Well, our blog post about Colin Firth playing the great Maxwell Perkins in the upcoming film Genius had a one-day reach of 3,000 viewers. We editors are the invisible and unsung celebrities of the publishing world, so it feels great to get some recognition in print or on film. Hell, we’ll even take word of mouth.
So, I thought that this month I’d share some of the books in my library about writers and editors and publishing. One of my all-time fiction favourites is The Novel, by James A. Michener (1991). It’s a sprawling story (as all Michener’s works are) that features the complex relationships between writers, editors, publishers and literary critics, with a great mystery in the middle.
Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003) is a fun read, but it also hits home with its portrayal of a couple of “devils in disguise” — at least, I’ve been told this by colleagues who’ve worked in the magazine world.
A memoir that reads like a novel is Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year (2014), which is about a young writer/editor’s first job at a literary agency. I just got Karl Wiggins’s Self-Publishing! In the Eye of the Storm! (2015) and, from what I’ve read so far, his “cautionary tales” are both funny and informative.
And then there’s the provocative essay collection MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, edited by Chad Harbach (2014). Don’t let the “American” throw you; the essays in this book can apply to the rise of program writing everywhere. Writers, editors, publishers and literary agents all weigh in on the move “to consider the fiction writer less as an utterly free artistic being, with responsibilities only to posterity and eternal truth (or whatever), and more as a person constrained by circumstance — a person who needs money” (Introduction, p. 1).
Do you have a favourite book about writing, editing or publishing — fiction or non-fiction? Feel free to tell us in the comments.
Melva McLean’s previous post: It’s Our Turn at the Box Office.
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Melva McLean
Melva McLean is an editor, screenwriter and filmmaker. Her short film, Chopin’s Heart, was selected for Telefilm’s Not Short on Talent showcase at Cannes 2016. Her historical drama, A Chinese Angle, won both a Praxis Fellowship and Best Historical Drama at Action on Film. She is currently writing another historical piece (this time a comedy) and is helping co-ordinate the Manitoba twig of the EAC.