Download Stet: An Editor's Life AudioBook Free
For practically five ages Diana Athill edited (nursed, coerced, coaxed) a few of the most celebrated freelance writers in the English language - among them V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, and Norman Mailer. A founding editor of the prestigious posting house Andr Deutsch Ltd., Athill needs us on the guided travel through the corridors of literary London, offering a keenly witnessed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate insider's portrait of the glories and pitfalls of earning books. Stet is spiced with candid insights about the sort of people who make excellent writers and clever web publishers and the idiosyncrasies of both. It brims with Athill's remembrances of offering as confidante, midwife, and sometime therapist to great literary statistics: Nobody that has read Jean Rhys' first four books can suppose that she was good at life, but no person who never attained her could know how very bad she was at it; "It was my job to hear [Naipaul's] unhappiness and do what I possibly could to help ease it, which wouldn't normally have been too bad if there had been anything I possibly could do." Primarily it is Athill's words that captivates - close, lively, generous, funny, the voice of the favorite aunt who's as warm and big-hearted as she actually is worldly and irreverent. Packed with delights, Stet is about the world of books, about people who write them and the process of earning them, a world dissected with pointed and irresistible credibility. It is an invaluable contribution to the world of books.
