On page one, we meet his father: “Born in Brooklyn when it was all farms, ball boy for the early Brooklyn Dodgers, a pool hustler, a bookmaker, a small man but a tough Jew in fancy shirts with slicked-back patent leather hair a la George Raft.” His uncle: “weak, wan and degenerate looking, wandered around the Flatbush streets peddling newspapers till he dissolved like a pale wafer. In a matter of phrases, he accomplishes things it takes a lesser writer several chapters to establish. It is an excellent exploration of the public man that includes some freighted gestures toward the private one.Īllen is one of the great storytellers of his time, completely original, and any version of his life-including this one, in which we are obviously in the hands of an unreliable narrator, although no more so than in any of his autobiographical movies-can only be riveting. The memoir comes off the blocks at 100 miles an hour, its theme “man’s search for God in a violent universe,” its pages studded with very famous names, its scope encompassing Tolstoy and Sid Caesar. And within just a phrase or two, you realize why people were afraid of it: Allen is a matchless comic writer and one whose voice is so well known by his aging fans that it’s as though the book is pouring into you through a special receiver dedicated just to him. What are we going to do with it? I suppose we could start-why not?-by actually reading it. So that’s settled: We have the damn thing. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.” In doing so, she held true to a principle elegantly advanced by her friend Genet: “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Fittingly, Seaver’s widow, the dazzling Jeannette Seaver, acquired Allen’s book after Hachette lost its nerve, and has published it under her Arcade imprint at Skyhorse Publishing. He brought to American readers all sorts of unsettling writers: William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet. He and the Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset acquired Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X when Doubleday cravenly canceled it after Malcolm X’s assassination. There was a time in living memory when editors and publishers were courageous men and women, willing to challenge, unsettle, and confront norms, and take whatever flak came their way. You want to make a day of it-get the kids to come out. No book burning, with all the trimmings? We know the publishing industry is in financial trouble, but what kind of hellish austerity measure is this? Banned books deserve the works: bonfire, weenies, the whole bit. It was the pulping of the books that really bothered me. ![]() Of course it didn’t! This is America! Hachette pulped the books and sniveled back to work. And it was because of this sacred trust that Hachette told its employees they could stay or go, but the book would be published. It requires courage and an unsparing dedication to freedom of expression, even when a particular title unsettles and disturbs, even when it puts a publisher on terrible footing with her or his employees. Hachette employees walked away from their desks in solidarity with Ronan, Dylan, and “all survivors of sexual assault.”īooks are dangerous things, always have been. ![]() A journalist and an activist, Farrow averred that “as the publisher of Catch and Kill,” Hachette had incurred an “obligation” not to participate in the “whitewashing” of sex crimes committed by powerful men. Farrow’s best-selling book, Catch and Kill, includes a lengthy and scathing account of the allegations against his father, who was accused of molesting Ronan’s sister Dylan in 1992, when she was 7. Ronan Farrow, Allen’s estranged son, is also published by a Hachette imprint, Little, Brown. The publishing conglomerate Hachette acquired it for its Grand Central imprint, but the announcement of this fact-including that actual publication was imminent-was met with outrage. ![]() And one that we almost didn’t get to read. W oody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing, is three things: a lively and deeply interesting account of his development as an artist a lengthy, lurid, and vengeful denial of the child-abuse charges brought against him 30 years ago and a worthwhile overview of his artistic output since then. Jean-François Rault / Sygma / Getty / The Atlantic
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