Diana Athill

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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
This book is currently unavailable
275 printed pages
Original publication
2014
Publication year
2014
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Impressions

  • Настя Мозговаяshared an impression6 years ago

    понравится тем, кто интересуется литературой и книгоизданием.

Quotes

  • redwerewolfhas quoted5 years ago
    I have been asked by younger women how I brought myself to accept this situation so calmly, and I suppose that part of the answer must be conditioning: to a large extent I had been shaped by my background to please men, and many women of my age must remember how, as a result, you actually saw yourself – or part of you did – as men saw you, so you knew what would happen if you became assertive and behaved in a way which men thought tiresome and ridiculous. Grotesquely, you would start to look tiresome and ridiculous in your own eyes. Even now I would rather turn and walk away than risk my voice going shrill and my face going red as I slither into the sickening humiliation of undercutting my own justified anger by my own idiotic ineptitude.

    But one can, of course, always walk away. That I could easily have done, and never thought of doing; so I doubt that it was only the mixed vanity and lack of confidence of the brainwashed female which held me there in acceptance of something which I knew to be unjust and which other women, whom I admired, were beginning actively to confront.
  • María José Evia H.has quoted5 years ago
    is impossible for someone of great natural charm to remain unaware of the effect he or she has on others, which makes the gift a dangerous one: the ability to get away with murder demands to be exploited, and over-exploited charm can be less attractive than charmlessness
  • Настя Мозговаяhas quoted6 years ago
    All publishing was run by many badly-paid women and a few much better-paid men: an imbalance that women were, of course, aware of, but which they seemed to take for granted.

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