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Archive for October 30th, 2009

October 30th, 2009 • Posted in Authors and Books

Publishers Weekly announces top ten books of 2009

File this under prematurity: Several weekends ago I drove down to Portland, Maine. Along the way I encountered a boggling number of pumpkins and various ghoulish-looking incarnations adorning the porches and windows of a surprising number of abodes. Like those pathetic types who simply refuse to take down the Christmas decorations months after the fact, only in reverse. These people all need to hear what William Shatner once said to a swarm of die hard Trekkie conference attendees (on SNL, here): Get a Life already.

All this to say we can now include Publishers Weekly in this company. They today, according to USA Today, announced their best books of 2009. Here’s the list:

Richard Holmes‘ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science; Dan Chaon‘s Await Your Reply; Victor LaValle’s Big Machine; Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life; Neil Sheehan‘s A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon; Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; David Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon; Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft; and David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir
 


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October 30th, 2009 • Posted in Authors and Books

What Diana Athill likes about the Publishing Game

I saw Diana Athill only at a distance when I was in Toronto last weekend for the IFOA. Pity I wasn’t able to interview her. I did however, just this afternoon pick up a copy of her autobiography Instead of a Letter, published in 1963 by Chatto, republished, in the edition I bought at the Book Market, by Andre Deutsch in 1976 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of its own founding – in November, 1951. Athill was a director of the firm at that time, as she was in 1976. Her book describes how the famous publishing company was launched, and, what she likes about the publishing game:

" Book X is not so good as Book Y, Books A,B, and C have good reasons for their existence but do not happen to interest me. Books D and E – God knows what we were thinking of when we took those on, they will both flop and they deserve to flop. Book F is embarrassing – I do not like it, I do not think it good but it will make a lot of money and it is not actually pernicious. But book G,H, I, J and K: now there are books with which I am pleased to have been concerned, there are voices which deserve to be heard;  and somewhere among them are my darlings, the books – not many of them, for in no generation are there many such writers – the books which, I believe, had to exist. This is why I like the work, and this is why other people in publishing like it, although some of them choose to affect a  ‘hard-headed-businessman’ attitiude and say at cocktail parties things like ‘I never read books’ or ‘I can’t stand writers.’ If a publisher does not have a good head for business either on his own shoulders of on his partner’s, he is a poor publisher, but if a good head for business were all he had, he would be making detergents or shoes of funishing fabrics, not books."
 

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