Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America's Most Celebrated Publishing House
Boris Kachka
Simon & Schuster
You can keep the Kardashians. Move over, George; the newest Windsor is yesterday's news. Those readers interested in pursuing the higher gossip may have found their purveyor of choice in Boris Kachka's publishing world tell-all Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America's Most Celebrated Publishing House. Kachka has arrived peddling a steamer trunk's worth of juicy nuggets about Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), the quasi-legendary American publishing house of Solzhenitsyn, Sontag, Vargas Llosa and O'Connor. But gossip this is; Kachka rarely stints on describing the inner workings of what founder Roger Straus's wife Dorothea referred to as "a sexual sewer".
Before proceeding into the sewer, let us first take a tour of the publisher's office. Roger Straus Jr was a scion of the Guggenheim family, a seeming wastrel who, after serving in the Second World War in the US navy's magazine and book section, began an imprint of his own. Straus was a crafty business mind but not much of a reader, so for the more specialised work of selecting and moulding writers, he brought in the editor Robert Giroux from Harcourt, Brace. Giroux was in many ways Straus's inverse: a Catholic to Straus's Jew, quietly gay to Straus's many extramarital tanglings. Most importantly for the future of FSG, Giroux had an eye for attracting and cultivating writers, bringing in many of the esteemed names he had worked with at Harcourt, Brace, and then complementing them with a glittering array of critically acclaimed novelists and poets such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud and Elizabeth Bishop.
FSG offered an attractive bargain to its favoured writers: steady publication, a stream of work as readers and scouts, and the imprimatur of a noble house in exchange for lower-than-average advances. Employees, too, settled for less: "They worked in gloves in the winter when the heat broke down; they jerry-rigged the paper towel dispenser roll in the ladies' room with an oversize dinner fork; they repaired their own desks and bought their own pencils and made sacrifices in their lives that well-born Roger W Straus Jr would never have to make, all for the freedom to publish what they loved, and little else." One FSG employee was caught stealing books from the office and selling them to local bookstores, and had a legendary rejoinder to Straus on being confronted: "I'll stop if you give me a raise."
The privilege of publishing Edmund Wilson and John Berryman required certain calculated concessions to the public's taste. FSG may have been the house of TS Eliot, but it was also the publisher of record for Sammy Davis Jr's Yes I Can. "Had I not published certain books," Straus told the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel's daughter, "I could not have afforded to publish your father and several other distinguished poets, philosophers and novelists." For all of FSG's loyalty to high literature, most of its bills were paid in those early years by an exercise manual, as in later years blockbuster novels by Scott Turow and Tom Wolfe would subsidise much of the house's less profitable work.
As if inspired by its subject, Hothouse is a companionable, chatty guided tour of the corporate end of literature. This is a business book with only a secondary interest in the writers themselves. Philip Roth shows up primarily to complain about the size of his advances, and Susan Sontag for her symbiotic relationship with Straus. The book's closest models are Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum's I Want My MTV and Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller's Live From New York, about Saturday Night Live - studies of long-standing, if slightly bedraggled, cultural institutions. Kachka has latched onto a juicy tale of art and business, and milks the details of financial intrigue and sexual misbehaviour. This makes for a wildly enjoyable book, if one with not as much to say about contemporary literature as it might think.
Ah yes, the gossip. Straus apparently treated the office like his personal harem, conducting long-term affairs with many of the female staffers at FSG. A certain brand of jovial sexual harassment was once de rigueur for the office. One staffer in the 1970s felt left out when Straus failed to comment on her breasts for a number of months. A dedicated phone line initially intended for a short-lived association with US intelligence agencies (FSG published a book by the diplomat Jeane Kirkpatrick that was little more than government propaganda) became Straus's private line for lunchtime sexual assignations.
Hothouse lovingly describes a bygone era in book publishing, where the ideal promotion for a new book (according to Straus) was for Edmund Wilson to host a dinner party for 18 or 20 carefully selected guests in its honour. (Second place went to a cover story in The New York Times Book Review.) FSG crowned certain writers with glory, and expected them to return the favour. Susan Sontag was the favoured daughter of Straus and the FSG staff, serving as the imprint's first reader and a shadow editor-in-chief, even being placed on the company's health insurance after surviving breast cancer. (Her son David Rieff notes that notorious skinflint Straus failed to contribute to her health fund while she was ill.) "She fit like a key into the culture of FSG," Kachka says of Sontag, "which operated best as a full-blown intellectual apparatus - a one-stop shop of literary greatness. Come for the parties; stay for the book contract; give back by reviewing our other authors or talking them up at the next party."
FSG's success was also born out of its comfort with foreign literature. Utilising the services of an array of well-read European scouts, FSG wholeheartedly embraced Italian and Russian writers, at one point going on an unprecedented streak in which 10 of the 18 Nobel Prize winners, including Singer, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, were FSG authors. FSG's devotion to the cause of international literature also granted it the opportunity to win out over deeper-pocketed bidders, as when it purchased the rights to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's much sought-after August 1914 because of the author's warm feelings for the company that had put out his Cancer Ward in the United States. "I am glad to say that personal relations still cut more ice in publishing than cabled bids of huge sums of money," crowed Straus. Nonetheless, there were still miscalculations. Sontag told Straus to purchase Salvatore Satta's The Day of Judgment instead of Umberto Eco's wildly popular literary thriller The Name of the Rose. The subsidies for another generation of underselling writers went to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich instead.
Eventually, FSG's generosity to its writers contributed to its unsteady financial sheet. Longer manuscripts required larger advances to keep favoured writers afloat, which made for longer waits between books. Sometimes the patience paid off. After years of delays, Wolfe delivered his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which managed to "mainline the zeitgeist" in precisely the fashion Straus and Giroux had hoped for. Susan Sontag and John McPhee unexpectedly stumbled across financial success later in their careers. But most of FSG's writers, even the beloved ones, sold poorly. "The correspondence is full of rejections," Kachka tells us, "pleading a surfeit of superb books with modest sales." In the 1990s, "FSG's revenue chart for those years looks like an EKG, with one in three years a Turow-led spike and deep Turow-less troughs in between".
Straus's son Rog wanted FSG to diversify its portfolio, while Straus was intent on keeping FSG running to his unique specifications, no matter what the bean-counters might say. The battle led to Rog's departure, but Straus was eventually forced to sell FSG to a European corporation. And his replacement, Jonathan Galassi, has made FSG look more like other publishers. It is likely that no one thinks of Thomas Friedman, one of the label's all-time best-selling writers, as a quintessentially FSG author.
In the end, then, the magic of FSG seems primarily to consist of its utter artificiality. There was nothing especially different about FSG, no unique mission or business model. The company published its share of French cookbooks and legal thrillers alongside its Nobelists, and sold out to a German conglomerate, just like all the other mid-size publishers in New York eventually did. But for a time, FSG - Straus, and also Giroux - convinced the writers they worked with, and the employees they hired, that they were engaged in a pursuit of the eternal verities. They gave the right writers enough time and money and pampering to produce the works they knew them to be capable of. It sounds like hardly anything of note. But if more publishers were capable of it, this book would likely not exist.
Saul Austerlitz is a frequent contributor to The Review.
Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989
Director: Goran Hugo Olsson
Rating: 5/5
Company%20Profile
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
The specs
Engine: 2-litre or 3-litre 4Motion all-wheel-drive Power: 250Nm (2-litre); 340 (3-litre) Torque: 450Nm Transmission: 8-speed automatic Starting price: From Dh212,000 On sale: Now
The specs
Engine: 1.5-litre turbo
Power: 181hp
Torque: 230Nm
Transmission: 6-speed automatic
Starting price: Dh79,000
On sale: Now
Living in...
This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.
The specs
Engine: 3.8-litre, twin-turbo V8
Transmission: eight-speed automatic
Power: 582bhp
Torque: 730Nm
Price: Dh649,000
On sale: now
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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COMPANY%20PROFILE%20
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The specs: 2017 GMC Sierra 1500 Denali
Price, base / as tested Dh207,846 / Dh220,000
Engine 6.2L V8
Transmission Eight-speed automatic
Power 420hp @ 5,600rpm
Torque 624Nm @ 4,100rpm
Fuel economy, combined 13.5L / 100km
Company Profile
Name: Thndr
Started: 2019
Co-founders: Ahmad Hammouda and Seif Amr
Sector: FinTech
Headquarters: Egypt
UAE base: Hub71, Abu Dhabi
Current number of staff: More than 150
Funds raised: $22 million
The National Archives, Abu Dhabi
Founded over 50 years ago, the National Archives collects valuable historical material relating to the UAE, and is the oldest and richest archive relating to the Arabian Gulf.
Much of the material can be viewed on line at the Arabian Gulf Digital Archive - https://www.agda.ae/en
UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
What are the GCSE grade equivalents?
- Grade 9 = above an A*
- Grade 8 = between grades A* and A
- Grade 7 = grade A
- Grade 6 = just above a grade B
- Grade 5 = between grades B and C
- Grade 4 = grade C
- Grade 3 = between grades D and E
- Grade 2 = between grades E and F
- Grade 1 = between grades F and G
Profile of Bitex UAE
Date of launch: November 2018
Founder: Monark Modi
Based: Business Bay, Dubai
Sector: Financial services
Size: Eight employees
Investors: Self-funded to date with $1m of personal savings
Living in...
This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.
if you go
The flights
Etihad flies direct from Abu Dhabi to San Francisco from Dh5,760 return including taxes.
The car
Etihad Guest members get a 10 per cent worldwide discount when booking with Hertz, as well as earning miles on their rentals (more at www.hertz.com/etihad). A week's car hire costs from Dh1,500 including taxes.
The hotels
Along the route, Motel 6 (www.motel6.com) offers good value and comfort, with rooms from $55 (Dh202) per night including taxes. In Portland, the Jupiter Hotel (https://jupiterhotel.com/) has rooms from $165 (Dh606) per night including taxes. The Society Hotel https://thesocietyhotel.com/ has rooms from $130 (Dh478) per night including taxes.
More info
To keep up with constant developments in Portland, visit www.travelportland.com
11 cabbie-recommended restaurants and dishes to try in Abu Dhabi
Iqbal Restaurant behind Wendy’s on Hamdan Street for the chicken karahi (Dh14)
Pathemari in Navy Gate for prawn biryani (from Dh12 to Dh35)
Abu Al Nasar near Abu Dhabi Mall, for biryani (from Dh12 to Dh20)
Bonna Annee at Navy Gate for Ethiopian food (the Bonna Annee special costs Dh42 and comes with a mix of six house stews – key wet, minchet abesh, kekel, meser be sega, tibs fir fir and shiro).
Al Habasha in Tanker Mai for Ethiopian food (tibs, a hearty stew with meat, is a popular dish; here it costs Dh36.75 for lamb and beef versions)
Himalayan Restaurant in Mussaffa for Nepalese (the momos and chowmein noodles are best-selling items, and go for between Dh14 and Dh20)
Makalu in Mussaffa for Nepalese (get the chicken curry or chicken fry for Dh11)
Al Shaheen Cafeteria near Guardian Towers for a quick morning bite, especially the egg sandwich in paratha (Dh3.50)
Pinky Food Restaurant in Tanker Mai for tilapia
Tasty Zone for Nepalese-style noodles (Dh15)
Ibrahimi for Pakistani food (a quarter chicken tikka with roti costs Dh16)
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The%20Specs
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