Mainstream and literary fiction

Mainstream was the agency's largest and broadest category. It took in comic novels, family sagas, coming-of-age stories and crime fiction that did not fit under thriller or mystery. W. Watts Biggers, better known as a co-creator of the cartoon Underdog, listed Abe and Almiranda, a novel built around the 1876 attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from its tomb in Springfield. Henry Grinberg's Wild About Harry followed a ten-year-old boy in a Jewish immigrant family in London at the start of the Second World War. Grant Rodwell's Gommera Woman followed a half-sister pitted against two brothers who wanted her out of the way and in control of a family pastoral empire in early Australia.

A few of these manuscripts reached print. Kevin McAleer's Surferboy, fifteen linked stories set in the San Fernando Valley and on Santa Monica Bay around 1980, was published by Wrecking Ball Press in Hull, England. Laurel Mills' Undercurrents, about a Boston art professor returning to a family island in Maine, came out from Rising Tide Press in 2001. Dean Monti's The Sweep of the Second Hand carried a note that Academy Chicago Publishers would issue it in 2001. Robert Dunn's Newport Beach novels and Stephen Madeline's Towers of Conceit, a roman a clef about Lee Iacocca, carried no publisher.