The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel - Softcover

Tom Engelhardt

2.7

33 ratings by Goodreads

9781558495067: The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1558495061 ISBN 13: 9781558495067

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005

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Pompeii never had it so bad. Rick Koppes knows a world is ending. The only question is, will he end with it? An editor at Byzantium Press for the last quarter century, he has watched his small, classy publishing house get gobbled up, first by an American publishing giant and then by Multimedia Entertainment, the Hollywood wing of Bruno Hindemann's German media empire. His editing colleagues are being downsized, his authors axed, and in a world where the cultural wallpaper is screaming, he himself hangs on by a fingernail -- the latest work of his sole best-selling author, pop psychologist Walter Groth, is racing off bookstore shelves. And that's just where his problems begin -- after all, Multimedia is about to make his ex-wife, a publishing executive at another house, his boss, his assistant wants his authors, and a woman who claims her father dropped the bomb on Nagasaki insists he publish her woeful memoir.

Koppes, who came of age in the sixties, is an editor slowly running off the rails. In the six episodes of The Last Days of Publishing, he refights the Vietnam War in a Chinese restaurant, discovers that the paleontological is political in a natural history museum, mixes it up with a flamboyant literary agent who went underground decades earlier, and encounters a hippie cultural oligarch on the forty-fifth floor of Multimedia's transnational entertainment headquarters.

Tom Engelhardt, himself a publishing veteran, has produced a tumultuous vision of the new world in which the word finds itself hustling for a living. By turns hilarious, sardonic, and poignant, his novel deftly captures the ways in which publishing, which has long put our world between covers but has seldom been memorialized in fiction, is being transformed.

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Review:

An ex-editor laments the death of the book - by writing a wonderfully observant novel about an editor whose career and way of life are both coming to an end. Having been a senior editor at Pantheon for 15 years, unsurprisingly, has given Engelhardt an easy command of the tone and texture of the publishing world, but the graceful abilities he also demonstrates in bringing character, place, and mood achingly to life must be the gifts of the man alone.... A brilliantly realized cri de coeur, pulsing throughout with life, sorrow, and thought. - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) ""A satisfyingly virulent, comical, absurd, deeply grieving true portrait of how things work today in the sleek factories of conglomerate book producers.... [A] skillful novel of manners - of very bad manners.... The scenes are vividly set, and this writer, made of stem scuff, was laughing through his tears. Engelhardt tells us that the love of literature persists even in these frantic times. It is essential to good reading to recognize that novels are true lies - truer and more philosophical than history, as Aristotle said about history. The episodes in Engelhardt's account emit a sense of autobiographical anguish, seasoned with an ironic notch at one corner of his mouth."" - Los Angeles Times Book Review ""The first thing to notice about The Last Days of Publishing, this interesting new novel about a gifted editor during the death throes of publishing as we've known it, is that it comes to us from a university press rather than a commercial house.... If you have any curiosity about the state of affairs in the publishing world, and, beyond that, the world of ideas, you should read this book."" - San Francisco Chronicle ""An engaging, at times bitterly funny lament for what [Engelhardt] sees as an endangered industry."" - Business Week ""Maintains a detached, bemused tone throughout, ultimately making the loss at its center all the more bitter. Engelhardt's unflashy observational style and rueful lit-geek koans (""To be a good editor has... nothing more to do with being a good person than saying ""Polly wants a cracker"" does with being a good parrot') are a treat for bookish types, and his Armageddon fixation is sure to strike a chord with middle-aged readers."" - The Village Voice ""Engelhardt has written the rarest of books: a truly intellectual novel. This faux memoir uses the decline of quality book publishing both as landscape and metaphor to explore in ways that are often heartbreaking the failure of the sixties to drastically change the world and the devastating moral and cultural consequences of that failure."" - Ariel Dorfman

About the Author:

TOM ENGELHARDT is a consulting editor at Metropolitan Books, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. He is author of The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation and creator and editor of the weblog Tomdispatch.com.

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