Discover Top Posts Tagged with #daniel menaker

Do we trust our own memories? We may when we're young, before they've piled into our brains and started bickering with each other, but we don't when we're old.

Daniel Menaker, “My Mistake: A Memoir”

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The true loss is only to the dying, and even they won't feel it when the dying's done.

Daniel Menaker, “My Mistake: A Memoir”

#books #daniel menaker

Sometimes the endless procession of automobiles strikes me as a march of monsters along a wide swath of flat, man-made insult to nature. Cars begin to take on a surreal implausibility - tons of metal often, usually, carrying a single human being oblivious of the peculiarity of the dreadful mechanical complexities his species' overgrown frontal lobe has wrought.

Daniel Menaker, “My Mistake: A Memoir”

#daniel menaker

Book Review for the Editor in You #1 - My Mistake

From now on, I will be reviewing books based on editing, publishing, grammar, and linguistics for those of you wanting to read more about the subjects. For each review, I will have a For the Editor section that offers a more narrow view from the eyes of someone interested in the educational or career-oriented aspects of the book.

The first book I'm reviewing is My Mistake by Daniel Menaker, a memoir of a former editor and publisher.

My Mistake by Daniel Menaker (2013); Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

4/5 Stars

A child at heart, Daniel Menaker provides us with a heartfelt, moody, and delightful memoir of his life as a literary enthusiast. Beginning at The New Yorker as a fact checker, he rises to become a respected Acquiring Editor of the 1980s-2000s; he works at publishing houses such as Random House and Harper Collins and edits pieces from high-profile authors. He goes through triumph and embarrassment, loathing and desire, and ultimately comes through the tunnel with a hint of laughter and a lot of humility.

Equally biographical as it is informative about the editing profession, Menaker both rolls his eyes and revels in the chaos that is the world of publishing. If you are looking for a book on grammar or usage, or one that will give you a list of do’s and don’t’s for editing, this is not the book for you. It is a book on the business of publishing—magazines as well as books—which will make your mouth drool and your heart sink for want of a better understanding about why the business is the way it is. It is a business after all. At the end we find Menaker a little disgusted at the industry’s ways; he even says at one point, “If I belong anywhere, it probably isn’t in publishing.” It is, in his opinion, impossible to do an editor-in-chief’s job well, and it is difficult to find good editors as well as bosses. Not that he doesn’t enjoy every minute he spends in this literary conundrum.

For the Editor:

My Mistake conveniently conveys the real stakes of what it is like in a corporate trade publishing environment. If you can skip through his chapters about Swarthmore College, soccer, and his family, you will get to the exquisite insider knowledge that can only come from the best of the best: finding the finest slush pile nonfiction to run in each issue of The New Yorker; the practice of buying books to sell and making offers; arguing with authors and agents; deciding which books to push in the market; and the detailing of the highly confusing and mathematical P&L, or Profit & Loss Statement (how many books actually make a profit every year? Not many.) We see the doldrums of fact checking, the styling marvels of the copy desk, nonfiction editing, fiction editing, fiction acquiring, and finally, editor-in-chiefdom—all of his career opportunities that sway with the breeze as much as the top-selling books do.

What makes My Mistake such a brilliant read for those interested in publishing? Maybe it is his clever metaphors, his child-like intuition, or his humbleness about the industry and his ability to glide through. It could also be his capability to compare actors to writers—advising, against all odds, to be less artificial—among other advice; or it could be the retelling of counsel he received about editing: “’Don’t touch a hair on its head,’ he will say when I begin to scout around for ways to show off at the expense of perfectly good writing.”

Learn More: Amazon | Goodreads | Author Website

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Like the teenager I was and in some ways still am, I grouse about and make fun of what I have to do and the people who tell me I have to do it, even when those people are me.

Daniel Menaker, from My Mistake: A Memoir, excerpted in New York magazine