Students of modernist literature and publishing history will find this a pleasure.
A namesake and descendant delivers a richly detailed biography of the distinguished British publishing house.
After World War I, returning veteran Geoffrey Faber found himself relieved from a job for which he didn’t have much talent, running a brewery, and talked his way into a medical publishing house, setting about diversifying the list with a literary magazine, works of fiction, and “legal cram books.” While the last never came about, writes Faber (Faberge's Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire, 2008, etc.), Geoffrey eventually shaped a list dominated by literature, publishing many of the greats. As he wrote to a friend, the company’s new premises on Russell Square provided an incentive “to build up as fine a publishing business as we can to inhabit it!” As the author writes in this documentary biography of the company, Geoffrey was fortunate in taking on the American poet T.S. Eliot, so much an Anglophile as to be more English than the English, as an early editor. Eliot often rejected submissions, but he also encouraged work by poets such as W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, helping make Faber a major presence in the literary world from the 1930s on. At the same time, other editors and directors brought in notable writers such as William Golding, who delivered a manuscript that he called A Cry of Children, soon to be superseded by a Faber editor’s much more memorable Lord of the Flies. The author isn’t shy about sharing the fiscal details of publishing, opening with the old adage that the way to make a small fortune in the business is to start with a large one. He also provides insight into the publishing work of rock legend Pete Townshend, who, despairing of the future of his band, came to work for Faber & Faber in 1983, writing what one colleague called "good old-fashioned publishing reports, very serious, very diligent reports on the books we’re considering.”
Students of modernist literature and publishing history will find this a pleasure.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-5713-3904-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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