Diana Athill

Stet (eBook, ePUB)

An Editor's Life

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A New York Times Notable Book: This memoir of a career in book publishing "should please anyone who cares about twentieth-century literature" ( The Washington Post Book World). For nearly five decades, Diana Athill edited (nursed, coerced, coaxed) some of the most celebrated writers in the English language, among them V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, John Updike, Jean Rhys, Mordecai Richler, Molly Keane, and Norman Mailer. A founding editor of the prestigious publishing house André Deutsch Ltd., Athill takes us on a guided tour through the corridors of literary London, offering a keenly observed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate insider's portrait of the glories and pitfalls of making books-spiced with candid insights about the type of people who make brilliant writers and ingenious publishers, and the idiosyncrasies of both. It is both "wryly humorous" ( The New York Times Book Review) and "full of history, wisdom, and dirt" ( The Boston Globe). "This is not literary life as we know it today-huge advances, showbiz and vast conglomerates-but the world of small literary houses... An enveloping blast of nostalgia: read and marvel at what we (all of us) are missing." - Marie Claire "A beautifully written, hard-headed, and generally insightful look back at the heyday of post-war London publishing by a woman who was at its center for nearly half a century." - The Washington Times "Witty and astute... The literarily curious will find [her] portraits of leading contemporary authors irresistible." - Publishers Weekly

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Grove Press
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. September 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780802191540
• Artikelnr.: 42542676

Autorenporträt

"Athill has written a book that should please anyone who cares about 20th-century literature and its creators-especially the six writers she describes in the book's second half: Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Mollie Keane and . . . Arthur Chester.-Nina King, Washington Post Book World "Diana Athill has a delightful way with the English language-crisp, scrupulously honest, precise and without a micron of self-indulgence. . . . Luckily for the reader, all her life Athill has also loved to gossip. So her engaging memoir, Stet: An Editor's Life, is full of juicy stories about the egos and libidos behind the literary personages she has known.-Andrea Behr, San Francisco Chronicle "One of the many excellent things about Diana Athill's previous memoir, Stet (2000), about her long and storied career as a book editor in London - she worked with V. S. Naipaul, John Updike and Norman Mailer, among others - was that she allowed the gaps in her story to fill, like frosting layered onto a cake, with fulsome memories of her own cherished dead. Some of the writers she celebrated in her witty, cantankerous style are all but forgotten now. Does anyone read the Irish novelist Molly Keane or the Brooklyn-born experimental writer Alfred Chester any longer? Ms. Athill sent you scurrying to catch up...Two other memorable things about "Stet were its punchy title - publishing speak for "let it stand, penciled in the margins of a manuscript when deleted words need to be saved - and (why not admit it?) its cover upon which the young Ms. Athill, in a photograph, bore an uncanny resemblance to Cate Blanchett. Ms. Athill was and is, not to put too fine a point on it, a knockout in every respect. "-Dwight Garner, New York Times "A beguiling tonic to book business sob stories . . . Stet can barely contain Athill's charm and great big heart. A generous spirit infuses every page of this book. . . . Diana Athill should be nominated patron saint of editors.-Peter Terzian, Newsday "An almost unnervingly cleareyed memoirist.-Evelyn Toynton, New York Times Book Review "[Athill] is unfailingly candid, generous, witty and astute, an eyewitness with a famously discerning eye. . . . The literarily curious will find [her] portraits of leading contemporary authors irresistible.-Publishers Weekly "All would-be authors and editors should have a copy.-The Sunday Telegraph "'Stet: a word or mark indicating that certain deleted typeset or written matter is to be retained . . . L, lit: let it stand.' Stet, then, is a marvelous title for a memoir-and Diana Athill's account of her life as a publisher and of the writers with whom she worked fully lives up to it.-Evening Standard "Tales from publishing by the incomparable Diana Athill . . . This is not literary life as we know it today-huge advances, showbiz and vast conglomerates-but the world of small literary houses where this century's greatest writers were launched. . . . An envelope blast of nostalgia: read and marvel at what we are (all of us) missing.-Marie-Claire "Athill is incapable of anything but the strictest candour, as much about herself as anyone else. The result is a narrative in which the passing literary stars take second place to an extraordinary guiding intelligence-skeptical, amused, humane.-The New Statesman "Good books about publishing are as hard to find as good publishers. . . . To write well about the profession requires candour, wisdom, clarity, passion, a sense of proportion, and above all a sense of humour, qualiities rarely found together. Fortunately, Diana Athill has them in abundance. . . . Her mind is independent and original and her book a model of good sense.-Independent on Sunday "Athill is delightfully reckless about retailing her own and her acquaintances' escapades and behaviour, sexual and otherwise. . . . [Stet] is startling and enjoyable, not to say riveting.-Times Literary Supplement "It's hard to believe that most of her authors came anywhere near Athill's own superb literary pitch.-David Hare, The Sunday Telegraph