Used - Very Good. Seller Inventory # 4-U-2-0213
Synopsis: “Mad Men for the literary world.” —Junot Díaz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux is arguably the most influential publishing house of the modern era. Home to an unrivaled twenty-five Nobel Prize winners and generation-defining authors like T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen, it’s a cultural institution whose importance approaches that of The New Yorker or The New York Times. But FSG is no ivory tower—the owner's wife called the office a “sexual sewer”—and its untold story is as tumultuous and engrossing as many of the great novels it has published.
Boris Kachka deftly reveals the era and the city that built FSG through the stories of two men: founder-owner Roger Straus, the pugnacious black sheep of his powerful German-Jewish family—with his bottomless supply of ascots, charm, and vulgarity of every stripe—and his utter opposite, the reticent, closeted editor Robert Giroux, who rose from working-class New Jersey to discover the novelists and poets who helped define American culture. Giroux became one of T. S. Eliot’s best friends, just missed out on The Catcher in the Rye, and played the placid caretaker to manic-depressive geniuses like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Jean Stafford, and Jack Kerouac. Straus, the brilliant showman, made Susan Sontag a star, kept Edmund Wilson out of prison, and turned Isaac Bashevis Singer from a Yiddish scribbler into a Nobelist—even as he spread the gossip on which literary New York thrived.
A prolific lover and an epic fighter, Straus ventured fearlessly, and sometimes recklessly, into battle for his books, his authors, and his often-struggling company. When a talented editor left for more money and threatened to take all his writers, Roger roared, “Over my dead body”—and meant it. He turned a philosophical disagreement with Simon & Schuster head Dick Snyder into a mano a mano media war that caught writers such as Philip Roth and Joan Didion in the crossfire. He fought off would-be buyers like S. I. Newhouse (“that dwarf”) with one hand and rapacious literary agents like Andrew Wylie (“that shit”) with the other. Even his own son and presumed successor was no match for a man who had to win at any cost—and who was proven right at almost every turn.
At the center of the story, always, are the writers themselves. After giving us a fresh perspective on the postwar authors we thought we knew, Kachka pulls back the curtain to expose how elite publishing works today. He gets inside the editorial meetings where writers’ fates are decided; he captures the adrenaline rush of bidding wars for top talent; and he lifts the lid on the high-stakes pursuit of that rarest commodity, public attention—including a fly-on-the-wall account of the explosive confrontation between Oprah Winfrey and Jonathan Franzen, whose relationship, Franzen tells us, “was bogus from the start.”
Vast but detailed, full of both fresh gossip and keen insight into how the literary world works, Hothouse is the product of five years of research and nearly two hundred interviews by a veteran New York magazine writer. It tells an essential story for the first time, providing a delicious inside perspective on the rich pageant of postwar cultural life and illuminating the vital intellectual center of the American Century.
About the Author: Boris Kachka in the author of Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House. He is the Books Editor at New York magazine, where he has also been a writer covering books, theater, film, and other cultural industries and personalities for many years. He has also contributed to the New York Times, GQ, Elle, T, and Condé Nast Traveler. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife and son.
Title: Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the ...
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 2013
Binding: hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Edition: First Edition.
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. 1st printing. Tight, straight binding and clean, unmarked pages with remainder mark on bottom of the text block. DJ has some smudge marks on the back. Seller Inventory # 000393
Book Description Condition: Good. First Edition. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # 1378274-6
Book Description Condition: Very Good. First Edition. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in excellent condition. May show signs of wear or have minor defects. Seller Inventory # GRP102279844
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Collectible-Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. First Edition. First edition by number code. Seller Inventory # 259509
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition. First Edition/ First Printing, complete number line. Condition of the book is Very Good. A little shelf worn but looks unread. Seller Inventory # 45315
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: As New. Dust Jacket Condition: As New. 1st Edition. This is an A New copy of the first edition (2nd printing) in an As New dust jacket. NOT a remainder copy. Includes photographs, Index, Bibliography. Seller Inventory # 047056
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition. First Edition/ First Printing (2013)(Full Number Line). Seller Inventory # 21090260
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. Red boards, lightly bumped in a couple tiny spots; unvarnished paper DJ is lightly rubbed/shelfworn/tanned as per usual, but no serious defects. And the story of FSG is a good one indeed. Buy this book and find out. Seller Inventory # 000033
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. DJ has some rubbing on edges and marks on front and back, boards are good. Pages are all clean, no creasing, highlighting, or notes.BP. Seller Inventory # ABE-1634231370620
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: As New. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. First Edition, 1st printing. Pristine, clean & tight copy, unread in As New condition. Bright & intact white jacket, maculate by association, now in archival mylar cover, shows its Fine character, o/w quite presentable. "This is an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime book. With HOTHOUSE Kachka has produced his very own Mad Men for the literary world---an exhilarating, beautifully written biography of FSG that's really an exhilarating, beautifully written biography of a literary culture."---Junot Diaz. "Astounding: an intelligent, knowing, spectacularly well-reported (read: gratifyingly gossipy) chronicle of the ultimate old-school book publisher. If you want a sense of how big-time, high-end New York publishing used to work and works today, I can't imagine a finer, more authoritative guide."---Kurt Andersen. Seller Inventory # RUB828