About the Author

Diana Athill was born in Norfolk in 1917 and educated at home until she was fourteen. She read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and graduated in 1939. She spent the war years working at the BBC Overseas Service in the News Information Department. After the war she met Andr Deutsch and fell into publishing. She worked as an editor, first at Allan Wingate and then at Andre Deutsch, until her retirement at the age of 75 in 1993.



Her books include An Unavoidable Delay, a collection of short stories published in 1962 and two 'documentary' books After A Funeral and Make Believe. Stet is a memoir of Diana Athill's fifty-year career in publishing.

Reviews

The venerable Athill (Make Believe: A True Story), now 83, has written a candid, chatty account of her years at Andre Deutsch, Ltd., one of London's premier independent publishing houses. An astute editor with an unfailing eye for quality, Athill helped launch the careers of Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul, John Updike, and many other literary giants. Although she never earned more than 15,000 (currently around $21,000) per year and was forced to resign herself to the company's male chauvinistic workplace attitudes, Athill loved her job. Central to her story is her complex relationship with employer and onetime love, Andre Deutsch. This canny entrepreneur often infuriated Athill with his autocratic managerial style, causing her to label him a "mean old bastard." Nonetheless, she remained in his employ for 40 years (until the firm was sold in 1985) and never ceased to be his loyal and affectionate supporter. Recommended for most libraries.DEllen Sullivan, Ferguson Lib., Stamford, CT Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

For nearly 50 years, Athill edited some of the best minds of the postwar generation, including Molly Keane, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Brian Moore, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Mordecai Richler, Philip Roth, Gitta Sereny and John Updike. A founding director of the now-defunct London publishing house Andre Deutsch Ltd., Athill "intervened" with legendary taste and self-restraint, earning her the loyalty, and sometimes the friendship, of her frequently tetchy, fragile authors ("Writers don't encounter really attentive readers as often as you might expect, and find them balm to their twitchy nerves when they do; which gives their editors a good start with them"). Athill, now an exuberant 83, looks back on her half-century in the business, beginning with her wartime fling with Hungarian ex-pat Andre Deutsch. The affair was brief, but the relationship flourished, as the two founded first Allan Wingate (which "pounced" to publish The Naked and the Dead) and then, in 1952, the house that bore both Deutsch's name and the stamp of his ego. Dealing with his temper and self-indulgence prepared Athill for playing "nanny" to a series of difficult writers, chief among them the "ugly drunk" Rhys; Morris Chester, an all-but-forgotten surrealist novelist plagued by "voices"; and Naipaul, whom Athill categorizes as the petulant and depressive. Cheerfully self-effacing as editor and friend, Athill offers few details of her personal life. But on the subject of her workplace and the "Interesting People" she met there, she is unfailingly candid, generous, witty and astute, an eyewitness with a famously discerning eye. Agent, Angela Rose, Granta Books, London. (Mar.) Forecast: Publishing insiders and the literarily curious will find Athill's portraits of leading contemporary authors irresistible. That won't translate into major sales, but it does offer an opportunity to enterprising booksellers, who may find happy results if they display this title along with Jason Epstein's forthcoming Book Business. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.