29 July 2013
There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes. I had an odd, vertiginous sense of unreality reading Hothouse, by New York's Boris Kachka, about the publishing house where I've worked for the past quarter-century, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I loved reading the spiky, spicy evocation of the company's good old days. But the story of those years casts a shadow on the current life of the company, and I found myself wondering: Do the book-publishing cynics have it wrong, or do I?
