"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]...

"An intimate biography of legendary editor Judith Jones, the woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century-including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath"-- "When twenty-five-year-old Judith Jones began working as a secretary at Doubleday's newly opened Paris office in 1949, she was tasked with wading through manuscripts in the slush pile until one caught her eye. She read the book in one sitting,...

This engaging study provides new perspectives on the lives and work of two major figures in American poetry and publishing in the second half of the twentieth century: Robert Giroux (1914-2008), editor-in-chief of Harcourt, Brace and Company and later of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and John Berryman (1914-1972), Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Shakespearean scholar who also received a National Book Award and a Bollingen Prize for Poetry. From their...