotel in Karachi on the occasion of KLF 2014 summing up his motives for the work as an effort to use thoughts about undoing the buttons of the ego to gorge out a proposition of his own.
Before his retreat, TNS tracked him down on the lawns facing the creek for an update. Unassuming and frail, he was nonetheless exuberant. Excerpts follow:
Click here to read the full post on The News on Sunday.