Nowadays, more and more quality books that are being published are being greeted with radio silence. Is it because there are so many more books flooding the marketplace that the publications devoted to covering them don’t have, as an editor recently told Delphinium, “Enough bandwidth to include them?” [Read more…]
Archives for November 2017
The Good News Phone Call
When I recently telephoned an author to say that we would be publishing her book, I was struck by how self-possessed and clear-headed the writer sounded. I have no doubt that she’d waited patiently to find the right publisher, and as we spoke I began smiling to myself, remembering the day that I received the phone call from an editor who published my first novel. That day I was anything but self-possessed and clear-headed. [Read more…]
Rethinking Joan Didion
When Joan Didion published her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, I avoided reading the book. I am a Joan Didion fan and eagerly read the excerpt from the book that appeared in the New Yorker before The Year of Magical Thinking was published. Didion, who lost her husband and only daughter within a two-year period, certainly had compelling material at her fingertips.
She was married to the novelist and journalist, John Gregory Dunne, and for many years they were known as a premier literary couple. [Read more…]