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Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie A Memoir in Essays

Wasserman Steve
Innbundet / 2024 / Engelsk

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781597146470
Publisert
2024-11-21
Utgiver
Vendor
Heyday Books
Høyde
215 mm
Bredde
139 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
352

Forfatter
Wasserman Steve

Biographical note

Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday. A 1974 graduate of UC Berkeley, he holds a degree in criminology. His past positions include being deputy editor of the op-ed page and opinion section of the Los Angeles Times; editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; editorial director of New Republic Books; publisher and editorial director of Hill and Wang at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and of the Noonday Press; editorial director of Times Books at Random House; and editor at large for Yale University Press. A former partner of the literacy agency Kneerim & Williams, he represented many authors, including Christopher Hitchens, Linda Ronstadt, Robert Scheer, and David Thomson. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie A Memoir in Essays

Wasserman Steve
Innbundet / 2024 / Engelsk
Wasserman Steve
Innbundet / 2024 / Engelsk
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<p><b>Finalist - <i>Foreword Reviews</i> INDIES Editor's Choice Prize for Nonfiction</b></p><p><b>Praise for <i>Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie</i>:</b></p><p>"Wasserman's love of reasoned debate and good writing shines through, and he often displays an impish wit. [. . .] The book is a remarkable record of a well-lived life. Written with care, passion, a keen eye for fakery, and a willingness to puncture it." —<i><b>Kirkus Reviews</b></i></p><p>"In this boisterous debut essay collection, Wasserman, the publisher of Heyday Books, discusses his literary friendships, lefty politics, and opinions on publishing's technological shifts. [...] Wasserman comes off as the quintessential book world insider, reflecting on his friendships with Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens, whose rightward turn in the early aughts Wasserman laments in an elegiac remembrance. [...] Erudite yet chatty, this gossipy grab bag of reminiscences will be catnip for book lovers." —<b><i>Publishers Weekly</i></b></p><p>"'Orson Welles Meets a Deadline' is surely the most hilarious piece in Wasserman's collection and seals his skill as a storyteller on the page. [...] Meetings with Barbra Streisand, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Gore Vidal are similarly thrilling [...] I could've read another book's worth of his takes on the demise of American print media, the decline of independent booksellers and their subsequent rebirth, and his hatred of Amazon." —<b>Denise Sullivan, <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i></b></p><p>"Throughout this wide-ranging book, Wasserman reflects on Barbra Streisand, interviews W.G. Sebald, offers shrewd commentary on Daniel Ellsberg, and summarizes the history of Cuba. Although his topics are diverse, Wasserman's wit and intelligence are consistently on display." —<b><i>Alta Journal</i></b></p><p>"[Wasserman] is a fine writer, offering a wealth of context to every subject, and a vocabulary to die for. Yet he is not sorry to have made his name as a publisher of other people's work." —<i><b>The Jewish News of Northern California</b></i></p><p>"Steve Wasserman has crafted a name and a career for himself over the past several decades as a polemical writer, brilliant editor, savvy publisher and as an (aging) enfant terrible who has declared cultural war on Berkeley, on California and on the American left. He has also carried on the good work that Malcolm Margolin began at Heyday. As a native of the Golden State, and a child of the Sixties, no one is better suited than Wasserman for the work of demolition that he has laid out for himself." —<b>Jonah Raskin, <i>CounterPunch</i></b></p><p>"If ever a man was in love with The Movement—that is, the peace and liberationist movements of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s—that man is Steve Wasserman. This collection of essays, in all its intelligent exuberance, pays full respect to that honorable devotion." —<b>Vivan Gornick</b>, author of <i>Taking a Long Look</i></p><p></p><p>"It's such a pleasure to see the cream of Steve Wasserman's writings now collected, from the remarkable tale of a bookstore owner who wouldn't let him buy the books he wanted to his brave against-the-grain take on the Black Panthers to his shrewd assessment of the fast-changing world of publishing. He is, as he says of his late friend Susan Sontag, an 'omnivore'—about politics, about literature, and about the way the rebellious currents he first encountered in 1960s Berkeley have continued to ripple through American life. The resulting volume is a feast." —<b>Adam Hochschild</b>, author of <i>American Midnight</i></p><p>"Steve Wasserman's wit and passions are on full display in this collection of fine essays, crammed full of insights and anecdotes from several (apparently very fun) decades in the literary world. Editor, publisher, agent, and bon vivant, Wasserman enjoys books, ideas, friends, and progressive politics, and his love for them all is infectious. A troublemaker of the good kind since his youth, Wasserman continues to inspire with his vigorous dedication to the life of the mind, exhibited with clarity and grace in this book." —<b>Viet Thanh Nguyen</b>, author of <i>A Man of Two Faces</i></p><p>"An intensely personal, engaging, and illuminating memoir in the form of essays published over fifty years, <i>Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie</i> is a richly detailed account of the intellectual life of an individual upon whom, to paraphrase Henry James, 'nothing has been lost.' Here is arguably the very best concise history of Cuba and the legendary Fidel Castro; beautifully composed eulogies for two close friends of the author, Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens, that also trace the writer's intellectual and personal growth; sharply perceptive commentary on Daniel Ellsberg; a thrillingly candid interview with W.G. Sebald. Highly recommended." —<b>Joyce Carol Oates</b>, author of <i>Butcher</i></p><p>"With its deeply human portraits and incisive criticism, <i>Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie</i> is a record of a personal and intellectual journey like few others. Berkeley in the '60s! Susan Sontag! Barbra Streisand! Orson Welles! Jackie Kennedy! Steve Wasserman is a treasure of American letters and his book is a testament, above all, to a literary life lived to the fullest." —<b>Héctor Tobar</b>, author of <i>Our Migrant Souls</i></p><p>"Steve Wasserman is so open to experience—so open and articulate about history, and the new—that to not follow his quicksilver intelligence and bountiful heart in these wonderful pages would be criminal. Read, reflect, and rejoice in the bounty. What a gift." — <b>Hilton Als</b>, author of <i>My Pinup</i></p><p>"<i>Tell Me Something, Tell My Anything, Even If It's a Lie</i> is a tremendous lively, thought provoking read. These essays are illuminating in the breadth and depth of Wasserman's experiences in the literary world and in book culture in general. They demonstrate a writer with wonderful narrative sense and thoughtful penetrating analysis of the cultural and political conditions that have shaped our world over the past decades." —<b>Paul Yamazaki</b>, principal buyer, City Lights Bookstore</p><p>"Steve Wasserman is a passionate witness of the upheavals of the past forty years that guided America to places unimagined before. His clear and sober reflections on the Berkeley counterculture, the Panthers in Oakland, the revolution in Cuba, the anti-war movement, Orson Welles, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, the writers of Los Angeles, the transformation of newspaper journalism, and the fate of the book remind us how much in this history there is to discover and to honor." —<b>Darryl Pinckney</b>, author of <i>Come Back in September</i></p>

An exhilarating journey through the world of books, featuring personal reflections on Susan Sontag, Huey Newton, Barbra Streisand, W. G. Sebald, and Christopher Hitchens."A troublemaker of the good kind since his youth, Wasserman continues to inspire with his vigorous dedication to the life of the mind, exhibited with clarity and grace in this book." —Viet Thanh NguyenBorn on the West Coast, the son of Bronx-born parents, Steve Wasserman is a generalist and public intellectual but is perhaps less well known as a cultural essayist and social critic of the first rank. In thirty splendid essays, originally published in such diverse publications as The New Republic and The Nation, The American Conservative and The Progressive, The Village Voice and The Economist, Wasserman delivers a riveting account of the awakening of an empathetic sensibility and a lively mind. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of his enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, and the tumults of a world in upheaval.These essays include the remarkable tale of a bookstore owner who wouldn't let him buy the books he wanted, to his brave against-the-grain take on the Black Panthers, to his shrewd assessment of the fast-changing world of publishing. Here is, as Joyce Carol Oates notes, "arguably the very best concise history of Cuba and the legendary Fidel Castro; beautifully composed eulogies for two close friends, Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens; sharply perceptive commentary on Daniel Ellsberg; a thrillingly candid interview with W. G. Sebald."
Les mer
Introduction Machine-Age Muse Future Shock Avenging Angel Rage and Ruin Exit Stage Left American Berserk Commie Camp Tom Hayden, R.I.P. A Nervous Nellie for Scheer The Heresy of Daniel Ellsberg Barbra Bows Out Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie Susan Sontag: Critic and Crusader Orson Welles Meets a Deadline The Russian Avant-Garde: Promise and Betrayal  Sebald’s Last Talk Letter from Graz Dear Hitch Sister Souljah Throws It Down Jason Epstein v. Benzion Netanyahu High Noon with Gore Vidal Scallops with Jackie Reading L.A. Chicago Agonistes Goodbye to All That The Fate of Books Size Matters In Defense of Difficulty A Writer’s Space Credo Index About the Author
Les mer
EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION Geography is fate.In the fall of 1964, a year after my parents left a hamlet of two thousand souls in central Oregon for the cosmopolitan seductions of Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement burst forth. A kid on the cusp of adolescence, I learned to run a Gestetner printing machine from David Lance Goines, the printer for the Free Speech Movement, a former student of classical antiquity who'd been kicked out for his activism. (Goines would go on to design the original poster for Alice Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse. And in that trajectory, perhaps, the odyssey of an entire political and cultural movement is inscribed, from militants who used to debate with alarming intensity how many Trotskyites might dance on the head of a Stalinist pin to very often the same folks who decades later argued with similar passion which street-corner bakery had the best croissants.) Although the media largely chose to report Berkeley's irruptions of dissent as singular, the truth was that Berkeley had a long history of protest. Even Robert S. McNamara, who graduated Cal in 1937, a principal architect of the Vietnam War, later would recall with considerable affection the heated political ferment of the university he knew as an undergraduate. But Berkeley, the city, was more conservative. Many of its residents regarded the political passions of students in their midst as dangerously provocative. Not so my parents. They sought out the friendship—dare I say comradeship—of malcontents and bohemians who had made their way over the years to the town, whose early boosters had dubbed it the "Athens of the West." Jessica Mitford, the quixotic muckraker with the aristocratic English pedigree, regularly punctured the pompous and the duplicitous with her instinct for the jugular and her unerring wit and withering irony. Fred Cody was another. A stand-up guy with an unabashed and unapologetic love for the unfiltered cigarettes that one day would kill him, he had made his way west from the impoverished hill country of West Virginia by way of Columbia University on the GI Bill. He and his wife, Pat, started a bookstore, which he named after himself. He banished the distinction between paperbacks and hardcovers and, like Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in San Francisco, championed the independent press, the neglected, the offbeat, and the marginal writers, poets, and other misfits who gathered in the Bay Area. Cody's radical patriotism and socially conscious literary aesthetics had much in common with the ethos that informed James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His best friend, John Dunbar, who'd been at Columbia with him and found a job teaching English at the California College of Arts and Crafts, had survived being shot down by the Germans over Nazi-occupied France, and had published a memorable account of his harrowing trek alone over the Pyrenees. His son, Robbie, a precocious guitarist with a high school band called the Purple Earthquake, inspired by the English rock 'n' roll of the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones, became my best friend. [...] It was impossible to grow up in Berkeley and not be drawn to the archipelago of bookstores that shaped the era. Despite California's fetish for the new and its widespread disdain for history, the reverence for old books among some was palpable. Used bookstores were as ubiquitous as they are now few and far between, many owned by ersatz bohemians who’d migrated to the Bay Area, feeling at home in the region’s cosmopolitan maritime mash-up. They often resembled hoarders reluctant to part with the treasures they needed to sell to stay in business. You'd enter their shops, often musty, woody places with dim lighting, chockablock with mysterious tomes in leather bindings, some behind locked bookcases, others displayed in glass vitrines. You felt you had to pass some secret and invisible test to pass muster as a potential buyer. This breed of bookseller was not only to be found in Berkeley. Years later, in my mid-twenties, Susan Sontag told me of a renowned secondhand and antiquarian bookstore on Amsterdam Avenue across from Columbia University. Called the Ideal Bookstore, it was run by an erudite Romanian Jew, a Holocaust survivor. Specializing in literature, philosophy, antiquity, and the Middle Ages, with a fine selection of poetry, the shop attracted scholars and writers and collectors from around the world. Susan told me that, upon entering the store, I should be sure that the proprietor saw me as he was deaf in one ear, and God forbid he wouldn't know you were there and then, startled by your presence, have a stroke. The guilt for killing off the last living remnant of Romanian Jewry would be unbearable. I wandered among the shelves and after an hour or so made my selection. I came to the cash register and placed my small pile of books on the counter. The owner examined each of the books and then looked me full in the face and said he couldn’t sell them to me. I said I had enough cash to make the purchase if he didn’t want to take my credit card. No, he said, it’s not your money. What was it then? "You're not ready." It was a familiar feeling. All my life I had wanted to be a grown-up. I remember as a young boy of eleven stealing out of my bed to huddle, shivering, in the hallway of our Berkeley apartment, trying to make sense of the murmured conversation at the dinner parties my parents would occasionally host. In Berkeley, I was soon surrounded by people, not much older than myself but who seemed impossibly sophisticated, who had decided to tilt at the status quo, to live the future they tried mightily to create. I was swept into the vortex of heated debate and perfervid efforts to make history. The French student slogan of May 1968—Be realistic, demand the impossible—was especially compelling.
Les mer

Relaterte produkter

<p><b>Finalist - <i>Foreword Reviews</i> INDIES Editor's Choice Prize for Nonfiction</b></p><p><b>Praise for <i>Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie</i>:</b></p><p>"Wasserman's love of reasoned debate and good writing shines through, and he often displays an impish wit. [. . .] The book is a remarkable record of a well-lived life. Written with care, passion, a keen eye for fakery, and a willingness to puncture it." —<i><b>Kirkus Reviews</b></i></p><p>"In this boisterous debut essay collection, Wasserman, the publisher of Heyday Books, discusses his literary friendships, lefty politics, and opinions on publishing's technological shifts. [...] Wasserman comes off as the quintessential book world insider, reflecting on his friendships with Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens, whose rightward turn in the early aughts Wasserman laments in an elegiac remembrance. [...] Erudite yet chatty, this gossipy grab bag of reminiscences will be catnip for book lovers." —<b><i>Publishers Weekly</i></b></p><p>"'Orson Welles Meets a Deadline' is surely the most hilarious piece in Wasserman's collection and seals his skill as a storyteller on the page. [...] Meetings with Barbra Streisand, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Gore Vidal are similarly thrilling [...] I could've read another book's worth of his takes on the demise of American print media, the decline of independent booksellers and their subsequent rebirth, and his hatred of Amazon." —<b>Denise Sullivan, <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i></b></p><p>"Throughout this wide-ranging book, Wasserman reflects on Barbra Streisand, interviews W.G. Sebald, offers shrewd commentary on Daniel Ellsberg, and summarizes the history of Cuba. Although his topics are diverse, Wasserman's wit and intelligence are consistently on display." —<b><i>Alta Journal</i></b></p><p>"[Wasserman] is a fine writer, offering a wealth of context to every subject, and a vocabulary to die for. Yet he is not sorry to have made his name as a publisher of other people's work." —<i><b>The Jewish News of Northern California</b></i></p><p>"Steve Wasserman has crafted a name and a career for himself over the past several decades as a polemical writer, brilliant editor, savvy publisher and as an (aging) enfant terrible who has declared cultural war on Berkeley, on California and on the American left. He has also carried on the good work that Malcolm Margolin began at Heyday. As a native of the Golden State, and a child of the Sixties, no one is better suited than Wasserman for the work of demolition that he has laid out for himself." —<b>Jonah Raskin, <i>CounterPunch</i></b></p><p>"If ever a man was in love with The Movement—that is, the peace and liberationist movements of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s—that man is Steve Wasserman. This collection of essays, in all its intelligent exuberance, pays full respect to that honorable devotion." —<b>Vivan Gornick</b>, author of <i>Taking a Long Look</i></p><p></p><p>"It's such a pleasure to see the cream of Steve Wasserman's writings now collected, from the remarkable tale of a bookstore owner who wouldn't let him buy the books he wanted to his brave against-the-grain take on the Black Panthers to his shrewd assessment of the fast-changing world of publishing. He is, as he says of his late friend Susan Sontag, an 'omnivore'—about politics, about literature, and about the way the rebellious currents he first encountered in 1960s Berkeley have continued to ripple through American life. The resulting volume is a feast." —<b>Adam Hochschild</b>, author of <i>American Midnight</i></p><p>"Steve Wasserman's wit and passions are on full display in this collection of fine essays, crammed full of insights and anecdotes from several (apparently very fun) decades in the literary world. Editor, publisher, agent, and bon vivant, Wasserman enjoys books, ideas, friends, and progressive politics, and his love for them all is infectious. A troublemaker of the good kind since his youth, Wasserman continues to inspire with his vigorous dedication to the life of the mind, exhibited with clarity and grace in this book." —<b>Viet Thanh Nguyen</b>, author of <i>A Man of Two Faces</i></p><p>"An intensely personal, engaging, and illuminating memoir in the form of essays published over fifty years, <i>Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie</i> is a richly detailed account of the intellectual life of an individual upon whom, to paraphrase Henry James, 'nothing has been lost.' Here is arguably the very best concise history of Cuba and the legendary Fidel Castro; beautifully composed eulogies for two close friends of the author, Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens, that also trace the writer's intellectual and personal growth; sharply perceptive commentary on Daniel Ellsberg; a thrillingly candid interview with W.G. Sebald. Highly recommended." —<b>Joyce Carol Oates</b>, author of <i>Butcher</i></p><p>"With its deeply human portraits and incisive criticism, <i>Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie</i> is a record of a personal and intellectual journey like few others. Berkeley in the '60s! Susan Sontag! Barbra Streisand! Orson Welles! Jackie Kennedy! Steve Wasserman is a treasure of American letters and his book is a testament, above all, to a literary life lived to the fullest." —<b>Héctor Tobar</b>, author of <i>Our Migrant Souls</i></p><p>"Steve Wasserman is so open to experience—so open and articulate about history, and the new—that to not follow his quicksilver intelligence and bountiful heart in these wonderful pages would be criminal. Read, reflect, and rejoice in the bounty. What a gift." — <b>Hilton Als</b>, author of <i>My Pinup</i></p><p>"<i>Tell Me Something, Tell My Anything, Even If It's a Lie</i> is a tremendous lively, thought provoking read. These essays are illuminating in the breadth and depth of Wasserman's experiences in the literary world and in book culture in general. They demonstrate a writer with wonderful narrative sense and thoughtful penetrating analysis of the cultural and political conditions that have shaped our world over the past decades." —<b>Paul Yamazaki</b>, principal buyer, City Lights Bookstore</p><p>"Steve Wasserman is a passionate witness of the upheavals of the past forty years that guided America to places unimagined before. His clear and sober reflections on the Berkeley counterculture, the Panthers in Oakland, the revolution in Cuba, the anti-war movement, Orson Welles, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, the writers of Los Angeles, the transformation of newspaper journalism, and the fate of the book remind us how much in this history there is to discover and to honor." —<b>Darryl Pinckney</b>, author of <i>Come Back in September</i></p>

An exhilarating journey through the world of books, featuring personal reflections on Susan Sontag, Huey Newton, Barbra Streisand, W. G. Sebald, and Christopher Hitchens."A troublemaker of the good kind since his youth, Wasserman continues to inspire with his vigorous dedication to the life of the mind, exhibited with clarity and grace in this book." —Viet Thanh NguyenBorn on the West Coast, the son of Bronx-born parents, Steve Wasserman is a generalist and public intellectual but is perhaps less well known as a cultural essayist and social critic of the first rank. In thirty splendid essays, originally published in such diverse publications as The New Republic and The Nation, The American Conservative and The Progressive, The Village Voice and The Economist, Wasserman delivers a riveting account of the awakening of an empathetic sensibility and a lively mind. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of his enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, and the tumults of a world in upheaval.These essays include the remarkable tale of a bookstore owner who wouldn't let him buy the books he wanted, to his brave against-the-grain take on the Black Panthers, to his shrewd assessment of the fast-changing world of publishing. Here is, as Joyce Carol Oates notes, "arguably the very best concise history of Cuba and the legendary Fidel Castro; beautifully composed eulogies for two close friends, Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens; sharply perceptive commentary on Daniel Ellsberg; a thrillingly candid interview with W. G. Sebald."
Les mer
Introduction Machine-Age Muse Future Shock Avenging Angel Rage and Ruin Exit Stage Left American Berserk Commie Camp Tom Hayden, R.I.P. A Nervous Nellie for Scheer The Heresy of Daniel Ellsberg Barbra Bows Out Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie Susan Sontag: Critic and Crusader Orson Welles Meets a Deadline The Russian Avant-Garde: Promise and Betrayal  Sebald’s Last Talk Letter from Graz Dear Hitch Sister Souljah Throws It Down Jason Epstein v. Benzion Netanyahu High Noon with Gore Vidal Scallops with Jackie Reading L.A. Chicago Agonistes Goodbye to All That The Fate of Books Size Matters In Defense of Difficulty A Writer’s Space Credo Index About the Author
Les mer
EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION Geography is fate.In the fall of 1964, a year after my parents left a hamlet of two thousand souls in central Oregon for the cosmopolitan seductions of Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement burst forth. A kid on the cusp of adolescence, I learned to run a Gestetner printing machine from David Lance Goines, the printer for the Free Speech Movement, a former student of classical antiquity who'd been kicked out for his activism. (Goines would go on to design the original poster for Alice Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse. And in that trajectory, perhaps, the odyssey of an entire political and cultural movement is inscribed, from militants who used to debate with alarming intensity how many Trotskyites might dance on the head of a Stalinist pin to very often the same folks who decades later argued with similar passion which street-corner bakery had the best croissants.) Although the media largely chose to report Berkeley's irruptions of dissent as singular, the truth was that Berkeley had a long history of protest. Even Robert S. McNamara, who graduated Cal in 1937, a principal architect of the Vietnam War, later would recall with considerable affection the heated political ferment of the university he knew as an undergraduate. But Berkeley, the city, was more conservative. Many of its residents regarded the political passions of students in their midst as dangerously provocative. Not so my parents. They sought out the friendship—dare I say comradeship—of malcontents and bohemians who had made their way over the years to the town, whose early boosters had dubbed it the "Athens of the West." Jessica Mitford, the quixotic muckraker with the aristocratic English pedigree, regularly punctured the pompous and the duplicitous with her instinct for the jugular and her unerring wit and withering irony. Fred Cody was another. A stand-up guy with an unabashed and unapologetic love for the unfiltered cigarettes that one day would kill him, he had made his way west from the impoverished hill country of West Virginia by way of Columbia University on the GI Bill. He and his wife, Pat, started a bookstore, which he named after himself. He banished the distinction between paperbacks and hardcovers and, like Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in San Francisco, championed the independent press, the neglected, the offbeat, and the marginal writers, poets, and other misfits who gathered in the Bay Area. Cody's radical patriotism and socially conscious literary aesthetics had much in common with the ethos that informed James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His best friend, John Dunbar, who'd been at Columbia with him and found a job teaching English at the California College of Arts and Crafts, had survived being shot down by the Germans over Nazi-occupied France, and had published a memorable account of his harrowing trek alone over the Pyrenees. His son, Robbie, a precocious guitarist with a high school band called the Purple Earthquake, inspired by the English rock 'n' roll of the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones, became my best friend. [...] It was impossible to grow up in Berkeley and not be drawn to the archipelago of bookstores that shaped the era. Despite California's fetish for the new and its widespread disdain for history, the reverence for old books among some was palpable. Used bookstores were as ubiquitous as they are now few and far between, many owned by ersatz bohemians who’d migrated to the Bay Area, feeling at home in the region’s cosmopolitan maritime mash-up. They often resembled hoarders reluctant to part with the treasures they needed to sell to stay in business. You'd enter their shops, often musty, woody places with dim lighting, chockablock with mysterious tomes in leather bindings, some behind locked bookcases, others displayed in glass vitrines. You felt you had to pass some secret and invisible test to pass muster as a potential buyer. This breed of bookseller was not only to be found in Berkeley. Years later, in my mid-twenties, Susan Sontag told me of a renowned secondhand and antiquarian bookstore on Amsterdam Avenue across from Columbia University. Called the Ideal Bookstore, it was run by an erudite Romanian Jew, a Holocaust survivor. Specializing in literature, philosophy, antiquity, and the Middle Ages, with a fine selection of poetry, the shop attracted scholars and writers and collectors from around the world. Susan told me that, upon entering the store, I should be sure that the proprietor saw me as he was deaf in one ear, and God forbid he wouldn't know you were there and then, startled by your presence, have a stroke. The guilt for killing off the last living remnant of Romanian Jewry would be unbearable. I wandered among the shelves and after an hour or so made my selection. I came to the cash register and placed my small pile of books on the counter. The owner examined each of the books and then looked me full in the face and said he couldn’t sell them to me. I said I had enough cash to make the purchase if he didn’t want to take my credit card. No, he said, it’s not your money. What was it then? "You're not ready." It was a familiar feeling. All my life I had wanted to be a grown-up. I remember as a young boy of eleven stealing out of my bed to huddle, shivering, in the hallway of our Berkeley apartment, trying to make sense of the murmured conversation at the dinner parties my parents would occasionally host. In Berkeley, I was soon surrounded by people, not much older than myself but who seemed impossibly sophisticated, who had decided to tilt at the status quo, to live the future they tried mightily to create. I was swept into the vortex of heated debate and perfervid efforts to make history. The French student slogan of May 1968—Be realistic, demand the impossible—was especially compelling.
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781597146470
Publisert
2024-11-21
Utgiver
Vendor
Heyday Books
Høyde
215 mm
Bredde
139 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
352

Forfatter
Wasserman Steve

Biographical note

Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday. A 1974 graduate of UC Berkeley, he holds a degree in criminology. His past positions include being deputy editor of the op-ed page and opinion section of the Los Angeles Times; editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; editorial director of New Republic Books; publisher and editorial director of Hill and Wang at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and of the Noonday Press; editorial director of Times Books at Random House; and editor at large for Yale University Press. A former partner of the literacy agency Kneerim & Williams, he represented many authors, including Christopher Hitchens, Linda Ronstadt, Robert Scheer, and David Thomson. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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