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Stet

Stet

An Editor's Life

by Diana Athill
CD-Audio
Publication Date: 03/01/2019

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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, Mordecai Richler, and Norman Mailer. A founding editor of the prestigious publishing house Andr 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.

Stet is spiced with candid insights about the type of people who make brilliant writers and ingenious publishers and the idiosyncrasies of both. It brims with Athill's memories of serving as confidante, midwife, and sometime therapist to great literary figures: Nobody who has read Jean Rhys' first four novels can suppose that she was good at life, but no one who never met her could know how very bad she was at it; "It was my job to listen to [Naipaul's] unhappiness and do what I could to ease it, which would not have been too bad if there had been anything I could do." Most of all it is Athill's voice that captivates--intimate, lively, generous, humorous, the voice of a favorite aunt who is as warm and big-hearted as she is worldly and irreverent.

Packed with delights, Stet is about the world of books, about people who write them and the process of making them, a world dissected with sharp and irresistible honesty. It is an invaluable contribution to the world of literature.

ISBN:
9781522637738
9781522637738
Category:
Uncategorized
Format:
CD-Audio
Publication Date:
03-01-2019
Language:
English
Publisher:
Brilliance Publishing, Inc.
Country of origin:
United States
Dimensions (mm):
171.45x133.35x12.7mm
Diana Athill

Diana Athill was born in 1917. She helped Andre Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. Athill's distinguished career as an editor is the subject of her acclaimed memoir Stet. She is the author of seven further volumes of memoirs, Instead of a Letter, After a Funeral, Yesterday Morning, Make Believe, Somewhere Towards the End, Alive, Alive Oh!, A Florence Diary, and a collection of letters, Instead of a Book, all published by Granta. Her only novel, Don't Look At Me Like That, was first published in 1967. In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for Somewhere Towards the End, and was presented with an OBE. She died in January 2019.

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