Unabridged

Stet: An Editor's Life

Diana Asher, author of The Last Dance and a leading British female editor of the 20th century, writes this "Working Life in the Literary World"
In the long river of life, what does work really mean?
What kind of work stories will the first generation of women who “make a living on their own” encounter?
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Editor's Recommendation:
She is the founding director of André Deutsch, one of London's leading independent publishing houses, and works for her boss, André. She admits that she prefers to be an "editor" rather than a "publisher." Therefore, this book is more like a work diary for a professional, discussing the place and meaning of work in a long life with characteristic candor.
◆The industry still faces difficult challenges:
★Images impact text, and people are unwilling to take the trouble to dig into a book even if it has only a little resistance.
★Literary value conflicts with commercial value, publishers and general readers are stratified, and being true to one's own judgment begins to mean losing money.
◆I am a literary editor who "generates electricity for love", and also a working person who loves life even more:
★The reason I can resist sales pressure, advertising troubles, and endless repetitive trivialities is that I love these books.
★I really like this job, but I hate working overtime on weekends and having breakfast meetings.
◆After retirement, all work is gone like smoke:
★After the retirement anxiety passed, I felt ten years younger.
★The working years are over, but I am not sad at all, rather I feel relieved.
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◎ Her list of authors is "star-studded": Nobel Prize winner VS Naipaul, Pulitzer Prize winners John Updike and Philip Roth, feminist literary pioneers Simone de Beauvoir and Jane Rhys, Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood... Witnessing the ups and downs of Western literature for half a century, Asier removes the filter of "literary sentiment" for us, and uses a sharp perspective to calmly understand the literary giants.
◆Good writers are not perfect, they just overcome their limitations in writing: when Jane (Jane Rhys) writes well, she is much more insightful than she is in her daily life.
◆Refuse to be pretentious and resist the mysterious power of "disguising garbage as art": "I can't understand this, it's beyond my understanding, or maybe it's very special." - This is a betrayal of wisdom.
Reflecting on class stratification and information cocoons: This class, mostly London-based, university-educated, upper-middle-class Britons, took over the publishing industry from booksellers in the late 19th century. … Most of us love books and sincerely want to understand the difference between good and bad writing. But I suspect that our definition of "good" is often simply that of this social class.
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◎ As the first generation of women in her family to "make a living on her own," she is both a pioneer and limited. She reveals all her rebellions and compromises:
◆The publishing industry is run by a lot of women with low incomes and a few men with higher incomes... To a large extent, the environment I grew up in shaped me into a man-pleasing person.
◆When I am not really in love with someone, I will not mistakenly think that I am in love... Maybe it is because I am romantic enough or realistic enough to make sure that I cannot marry a man I don’t love.
Andre, a short man, sat in a large room with a desk as spacious as a conference table, while Diana—powerful, commanding, and far from petite—was crammed into what looked like a broom closet. The world of books was similar in those days.
—Margaret Atwood
◎Li Mengsu, former chief reporter of Sanlian Life Weekly and cultural writer, wrote a preface and recommended:
Asir, with her stoic and lively temperament, decisive and wise in her actions, is strangely drawn to tragic figures. She observes each lost soul with an almost painful honesty... Precision, clarity, and composure define not only her way of seeing the world but also her style of writing. The reader might feel a certain aloofness, but strangely, not a chill.
◎A small-format hardcover book with a blue and gray cover and a printed painting of an office desk scene by Asir—looking back on my work life, I spent the last time at my desk as an editor, processing my memories “unabridged.”
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Introduction:
In this book, we follow Asir into the world of these literary giants of the post-World War II generation. The book is mainly divided into two parts:
The first section recounts Asier's journey from Oxford University, where she worked at BBC News, to her meeting publisher André Deutsch and the subsequent founding of the legendary independent publishing house, André Deutsch Publishers. With characteristic wit and rare candor, she recounts the details of her fifty-year publishing career.
The second part focuses on recalling the author's interactions with six authors, including Naipaul and Jane Rhys, and details the experiences and personality traits of these authors. It is a true and interesting anecdote about famous writers and a valuable contribution to literature.
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Media Recommendation:
★Writing this book was almost the best experience of all my writing experiences.
—Diana Athill★Publishing professionals and those interested in literature will find Athill's portraits of famous contemporary writers irresistible.
—Publishers Weekly
This memoir of a career in book publishing should satisfy anyone who cares about 20th-century literature.
—The Washington Post

2024-01-01

四川人民出版社

Houlang, Houlang Literature

352

9787220135156