Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (2)
Fine Print: Naming the Editors
March 14, 2008
It's possibly been noted elsewhere, and I am certainly not the first to notice - esteemed colleagues at some other west coast stores had already seen this - but this current season's Little, Brown portion of the flip-it Grand Central/Little, Brown catalog is the first I've ever seen that names books' editors. Almost more than any single title on the list - which, with David Sedaris, Michelle de Kretser, and others, had some good things - this little bit of small type had me exclaiming.
There's a few of us, I know, who when working as buyers do constantly ask, as we go through certain lists, who the editors are. In many instances we know. But in others ... This present season, for example, I would have known from past history that Robin Desser at Knopf was the likely person working on the new David Guterson novel, The Other. She had worked on his novel there before that. I also would have known - from press reports, alone - that she is the editor for Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection (and first book from Knopf), Unaccustomed Earth. But, allowing for the mailing here and there, it was only by asking around that one might know she is the editor for Nam Le's much-touted (one heard Ethan Canin at Winter Institute go on about this former student of his) debut collection of stories, The Boat. And, for a writer who has been published elsewhere, received solid praise, but not yet the wider readership, Robin Desser is also the editor of Rabih Alameddin's magnificent forthcoming novel, The Hakawati.
Similarly, looking through Simon and Schuster, one senses some other, newer editorial presence there: suddenly novels in translation are appearing ... where did this gemlike French novel, Memory, by Philippe Grimbert, come from? Ask, ask, and ye shall be answered: it's fairly new arrival Dedi Felman, previously over at Oxford, and also a major hand in the "Words Without Borders" online journal of translated literature.
So it is Little, Brown - whose shared catalogs may also have been the first to use titles' bar-codes in them, to go a whole other way with things - that is the first I've seen to list these editors. Seeing that it's Asya Muchnick that is doing the David Sedaris (along with other books), that Pat Strachan is doing the Michelle de Kretser, Judy Clain the Katie Crouch, what Michael Pietsch is up to, Geoff Shandler, and others, as well, makes going through that catalog a whole other exercise.
Posted by Rick Simonson on March 14, 2008 | Comments (2)
