News & Blog by Brandon VanOver
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
Go to any social event where you’re mixing with some proportion of strangers, like a wedding or a distant cousin’s barbecue, and in the course of social introductions, not long after the exchange of names and shortly before the discussion of property prices, the question will be asked: ‘What do you do?’ Some skip straight to the matter (‘What do you do for a crust?’) while others have the decency...
Sometimes I encounter the misconception that authors are alone on an island of creativity, and editors are simply drab sticklers who take a manuscript and tidy it up by applying the laws of grammar and usage, laws as predictable and inscrutable as gravity. The truth is that there are few more intimate and dynamic relationships in publishing. The author has created something from themselves, stories...
Clues to the more mysterious things in life are often lying around us, common as dust bunnies, as numerous as mould spores. My ten-month-old daughter, Greta, likes to have a poke around, a casual survey of our unit kingdom. More often than not I see size-one feet disappearing around a corner, bound for a bout with the CD tower, a lurch towards a power cord, a cuddle with this really creepy doll my...
In thinking about the role of the editor, my mind curiously jumped to my most humiliating moment. I played the bass clarinet for half a term in Year Seven. And I was horrendous. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell puts the watershed moment of any successful endeavour at 10,000 hours of practice, whether swinging a 9-iron, cooking gumbo or fingering scales on a bass clarinet. 10,000 hours to greatness. In...
In its simplest terms, editing is the act of selection: weighing up the merits of x and comparing it against y. At twenty-three, sitting at the top of a ski run on the icy slopes near my home in Virginia in the US, sharing a cigarette with a friend, I decided to make a claim on behalf of my collegiate adventures in English lit. I wanted to take my classroom hunches about Keats and Kerouac and ply...
