Jonathan Galassi
Jonathan Galassi
Jonathan Galassi born 1949 in Seattle, Washington, is the President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the eight major publishers in New York. He began his publishing career at Houghton Mifflin in Boston, moved to Random House in New York, and finally, to Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He joined FSG as executive editor in 1985, after being fired from Random House. Two years later, he was named editor-in-chief, and is now President and Publisher...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublisher
CountryUnited States of America
afraid faith hard listen work
Be patient, work hard and consistently, have faith in your writing, and don't be afraid to listen to constructive criticism.
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I deal with the authors I work with, agents, and other departments of the company, talking about both the books that I'm working on and everyone else's. Then there's dealing with foreign publishers: foreigners visit all the time. People want to bounce things off the publisher, and a lot of it is encouragement.
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I think publishers need to be the ones that publish the books and control that process: finding writers, helping them with their work, finding readers. I think writers need that.
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I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
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A publisher - and I write as one - does far more than print and sell a book. It selects, nurtures, positions and promotes the writer's work.
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If you've worked in a company for a long time, there's a mythology that you know by heart, you don't need to look it up to evoke. It's there in your blood, as it were.
work
An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created.
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I can write anywhere that's quiet. I have a study in my apartment, but I often work in the kitchen of a house that we rent in the country.
The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe.
As the publisher of FSG and the custodian of its legacy, I have an interested insider's view.
background convincing form history interests needs reads terms
A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.
What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous.
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Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.
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Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?