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Maggie Sadler

Howland Literary Agency

My Manuscript Wish List®

Please be aware of scammers currently impersonating literary agents.
I will only ever contact you through my QueryManager form or from my official @howlandliterary.com email address. Please be diligent.

I primarily seek adult literary fiction and upmarket fiction with distinct character voices, lyrical prose, and propulsive plots. I love books that quietly yet unapologetically challenge and deconstruct genre, craft, or structural conventions—books that take risks. I appreciate a careful, restrained hand with magical elements, one that gently asks the reader to reconsider the boundary between the real and the fantastical. Above all, I crave raw, authentically human writing and wildly innovative concepts that have me whispering, “I needed this manuscript yesterday.”​

I would love to see the following in my query box, but I’m always open to being surprised:

Adult Fiction

  • Accessible literary fiction with a propulsive hook, expertly crafted tension, and gently stylish prose that turns timeless themes on their axes.
  • Upmarket fiction that explores insightful and nuanced socio-cultural commentary with a high-concept hook, authentically human characters, and distinct emotional resonance.
  • Work that revels in genre play—if the project is best described as “X meets Y with strains of Z,” consider my interest piqued.

Narrative Nonfiction

  • Projects orbiting topics of travel, health and wellness, ecology and nature, and cultural criticism that combine subject-area expertise with passion and a fresh, compelling perspective to tell previously untold stories with timely urgency.

Anti-MSWL

  • High, epic fantasy, especially novelizations of TTRPGs
  • Hard science fiction
  • Commercial fiction: think contemporary romance, prescriptive thrillers, cozy mysteries, beach reads, etc.
  • The Young Man’s Odyssey™
  • Books about wars throughout the twentieth century. I cannot stress this enough. No more narratives set during WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or the Cold War; I’m begging you!
  • Biblical retellings—I have plenty at this point in time, thank you.
  • Memoirs, unless there is a very strong hook and sufficient platform.
  • A narrative with A Little Life as a clear comp title.
  • Any work for young adult audiences and younger—I am exclusively focusing on work for adult readers at this time.

Fun facts about me:

Professionally irrelevant but potentially charming tidbits:

  • I have called four different countries home, with each location being, coincidentally, coastal: USA, Scotland, The Gambia, and Newfoundland.
  • I confess to being a serial hobbyist—watercolor painting, mounted archery, and fly fishing are a few of my recent quests.
  • I am of the very firm opinion that the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy is Elizabeth Swann’s story, and I will die on that hill.
  • My horse Cooper is much more interesting than I am. His antics include but are not limited to drinking a tipple of brandy from a cup, wearing a variety of absurd hats, and scheming various clever methods to steal my snacks.

Submission Guidelines

Please find the submission guidelines at: https://querytracker.net/query/2495.

Please do not send multiple queries for the same project. I personally review each and every query that makes its way to my inbox as soon as I am able. Your patience is greatly appreciated.

​​I do NOT accept queries via email! Emailed queries will be deleted without consideration.

Please be aware of scammers currently impersonating literary agents.
I will only ever contact you through my QueryManager form or from my official @howlandliterary.com email address. Please be diligent.

Guidelines & Details

Vital Info

Website

Agent

Non-Fiction:

Cultural criticism, Feminism and women\'s issues, Health, Travel, Wellness

Favorite sub-genres:

Accessible Literary Fiction, BIPOC, Cross-genre, Essay collections, Experimental, Fairytale Retellings, Feminist Horror, Folklore, Gothic, High Concept, Historical Fiction, LGBTQ+, Literary Crossover, Magical Realism, Marginalized Voices, Multicultural, Narrative Nonfiction, Nature Writing, Neurodiversity, New Adult, Retellings, Speculative, Travel, Underrepresented Voices, Upmarket Fiction, alternate history, body horror, books in translation, character-focused stories, dark academia, diverse voices, groundbreaking structures, literary, non-Western historical fiction, non-western settings, weird fiction

I’d like the next…

  • In both fiction and nonfiction, I keenly welcome work from debut Indigenous and First Nations, BIPOC, and queer storytellers.
  • Innovative and evocative folklore/fairy tale retellings that sour or devour the conventions of their source texts—particular interest is afforded to non-Western tales and settings.
  • Folk horror, especially horse girl folk horror.
  • Across fiction genres, I am on the hunt for narratives in translation.
  • Historical fiction that foregrounds marginalized perspectives and under-explored locales.
  • Unusual, unhinged concepts that “go there.” Think Daryl Gregory’s Revelator—let’s get weird.
  • Treacherous, unreliable, or unusual narrators.
  • A narrative that evokes Soap&Skin’s “Me and the Devil.”
  • Quirk-ridden liminal spaces and setting-as-character. I am particularly interested in islands, rural areas, and bogs, as well as settings that seem to exist outside of time and space, like the labyrinth in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi or Backrooms (2026).
  • Notes of grounded, lush, and atmospheric magical realism, wherein the potential for the fantastic flits at the edge of our vision, in the style of Emilia Hart, Julia Fine, Kirsty Logan, or Hayao Miyazaki.
  • Intelligently, painstakingly crafted love letters to the Gothic—atmospheric, simmering with uncanniness and dreadfulness—set anywhere other than the Deep South. Think Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker.
  • A novel that introduces readers to a unique area of study or handicraft.
  • Strange women doing strange, sometimes terrible things à la The Lamb by Lucy Rose, Open Wide by Jessica Gross, and The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh.
  • Complex, tangly, and fraught relationships teetering on a knife’s edge. Romantic, platonic, familial, brief encounters—anything that forces us to deeply consider what it means to connect with other humans.

My favorites include…

Fiction

  • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
  • The Lamb by Lucy Rose
  • Revelator by Daryl Gregory
  • The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
  • Anything by Karen Russell or Lauren Groff

Films

  • The Princess Bride
  • The Lord of the Rings trilogy
  • The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy
  • The Goonies
  • Willow
  • Howl’s Moving Castle
  • The Boy and the Heron

Television Shows

  • Black Sails
  • Battlestar Galactica (2004)
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender