Are things different in the London publishing world?
No, it’s just the same. I picked up a book just before I left. It’s a nice book, I’m not going to say what. I looked at it, the adjectives on this book, you’d think it was Proust. Not that Proust ever got that when he started. How can any poor reader find his way amongst all this? What happens is publishers send books to us, because of the difficulty of getting books noticed, and we think, “My god, the future of this writer might depend on my saying a nice thing!” And all these phrases get put together, and it sounds as if this is the greatest writer that ever was. Well, it’s just terrible. This new book is also about that era’s sexual politics. You write about how the new freedoms backfired somewhat. People’s feelings were badly hurt, particularly women’s, by the notion that you could have sex and it didn’t really matter that much. People say it all began in the ’60s; I think it began in the ’50s. The thing was, there were no rules. There were no rules at all. In the past, everybody k
No, it’s just the same. I picked up a book just before I left. It’s a nice book, I’m not going to say what. I looked at it, the adjectives on this book, you’d think it was Proust. Not that Proust ever got that when he started. How can any poor reader find his way amongst all this? What happens is publishers send books to us, because of the difficulty of getting books noticed, and we think, “My god, the future of this writer might depend on my saying a nice thing!” And all these phrases get put together, and it sounds as if this is the greatest writer that ever was. Well, it’s just terrible. This new book is also about that era’s sexual politics. You write about how the new freedoms backfired somewhat. People’s feelings were badly hurt, particularly women’s, by the notion that you could have sex and it didn’t really matter that much. People say it all began in the ’60s; I think it began in the ’50s. The thing was, there were no rules. There were no rules at all. In the past, everybody k
