David Levenson for TIME

Pankaj Mishra's literary odyssey began on a train. In April 1996, Mishra, then a 27-year-old New Delhi editor for an international publishing house, was traveling from the foothills of the Himalayas to the Indian capital. He was perusing the manuscript of a first novel when the train made an unscheduled halt. He dashed to a telephone on the darkened station platform to inform the author, by crackly long-distance line, that she was a genius. The author was Arundhati Roy, and the novel was The God of Small Things, which went on to earn millions for its author and win Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. Mishra discovered it.

Chapter Two. Eighteen months later, Mishra had quit publishing, but aspiring authors continued sending him their work. A 31-year-old journalist named Raj Kamal Jha asked him to read six short stories. Mishra advised the author by e-mail--the two men had never met--on how to meld the stories into a novel. On the strength of 20 manuscript pages, Jha got a reported advance of $163,000; editions are planned for the United States, Germany, France, Denmark, Italy and Israel, and in two Spanish dialects. The Blue Bedspread comes out in April. Mishra discovered it.

Chapter Three: Mishra, at age 30, finally gets himself discovered. In early February, his novel The Romantics, written in nine weeks, was sold in London and Germany for a reported $300,000.

And the story is far from over. Documentary filmmaker Ruchir Joshi, 39, sent off two chapters to a London agent last September. The incomplete novel, called The Last Jet Engine Laugh, was sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair a month later for $130,000. "To celebrate, I took the kids out for pizza," Joshi laughs. "Me and their mother were very, very broke." Journalist Suketu Mehta, 35, has a two-book contract with Knopf and Britain's Hodder Headline and is getting the kind of up-front money--more than $140,000 from the Brits alone--he never dreamed of. "It is pretty amazing," he says. "I thought I'd go the usual route: University of Nebraska Press, then maybe get noticed by some Hungarian publisher. But boom--here I am at Knopf, up there with Marquez and Naipaul."

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