Discover Howland Literary

  Maggie Sadler earned her joint Masters with honors in Comparative Literature and English from the historic University of St Andrews and her Masters in Literary Studies from Memorial University of Newfoundland, where her literary interests ranged from folklore retellings to nineteenth-century maritime adventure fiction and interrogating audience reception across creative mediums. Outside of the agency space, Maggie also works as an editor and writing coach. Maggie marries these complementary experiences with an intentional, growth-minded approach as a literary agent.

Maggie primarily seeks accessible literary fiction and upmarket fiction for adult readers with distinct character voices, lyrical prose, and propulsive plots. She loves books that quietly yet unapologetically challenge and deconstruct genre, craft, or structural conventions—books that take risks. She appreciates 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, Maggie craves raw, authentically human writing and wildly innovative concepts that have her whispering, “I needed this manuscript yesterday.”​

Maggie would love to see the following in her query box, but she is always open to being surprised.

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 her 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.

White Whales:

• In both fiction and nonfiction, Maggie keenly welcomes 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, Maggie is 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. Maggie is 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.

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. Maggie cannot stress this enough. No more narratives set during WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or the Cold War; she's begging you!
• Biblical retellings
• 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—Maggie is exclusively focusing on work for adult readers at this time.