Talking about Jim Harrison, w/Colum McCann and Todd Goddard

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An exciting event coming on April 20, for friends interested in Devouring Time, the recently published biography of Jim Harrison. Novelist Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin—who knew Harrison well, and was one of 100 interviewees biographer Todd Goddard talked to for the book—will be in conversation with Todd, who is a client of Philip Turner Book Productions, at the NYPL Library’s Stavros Niarchos building, 455 Fifth Avenue, across the avenue and one block down from the Main Library Building, at 6:30 that evening, a Monday. Registration for the free program has just opened, with in-person attendance—and live streaming, so folks can watch from all over the country—linked to here.

I’m sure it will a great night, so hope to see you there!

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“Live Theater—An Incomparable Art Form,” a Guest Essay by Alexis Greene

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Live Theater—An Incomparable Art Form by Alexis Greene

I fell in love with theater when I was nine years old. I was growing up in New York City, and in the fall of 1954 friends of my mother took me to see the Broadway musical Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin as Peter and Cyril Ritchard as the villainous Captain Hook. It was the first time I’d ever been inside a theater and I loved where we were sitting: in a box on the right side of the stupendous Winter Garden Theatre. I loved the show, and I especially adored Margalo Gillmore, who played Mrs. Darling, the loving mother of the children whom Peter Pan invites to fly with him to Neverland. I was entranced by the gowns that Mrs. Darling wore: I wanted to be an actress.
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I acted in productions in high school and college, at Vassar, where I majored in theater. The head of Vassar’s Experimental Theater, William F. Rothwell, Jr., was inspiring, and he believed I was an excellent young character actress. My favorite role was when Rothwell cast me as 13-year-old Willie in This Property Is Condemned, and I remember walking barefoot on the stage, talking to myself and the audience about my deceased older sister. The role was a gift.

After graduating, I was cast in a couple of off-Broadway productions. But the craft of acting did not love me the way I loved it so I went back to school to write my Ph.D. dissertation on Off-Off Broadway theater, and subsequently taught theater at New York University and Hunter College. I became enamored of dramaturgy and cofounded Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas), and I helped to make live theater as Literary Manager at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I traveled the Eastern U.S. for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), doing site visits.

Eventually I found my true calling: writing and editing books about theater companies and theater artists, especially women. All of these vocations intensified my love for live theater.

When I go to the theater and watch a play or a musical, or simply listen to actors reading a play, I often experience a range of emotions roused by the script and the performances: love and anger; pity and sorrow; desire and pleasure. I learn about myself and I also learn about people who live in the world around me. When I see Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, I relive my own true love. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, in 1959 the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway, taught me about the hatred and fear that African Americans endure in America. For me, it was, and remains, a frightening, and enlightening, revelation.

I imagine that when theater began in the Western world—in ancient Greece—audiences watching the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes, felt the same emotions and experienced the same kinds of awareness as we do today. Indeed, the mostly male audiences reportedly became so involved that sometimes, if they didn’t like what they saw and heard, they threw things at the stage. Women, unfortunately, were usually excluded from these performances in ancient Greece, from the audiences and as performers.

Live theater continued to grow and thrive in Europe and then in North and South America.

Theater, opera, and dance also came to life in the Far East. Opera emerged in China; Noh and Kyogen plays came about in Japan. Performances, which often merged music and song, dance and mime, sometimes continued for hours, and audiences stayed and watched, munched food, and talked about what they were seeing.

As the world has changed over the centuries, theater has evolved. Slavery was still rampant in America in the nineteenth century, but as the theater historian Oscar G. Brockett writes, in 1821 there arose in New York City the first known company of African American actors in the United States, performing at the African Grove, an outdoor tea garden, and eventually at an indoor theater. Along with Shakespeare’s plays, they performed what was perhaps the first known play written by a Black man in America: The Drama of King Shotaway.

Women also began to receive attention on America’s stages, and in 1840 Anna Cora Mowatt wrote what became a frequently produced comedy of manners: Fashion. As Joel Hirschhorn told Variety in 2008, “She defied male contempt for femme authors, a species Nathaniel Hawthorne defined at the time as a ‘damned mob of scribbling women.’”

During the 19th century, New York City became a theatrical center, with commercial theaters decorating Broadway, and early in the twentieth century Times Square became commercial theater’s most famous location, with a bevy of impressive stages.

But also in the early nineteenth century, here in the USA, the Little Theatre Movement brought to life intimate, independent theaters that in effect challenged Broadway’s commercial devotion and brought forth new playwrights, most notably Eugene O’Neill. Then, in the 1960s, nonprofit regional theaters, funded by the NEA, began to bloom throughout the United States. And as our country passed new laws recognizing and affirming the rights of women and people of color, more and more women and people of color wrote plays and saw them produced: playwrights like Constance Congdon and Eve Ensler, Pearl Cleage and Tina Howe, Lynn Nottage and Emily Mann, Migdalia Cruz and Beth Henley, Rukhsana Ahmad and Diana Son. And directors explored so-called “non-traditional” casting in classical plays.

The best plays often reflect the world we are living in. In December 2025, for instance, I saw Martyna Majok’s Queens at Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC). The title might suggest a play that extols women, and the play does do that. But the title actually refers to the borough of Queens in New York City, where a group of immigrant women are living together in a basement apartment. Majok wrote her play in 2018, but she revisited the script for the 2025 production, and we naturally connect the images and the characters and their situations to the issue of immigration that our current President has brought to the fore with calamitous and tragic consequences.

Our country is a country of immigrants, beginning with those who sailed to this land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And people from practically every country in the world have moved here since. My own grandparents—my mother’s parents–came from Eastern Europe to Dorchester, Massachusetts, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and made relatively pleasant and successful lives for themselves there.

The undocumented women in Queens, who live together in an illegal dwelling, are Belarusian, Afghan, Honduran, Polish. The play particularly involves a young Ukrainian woman named Inna (played beautifully at MTC by Julia Lester). She has come to America looking for her mother, who abandoned Inna and came to America when Inna was a child. Indeed, as we watch the production and absorb the play, we realize that the women in Majok’s play have come to America because of the deprivation they faced in their lives in their original countries. But here in America they are striving to find safe, comforting, and sustaining existences.

The play and this production aroused in me what the best of live theater gives us. It stirs our emotions, awakens memories, and leads us to contemplate what the world around us is like. In the case of Queens, of course, I and many others in the audience could not help but connect the play’s content to how America’s current President and administration are treating immigrants: reviling them and deporting them.

Because live theater is such a penetrating and unique experience, those of us who have been following the news are especially disheartened by the threats to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which significantly supports nonprofit theaters like MTC. As Nathan Pugh wrote so aptly in a Fall 2025 essay for American Theatre, “A political takeover of the arts is more than just symbolic; it’s indicative of a very real takeover of American thought and imagination.” Last spring, President Trump recommended eliminating the NEA in the 2026 Federal budget, and in May 2025, the NEA began slashing hundreds of grants that had already been awarded. Among other new reasons for slashing grants were rules against funding a theater company that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Anne Hamburger, Founder and Artistic Director of En Garde Arts in New York City, wrote to the En Garde Arts Community soon after the NEA revoked a $40,000 grant that En Garde Arts had previously been awarded:

“To say we’re disappointed is an understatement. En Garde Arts as an organization will survive. But our artists are at risk. As federal arts funding is slashed, the first to suffer are the bold, untested, and extraordinary new voices….En Garde Arts is launching a campaign to say clearly, loudly, and in no uncertain terms: Art is Not Expendable.”

The NEA was established by Congress in 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson was President. In addition to Theater, the NEA supports Dance, Music, Visual Arts and Literary Arts and Media Arts, Folk & Traditional Arts, and Design.
President Johnson encouraged the House and the Senate to establish both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And when he signed the NEA into existence, sixty years ago on September 29, 1965, he said, “Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”

The NEA has not been cancelled, but hundreds of grants and offers of grants to arts organizations have been. And on top of that the NEA’s future is uncertain.

Protecting live theater, along with the other arts that the NEA has supported, is urgent, and it begins, as it did with me, by loving theater, either as a regular member of the audience or as someone onstage or behind the scenes. The Los Angeles-based playwright Larissa Fasthorse put it beautifully in the Winter 2025 issue of American Theatre: “You wanna remember why you do theatre? Do a show full of audiences who have never been to theatre before. Hearing gasps and cheers at the magic of theatre—it’s incredible and addictive.”

Those are words I will remember as I go forth contemplating a lifetime of theater experiences I have enjoyed.

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ALEXIS GREENE is a writer and editor of numerous books about theater, including The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway, written with Julie Taymor (Disney Editions, 1998); Lucille Lortel: The Queen of Off Broadway (Limelight Editions, 2004); Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater (Applause Books, 2019); and Shakespeare Theatre Company: The History of a Classical Theater (Peter E. Randall Publishers, 2025). In addition to writing books about theater, Greene’s career spans acting, theater criticism, and teaching (she holds a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York). She is a member of Biographers International Organization, PEN, the Authors Guild, and League of Professional Theatre Women. She is a client of the literary agency Philip Turner Book Productions. Born and raised in New York City, Greene lives there with her husband, Gordon Hough.

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Remembering Years of Enjoying Radio and Recommending Three Favorite Book-Oriented Podcasts

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Raised on Radio

I became a devoted listener to radio starting about age nine, when I got my first in a series of transistor and tabletop radios. While an interested reader from my early years, taking in information with my eyes, I was also an ardent listener and enjoyed aural entertainment—music, information, sounds of all kinds. To borrow a memorable line from onetime presidential candidate Ross Perot, you might say I was “all ears.”

Luckily for me, my hometown of Cleveland was a radio capitol, the very birthplace of the term ‘rock ‘n roll’, with local stations playing new music, hits, and oldies throughout the day. What’s more, the proximity of Lake Erie, across which radio waves could travel unimpeded, meant I could listen to CKLW—the hit-making 50,000 watt behemoth from Windsor, Ontario, known as the Powerhouse—even before nightfall, when radio waves are known to travel far from their point of origin. According to a 2022 article in Walrus magazine, CKLW “routinely captured more than 20 percent of the listeners in its market— a figure impossible to imagine in today’s fragmented radio industry. By 1973, with twelve million listeners, it was the third-largest station in North America.”

Cleveland radio stations used to employ DJs with colorful on-air personalities who were fun to tune in to as they rolled through the day, ID’ing songs and bands, mixing the music up with light-hearted announcements and banter. Contests, word puzzles, and trivia games were featured, to which a listener could phone in and give answers to try to win a prize. I recall playing a late-night rhyming word game called “Onesies-Twosies” with host Jay “Jaybird” Lawrence on a local station.

My late father, Earl I. Turner, had a knack for winning contests on the radio, a bit of good luck I seemed at a young age to have inherited from him, as over the years I too won an occasional contest on the radio, though they are rare to extinct these days.

Unfortunately, more recent decades have seen a pronounced dulling of the radio dial, with little personality, and little locality attached to what’s broadcast; much of what airs nowadays sounds like impersonal mass pre-recorded pablum. Talk radio is more live, but it’s also overwhelmingly political, and not my cup of java.

For me, a fortunate exception to the generalized dullness came, again, from Canada, in the form of an Internet radio station, CBC Radio 3, may it rest in peace, that for more than ten years served as a vital outpost for Canadian indie rock ‘n roll, associated with the hashtag #CANRock. They had live hosting helmed by a bevy of talented announcers—Grant Lawrence, Lana Gay, Vish Khanna, Lisa Christiansen, Amanda Putz, and Craig Norris, and guest musician hosts, who formed an extremely enjoyable and listenable lineup—with a communal blog that regularly featured a Question or Topic of the Day, about which listeners would chime in on, with our comments being read out on the air, all of which formed a cohesive community of which I was a part. I also became friendly with Radio 3 producer Pedro Mendes, who I later represented as agent for a book project of his. Unfortunately, in 2015, CBC, the mothership of public broadcasting in Canada, took the retrograde step of shuttering Radio 3.

I want to give credit where it’s due and add that the very first podcast I know of—which was revolutionary for facilitating on-demand listening and time-shifting for listeners—appeared in 2005, The CBC Radio 3 Podcast with Grant Lawrence. When contacted for this essay, Lawrence reminded me that “Doing a music podcast was the idea of our boss Steve Pratt….I had no clue what a podcast was, but it took off very quickly and became the single biggest international success I’ve ever been involved with….It came out every Friday, one hour of music, about ten songs, and one interview or brief feature….It lasted for [about] twelve years. Out of its success came The R330 (thirty top songs) with Craig Norris; Appetite for Distraction with Lisa Christiansen (a way-ahead-of-its time long-form interview podcast—now the norm); Track of the Day, which introduced a new song by a Canadian band each day.” I also enjoyed such programs and on-air features as The Breakfast Club, where Vish Khanna (who’s since gone on to have his own long-running podcast, Kreative Kontrol) ate breakfast with musicians at Canadian diners while they discussed their music; Radio 3 Sessions, where bands were recorded “live off the floor.” CBC Radio 3 was also notable for inviting bands to upload their music to the station’s website, where listeners could find new and favorite music, even when it wasn’t being played at a given moment. At its peak, thousands of musicians and bands uploaded their music to the portal. CBC Radio 3 engendered a strong community spirit that crossed national borders, something we could surely all use more of today.

Meanwhile in the States, though NPR offers much essential programming, relatively little of it is live or interactive, with the exception of two local shows in New York City, on WNYC where I live now. NPR did have a national call-in show, Talk of the Nation, which began in 1991. The first host was John Hockenberry, and later Ray Suarez ably held down the spot. Unfortunately, the network canceled it in 2013, with host Neal Conan (d. 2021) the two-hour program’s last on-air voice.

With radio programming now almost completely relegated to impersonality, my radio listening time is greatly reduced, as it is far less interesting and enjoyable than it used to be. Fortunately, podcasts have emerged to fill the gap, with a kind of personalized listening that I’m still avid for, though they are not live and only occasionally have an interactive component.

Shifting to Podcasts

Nowadays, I regularly listen to a number of different podcasts, on such topics as current affairs (The Daily Blast, an imperative discussion of our parlous politics, hosted by Greg Sargent of The New Republic); sports (Fear the ‘Fro, on the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers, hosted by Bob Schmidt, which has interactive elements thanks to a phone-in mailbag and a Discord feed listeners can contribute to); history, culture, and science (In Our Time on BBC 4, hosted for almost thirty years by Melvyn Bragg, who’s now retired from the program and given way to Misha Glenny); and music (Folk-on-Foot, with performances by folk musicians of the British Isles, and interviews of them, by host Matthew Bannister, which I became a fan of during Covid-19).

Additionally, I listen to a number of book-related podcasts, with three that are special favorites, which I’m excited to share word of with book-loving readers of this blog and friends in publishing.

Writerscast with David Wilk

Writerscast is hosted by David Wilk, a publishing veteran, with whom I’ve been friends for many years; he releases new episodes regularly. For more than half of them, he interviews authors of current books, many of them biographies, but also current affairs and fiction. On a program released in March 2025, he interviews Iris Jamahl Dunkle, who wrote Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, 2024). Babb (1907-2005) was a novelist whose extensive notes for a Dust Bowl epic regrettably became resource material for John Steinbeck when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, after which Babb’s novel was dropped by major publishers who were considering it. Linked to here, David and Iris have a stimulating 35-minute conversation, during which they discuss Babb’s long persistence as a writer—her lyrical Dust Bowl novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, was finally published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2004—and her many friends, including William Saroyan and Ralph Ellison. I was also intrigued to learn she was married to the pioneering Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe from 1949 till Howe’s death in 1976.

As is the case in the podcast with Dunkle, an occasional theme of Writerscast is authors who’ve uncovered what they believe is a grave injustice, as in a podcast from last June when Wilk talks with Jeff Kisseloff about his book Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss (University of Kansas Press, 2025). Beginning in his college days, Kisseloff was a volunteer on the small staff that worked for Alger Hiss following his release from federal prison after a four-year sentence for a perjury conviction in the notorious case that grew from charges he’d been a Soviet agent, allegations that Hiss (1904-1996) always denied.

NB: I played a role in Kisseloff’s writing of his book when in 2017 he consulted me about the Hiss manuscript, then in development, and I advised him to try writing the narrative in first person, as it was plain to me as an early reader that he’d read the entire complicated and lengthy case record, knew it inside and out, and had been an observer of many relevant events that readers would be more apt to understand if he chronicled his discoveries as a journey, which the reader would be more apt to follow along with and understand better than if a standard third-person approach was taken. He took up my suggestion, and the published book is written in first person, a suggestion for which he expresses his gratitude in the acknowledgments of the printed book.

I want to add that Todd Goddard, author of Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life (Blackstone Publishing, November 2025), an agency client of Philip Turner Book Productions, was recently interviewed by David Wilk, and I anticipate that their Writerscast episode will come out sometime in the next few weeks. I will share it in this space when it’s available. In fact, it is now posted, on February 3, 2026, available for folks to listen to, linked to here.

A second portion of Wilk’s podcast is devoted to a series he calls Publishing Talks, where he interviews book business figures, such as last January’s conversation with Jack David, of independent Canadian publisher ECW Press, and an episode last September with Carol Fitzgerald of the Book Reporter, the prominent clearinghouse for book clubs and reading groups.

I’ve really enjoyed these conversations, both Writerscast and Publishing Talks, which usually run a bit longer than a half-hour.

Open Book with David Steinberger

While less than half of Wilk’s podcast episodes are focused on publishing professionals, Open Book hosted by David Steinberger, CEO of Open Road Integrated Media and Chairman of the National Book Foundation, is devoted almost entirely to conversations with publishing insiders, while only a few are with authors. The most recent episode, which I found the most informative and interesting so far among the couple dozen I’ve listened to, is a conversation with Terry Finley, President and CEO of the independently-owned major bookstore chain, Books-a-Million.

Steinberger always asks his guests if they were big readers at a young age, and Finley’s home, where he was one of seven kids, had few books in it—beyond the World Book Encyclopedia, which he and his father read avidly. He did have an eighth grade teacher at a Catholic high school in Birmingham, AL, a nun, who encouraged her students to read and write. “We would go outside and sit under the trees and [Sister Margarita] would read Shelley, Keats, and Byron, and then she would encourage us to write poetry…She was the person who got me interested in reading, books, and literature.”

Finley’s career journey in the book business began when as a student at Auburn University, he worked in the college’s bookstore. His first job after college was at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta, GA, where he was hired as an assistant buyer by Faith Brunson, a legendary doyenne of bookselling in this era, the late ’70s-early 80s, when department stores had significant clout in the book business; Brunson was even President of the American Booksellers Association, the trade association of booksellers. I’ve written about that period when department stores sold lots of books, in a personal essay on this site titled The Education of a Bookselling Editor.

Next, Finley worked as a sales rep for Crown Publishers, with his first territory Pittsburgh, western PA, and southern Ohio. (With my siblings and our parents, I began operating Undercover Books in suburban Cleveland in 1978, but had a different rep for Crown, and never encountered Terry during this period.) He tells Steinberger that his first day on the road for Crown proved to be a misadventure for the ages. Finley drove his new company car from Pittsburgh to Erie, where upon arrival at the bookstore he learned that the buyer he was supposed to sell to that day had died hours earlier. As he got back on the road, he was sideswiped by a reckless driver; he was alright, but the car was a wreck. Fortunately, things got better from there, and soon after he was able to earn an extra sales commission for his efforts.

After about ten years as a rep, Finley wanted to get off the road, so took a job with a book chain in Knoxville, TN, which was soon acquired by the Anderson family of Birmingham, AL, who operated newsstands and bookstores, known then as Bookland. Finley was given a key role in the newly combined companies, which made up about 120 locations. This, of course, was pre-Internet, prior to the super-store concept that Barnes & Noble and Borders embarked on soon after, and well before before Amazon began operating.

Finley said that around 1989 they opened the first store of theirs with the name Books-a-Million, in an old 45,000-square-foot department store in Huntsville, AL, which they stocked with backlist titles, new releases, and remainders, the latter which he knew well from his days with Crown, which owned Outlet Book Company, the biggest remainder company. Lacking proper shelving at that point, they displayed the merchandise on pool tables, and used jury-rigged sawhorses and plywood. Though it must have had a raw pop-up atmosphere, the store was an immediate success, and offered proof-of-concept for what became a major expansion. The chain, which is still owned by the Anderson family, with Clyde Anderson serving as chairman emeritus of the company, age 91, currently operates 220 stores. They’ve been opportunistic. For instance, they took over forty-five Borders locations after that national chain closed in 2011. Finley told Steinberger that Books-a-Million will open 15 new locations in 2026.

In a small way, I can relate to the growth Books-a-Million underwent, as Undercover Books grew from one location in the Cleveland area to three stores before I moved to New York City in 1985, I hoped, to work in publishing. My family continued to operate Undercover Books after I left, evolving into Undercover Book Service, an online book-ordering operation under the direction of my visionary brother Joel C. Turner, who created an early website and began selling books online in 1993, roughly six months before Amazon hung out its virtual shingle. The company operated until Joel’s unexpected death in 2009.

All in all, in this conversation Terry Finley shows a command of facts and figures that was impressive, with deep knowledge of the demographics of his customers, and insights about aspects of the book business I hadn’t considered or heard before. Because I represent authors in the Horror and Gothic Fiction space I was especially interested in his observation that Horror is currently a burgeoning category for Books-a-Million, starting to supplant Romantasy as that category peaks.

Episodes of Open Book usually run about twenty minutes. Other episodes that I’ve especially enjoyed include the program with Arnaud Norry, Chairman and CEO of Les Nouveaux Éditeurs in France, and the episode with Andy Hunter, founder of Bookshop[.]org, the online book ordering service that shares revenue with hundreds of independent booksellers around the country.

The Lives They’re Living with Ben Yagoda

Finally, as a bonus, I’d like to recommend another podcast, one that I enjoy enormously; the program is partly book-oriented, though not to the same extent as the above programs hosted by David Wilk and David Steinberger. It’s called The Lives They’re Living, and the host is Ben Yagoda, whose writing I first enjoyed in the pages of the terrific magazine from the early 2000s, Lingua Franca. Ben has written fourteen books; his two most recent are Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English (Princeton University Press, 2024) and a novel, Alias O’Henry (Paul Dry Books, 2025), a historical what-if about the American author known for his twist endings.  In his podcast, Yagoda focuses his attention and that of listeners on “remarkable people who are a little more under the radar than they deserve to be.” In each episode, he speaks with “someone who is an expert on and fascinated by the subject at hand.”

Over the past two years, there have been twenty-nine episodes, and I’ve listened to about half of them. Checking the website for the podcast, I see that Yagoda has talked with Dave Barry on Roy Blount, Jr.; Elijah Wald on Ramblin’ Jack Elliott; David Bianculli on the TV writer James L. Brooks and the musician Mason Williams; David Remnick on John McPhee; Dwight Garner on Calvin Trillin; Steve Wasserman on Robert Scheer; Glenn Kenny on film editor Thelma Schoonmaker; Steve Soliar on Dick Cavett; Laurie Gwen Shapiro on Abigail Thomas (“Novelist and memoirist, and probably the best writer you’ve never heard of.”); Adrienne LaFrance on Albert Brooks; and Chris Molanphy on Quincy Jones. In a favorite episode of mine, Ben flies solo, talking about the admirable writing career of the protean author Paul Dickson, who’s published more than 60 narrative nonfiction books and reference titles, such as The Bonus Army: An American Epic and The Baseball Dictionary. You’ll find Yagoda’s enjoyable podcasts via this link.
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Kudos and props to the two Davids, Wilk and Steinberger, and Ben Yagoda, companionable hosts of their enjoyable programs, each of whom does good work that permits me to indulge my lifelong affinity for aural entertainment, fueling my interest in smart conversations about writing, publishing, culture, and books!

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W.H. Auden’s “A Certain World: A Commonplace Book,” an Uncommonly Enjoyable Collection

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One of the secondhand books in my library that I treasure most is W. H. Auden’s A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (A William Cole Book, Viking Press, 1970). Though hardly common nowadays, commonplace books have been kept by many writers, over the centuries among them John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster (at Undercover Books, the Cleveland, Ohio bookstore I ran at the beginning of my career, we stocked a scholarly facsimile edition of Forster’s commonplace book published by Scolar Press) and C.S. Lewis, as well as Auden (1907-73), whose profound poem “September 1, 1939” is also a personal favorite. Commonplace books are often very personal assemblages, and as such are seldom published later; Auden’s is an exception. They may be kept for decades, even over a lifetime, and are apt to contain adages, aphorisms, bits of wisdom, maxims, quotations, clippings, lists, poems, even recipes.

A Certain World —which I also blogged about on this site back in 2022*—is arranged alphabetically by category, with dozens of headings, e. g., Hell, Home, Humor, Marriage, and Neighbors. Under “Money” is this gem, a translation of a Yiddish proverb: “If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a comfortable living.”

A Wikipedia entry reports that the origin of the term “commonplace book” goes back to Latin and Greek, and that in Aristotle’s time a discrete nugget of knowledge was known as a “commonplace.”  It strikes me that my home library is in some ways a kind of commonplace book, with a wealth of wisdom secreted in the pages of the scores of volumes I’ve accumulated over the years, waiting to be discovered—and rediscovered, since I savor rereading my favorite books, something I’ve been doing today with A Certain World. I cannot remember where I found my copy of Auden’s book, nor whether I was living in Cleveland or New York City when I bought it; it might have been New Hampshire, as I bought many good books at used bookstores during my college days at Franconia College in New Hampshire in the 1970s, though I wasn’t aware of the term commonplace book until I became familiar with it at Undercover Books post-college due to the E. M. Forster example mentioned above. Wherever I got it, I’m very glad I did. It doesn’t seem to be in print currently, neither in the US or the UK. Right now, there’s a handful of copies of it for sale on used book sites, ranging in price from $41 to $125. One aspect of the book that I’d like to learn about is the Viking editor, William Cole, who had an imprint in his name. The hardcover edition that I have is a handsome volume with a crisp dust jacket and stunning red endpapers which can be seen in the photos below along with the interesting flap copy. I love Auden’s contribution to this overlooked literary form.

I am grateful that the term commonplace book takes a word “commonplace,” often thought of as slighting or pejorative, and elevates it to new significance and resonance. Do you know of any commonplace books? Do you have one in your library? In a sense, this blog, The Great Gray Bridge, which I’ve been writing and curating since 2011, is for me a sort of commonplace book.

*When I blogged about A Certain World in 2022, I quoted favorite maxims, the Yiddish one from Auden and a handful of others:

“It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you’re on the ground with the turkeys.”–Seen above the bar at Cleveland’s Euclid Tavern, circa 1970s-80s, source unknown

And three of my own coinage:

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“Stay neutral, lean positive.”

“Being an editor allows me to express my latent religiosity, since I spend so much time praying for my books.”

“Publishing companies have long been known as ‘houses’ because they (are supposed to) offer hospitality to writers.”

 

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Looking Back on 2025, Another Productive and Creative Year in Writing, Editing, Consulting, and Agenting

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2025 was another banner year for Philip Turner Book Productions, the editorial services consultancy joined to a literary agency that I established in 2009, where I was joined by my adult son Ewan as full business partner in 2020. Before listing the business’s milestones last year, I want first to catalog what Ewan, who publishes as M. G. Turner, accomplished in the past twelve months.

1) I sold his first full length short story collection City of Dark Dreams: Tales from Another New York to DarkWinter Press, a Canadian publisher that specializes in horror and gothic fiction, with great distribution in the U.S. Incorporating the mysterious and the macabre, the 25 tales—selected from a larger body of work M. G. calls the Neighborhood Legendarium—explore life and death, ponder whether mortality can be circumvented, imagine dreams impinging on reality, and find the uncanny in the everyday. Melding the collection into a unified whole is the setting, the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a fictional college, Hudson University, which introduces a dark academia motif. The characters populating this world intersect and influence each other’s lives, akin to the storytelling in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.” It will be released in January 2027.

2) M. G. published three chapbooks. Dreams of the Romantics, a story cycle that was inspired by the fateful gathering during the Year Without a Summer at Villa Diodati in 1816, when Lord Byron challenged each of his friends to write a scary story and Mary Shelley began writing the manuscript that would become Frankenstein; Roman Visions, stories inspired in part by The Aeneid, in which M. G. imagines a recovered last chapter of Virgil’s epic; andReader Faustus, a novella-in-verse, which zeroes in on today’s zeitgeist as a young poet exchanges his soul with the devil for the opportunity to read every book ever written; this chapbook includes two other Faustian-themed stories by M. G., and an essay I wrote in my college days, “Faust, Man and Myth,” all of which make this a veritable museum of Faust.

The three chapbooks books range in page count from 96 to 116 pages, and the suggested list price of each is between $18-$20. However, as a New Year’s deal, we’re offering them at a special price of $11 each, or the 3-book bundle for $30. For ordering information, please contact us at ptbookproductions[@]gmail[.]com.

3) The chapbooks were reviewed four times. Two reviews were from the excellent Canadian publication The Seaboard Review of Books, which wrote generously about all three titles. Dreams of the Romantics was also reviewed favorably by Weird Fiction horror critic S. T. Joshi in his periodical Spectral Realms, and by Vermont folklorist Joseph A. Citro in his social networks.

4) Two of the chapbooks, Dreams of the Romantics and Roman Visions, are available in NYC bookstores: Book Culture on Broadway near 114th St and Westsider Books on Broadway near 79th St.

5) Dreams of the Romantics was purchased by Old Dominion University for their book collection, The Perry Library, with the possibility of it being used as teaching material.

6) M. G.’s gothic short story “The Apparatus” was selected for The Promethean Archives an anthology published in July by indie press The Words Faire of Dayton, Ohio.

7) A personal essay by M. G. on movie special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen was published in the Winter 2025 issue of Videoscope Magazine.

8) M. G.’s successes this year were highlighted in the block association newsletter for our Manhattan neighborhood (page 11).

9) M. G. also completed a novella, his longest individual work to date, along with numerous short stories.

10) To cap off this exciting year, quite by happenstance, on December 30th a candid photograph of M. G. browsing in a Barnes & Noble bookstore was published in the New York Times’ year-end summary of publishing and bookselling.

11) Essays and stories by M. G. can be found via this link on our website.
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On the editorial side of our business, we worked with 16 authors, editing their manuscripts and book proposals, and consulting with writers on a number of book ideas. For the Mayo Clinic Press, I was contracted to edit the manuscript of Face in the Mirror: A Surgeon, a Patient, and the Remarkable Story of the First Face Transplant at Mayo Clinic by Jack El-Hai, which was published in 2025; El-Hai’s excellent book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, was recently adapted into the major movie “Nuremberg.”

On the agency side, in addition to City of Dark Dreams: Tales from Another New York cited above, we made multiple deals with book publishers for titles that will be published in 2026 and beyond; in addition, we received royalty income from past sales for 15 authors, and are currently submitting to publishers several of the book proposals and manuscripts that we edited. These are some of the books we licensed in 2025:

• Home equity expert, small business owner, and bank executive Sue Pimento’s Your Retirement Reset: How to Convert Home Equity into Financial Security, giving Canadian seniors and near-seniors the resources and confidence they need to navigate many complex decisions as they plan for and execute a comfortable retirement, to Jennifer Anne Smith at ECW Press, for publication in Fall 2026.

• First Great Sorrow: My Years with Senator Robert Kennedy, a memoir by Donna Chaffee, sold to Usher Morgan of Library Tales, to be published in June 2026.

Deep Story: A Practitioner’s Guide to Creating Transformative Attractions, Destinations, and Guest Experiences—A Guide for Leaders, Creators, and Teachers by Bob Rogers a business book by America’s foremost designer of themed and historical attractions, the manuscript for which we also had a hand in editing; to Peter E. Randall Publishers, for publication in 2026

• John McGraw: The Tumultuous Life and Times of Baseball’s ‘Little Napoleon’ by Daniel R. Levitt. This will be the first full biography of the New York Giants’ legendary player-manager in two decades, sold to University of Nebraska Press for their stellar sports list.

And we are currently submitting a number of proposed books to editors at publishing houses, including a narrative history of surgery going back to the ancient world; a book about the aftermath of the JFK assassination; a natural history book about butterflies and music; and a novel by a Ukrainian emigre writer now living in Ireland.
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In November 2025, we were thrilled with the publication of our agency client Todd Goddard’s superb biography, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life, published in hardcover, audio, and ebook by Blackstone. The author undertook a vigorous national book tour with numerous stops at bookstores in Montana, Michigan, Mississippi, and Utah, with more appearances coming up in 2026 including Florida and New York City. The book received stellar reviews, including this one from Isaac Randel of Foreword Reviews, who wrote in part, “Drawing on intimate gossip and rigorous critical scholarship…Devouring Time is the first full-scale biography of Jim Harrison, the mold-breaking and large-living man of letters who transformed the literary landscape of his time….A meticulous, loving biography of one of the twentieth century’s most exuberant literary personalities.”

Todd Goddard and I have also licensed the rights for a feature documentary based on Devouring Time to the excellent filmmaker Matthew Miele, who’s made earlier films on Paddy Chavesky and the Carlyle Hotel. Philip Turner Book Productions looks forward to continuing to represent Todd Goddard on future literary projects.
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Other books we’d licensed in previous years were published last year, including

• Man in the Iron Mask (Pegasus Books, April 2025), a new translation of Alexandre Dumas by Lawrence Ellsworth. The culmination of Dumas’s swashbuckling saga, set at the glittering court of King Louis XIV, with adventures ranging from the grim fortress of the Bastille to battles on the wild coast of Brittany, in which the Musketeers intrigue, romance, and fight alongside each other. Ellsworth has translated a number of titles in the Musketeers Cycle including The Three Musketeers.

• Shakespeare Theatre Company: The History of a Classical Theatre (September 2025, Peter E. Randall Publisher) by Alexis Greene. A history of one of America’s great classical theaters, the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D..C., whose roots stretch back to the Folger Shakespeare Library and colonial America. Greene is also author of Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater (Applause Books, 2019). To Peter Randall Publishing.

• Scared by the Bible: The Roots of Horror in Scripture (Morehouse Publishing, October 2025) by Brandon Grafius. A practical and spiritual guide to reading the horror stories in the Bible which builds on the author’s illuminating readings of challenging texts from scripture, to Church Publishing, Grafius is also the author of Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions that Haunt Us (Broadleaf Books, 2019).

• The Pot Thief Who Studied Calvin, the tenth book in the popular POT THIEF mystery series by J. Michael Orenduff, our longest-tenured agency client who we’ve been representing since 2010, was published by Open Road Media in January 2025. With Open Road, Orenduff, also published his first nonfiction book, The Ten Commandments: Updated, Condensed, and Improved, which provides readers with a fresh look at a familiar text.

Additionally, two audiobooks of books by our authors were published last year:

Our Woman in Havana: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of America’s Long Struggle with Castro’s Cuba, by Vicki Huddleston, which we licensed to Overlook Press in 2018; the audiobook came out from Tantor Media,

The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption, a revelatory book by Barbara Bisantz Raymond. Working from her mis-named Tennessee Children’s Home Society, Tann stole, bartered, and brokered more than 5,000 children from unwed mothers and poor Appalachian families from the 1920s through the 1950s, selling them to wealthy clients around the country including in Hollywood, where actors Dick Powell, Lana Turner, and Joan Crawford were among her clients. I edited the manuscript while an editor with Carroll & Graf Publishers in the mid-2000s. It was a Publishers Weekly Best Book in 2007, and changed the face of adoption, leading many states to open their adoption records. The book was awarded an “Angels in Adoption” citation from the US Congress. After Lynn Franklin, the author’s longtime agent, died a few years ago, the author asked Philip Turner Book Productions to be her new agent. We’re also aiming to license a new trade paperback edition in the future.
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A number of books we’ve licensed in previous years are set to be published in 2026 or 2027, including

• The Ice On The Lake, a debut novel by Alex Messenger, about a late middle-age man haunted by past tragedies, mistakes, and the children he’s pushed away. After a medical diagnosis prompts him to begin making amends with his estranged daughter, he goes missing while ice fishing on Lake Superior; a story of redemption and survival set in the wild environs of the frozen north, to Blackstone Publishing, by the author of the Wall St Journal bestseller, The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack on the Canadian Tundra (Blackstone, 2019). Messenger’s novel has already received this enthusiastic endorsement:

“Alex Messenger is a sensational writer, and The Ice on the Lake is a mesmerizing tale of loss, love, and redemption. Equal parts survival story and psychological reckoning, this book manages to thrill even as it gets to the heart of what it means to be alive. It’s also a magnificent portrait of Lake Superior and all her many moods and depths. I couldn’t put it down, and I already can’t wait to read whatever Alex writes next.”—Peter Geye, author of A Lesser Light

• Feeling Our Way Through the Bible: Interpreting Scripture with Emotions (Baker Academics) by Brandon Grafius, author of the above-named Scared by the Bible. This book for students and scholars will demonstrate how emotional responses to a biblical text can help readers understand difficult passages in the Bible.

• Versions and Subversions: The Cover Songs That Changed Music by Nate Patrin (University of Minnesota Press). A wide-ranging examination of the place the cover version holds in popular music. Starting from the premise that the rise of the singer-songwriter in 1960s pop music put a renewed emphasis on the potentially transformative relationships between a song’s author and its performer(s), Patrin’s new book takes a kaleidoscopic and unpredictable view of the way musicians both renowned and obscure have found new means of expression through the works of others. Examples include Aretha Franklin’s cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect”; Run-D.M.C.’s genre-bending revival of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way”; and Johnny Cash’s world-weary cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” Patrin is previously author of Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop and The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock’n’Roll to Synthwave, published by UMP in 2019 and 2022, so the new book should be seen as the third in a trilogy of books by Patrin about the surprising ways in which songs are given additional life through new contexts.

• “I’ve Got the Shakes”: Performing Richard Foreman by Shauna Kelly (Applause Books). A sparkling curation of interviews and writings from cast and crew discussing their experiences working with Richard Foreman (1937-2025), who wrote and directed award-winning plays for forty-five years at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (OHT) in SoHo, the East Village, at the Public Theater, and around the world, exploring Foreman’s philosophy, legacy, creative methods, and artistic values, and providing insight about the careers of theater artists such as Willem Dafoe with roots in off-off Broadway. The Foreword to the book is by Helen Shaw, recently named Theater Critic of the New York Times.

•  Wallace Terry: A Reporter’s Journey from Selma to Saigon toBloods (High Road Books, University of New Mexico Press) by Ray E. Boomhower, out in October 2026. The first-ever biography of Terry (1938-2003), who spent his life smashing barriers as a Black journalist, first in his hometown of Indianapolis, all the way to the nation’s capital at the Washington Post and Time magazine (becoming the first Black correspondent working for a major U.S. news magazine) and then overseas during the Vietnam War, where he chronicled Black service members as no one ever had before him.  With University of New Mexico Press Boomhower is also author of Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam and The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm Browne, Thich Quang Duc and the News Photograph that Stunned the World.

• Who’s To Blame for Putin? Reassessing Russia’s Lost Chance for Democracy (Reaktion Books, London) by Amy Knight. Thirty-five years ago many in the West hoped that Russia was embarking on a future of unprecedented political freedom. Today the countries of Eastern European that were under the Soviet yoke are democracies and members of NATO and the EU, while Russia has retreated to a form of governance that echoes the Stalin era. Knight’s new book will examine how this occurred. Amy Knight is also author of Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (St Martin’s Press, 2017) and The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia (Cornell/Northern Illinois University Press, 2024).

• And the above-mentioned City of Dark Dreams: Tales from Another New York by M. G. Turner, which DarkWinter Press of Ontario, Canada, will publish in January 2027. We’ve already received this endorsement of the collection:
“Anyone who enjoys Poe, Robert Chambers, M.R. James, and other 19th-century writers will enjoy this collection; those who have been put off by the sometimes archaic language of some gothic writers will find M. G. Turner’s work more accessible. Don’t look for splatter, though, as these tales aim to disturb the mind and the heart rather than the stomach. American horror fiction would be immeasurably better off, in my opinion, if more writer’s followed Turner’s example.”—Graeme Davis, editor Colonial Horrors: Sleepy Hollow and Beyond (Pegasus Books, 2017, an anthology we licensed to the publisher on behalf of the editor)
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I want to also note with sadness the passing in September of my longtime author and good friend, Elaine Dewar, age 77. Elaine was a very accomplished journalist and author who specialized in reporting on and writing about challenging subjects, especially cutting-edge science as it intersected with culture, business, and society. I had the privilege of working with her on four of her seven books. Beyond our strong professional links, she was a tremendously steadfast friend—having my wife and I stay in a comfortable bedroom in her home numerous times when visiting Toronto, always reminding us that it was there for a getaway when needed. She also had my back after 2009, the year that I became an independent editorial provider in the book business, with me no longer holding an in-house publishing position. I will always think fondly of Elaine, and her husband Stephen Dewar (d. 2019), seated at the breakfast table in their cozy kitchen, CBC Radio program Metro Morning on the dial, newspapers open, when I came down for a morning meal, and they each greeted us with humor and charm.

I also note the passing last year of my longtime close colleague Herman Graf (1933-2025), who founded the publishing company Caroll & Graf, where I worked with him from 2000-07. As he was remembered in the NY Times, Herman was “A raconteur with a booming voice [and] a bibliophile who loved the works of Stendhal and Thomas Mann. His apartment in Queens was filled with books, many of them first editions. And he was a relentless, and boisterous, salesman for Grove Press, where he spent the better part of two decades.”

Last, among people I admired who passed last year, I want to note David Pryce-Jones (1936-2025), a true person of letters, the like of which there are few examples today. Foreign correspondent, memoirist, essayist, novelist, devoted letter writer, and biographer of Unity Mitford, one of the five Mitford sisters, who had a notorious romance w/ Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. For writing about her life some members of the Mitford family sued Pryce-Jones for libel, intent on suppressing the book, while some upper crust Brits inveighed against Pryce-Jones for spotlighting deep currents of anti-semitism in British society; he was Jewish, and as a three-year old had been evacuated from France when WWII began. Pryce-Jones was faced with a decision to halt publication, or go forward, despite the threat of significant money damages if he lost in court. He didn’t back down, and was vindicated; the book is still in print today. I eulogized him a post last month: A True Man of Letters Whose Work Revealed Anti-Semitism in the UK.
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Please be in touch if you want to discuss your book ideas! Contact us at ptbookproductions[@]gmail[.]com.

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RIP David Pryce-Jones (1936-2025), A True Man of Letters Whose Work Revealed Anti-Semitism in the UK

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January 11, 2026 Update

As an addenda to the tribute below I published last month about British man-of-letter David Pryce-Jones, in which I mentioned that he and actress Helena Bonham-Carter were cousins, I want now to share an article by Juliet Conway in the Daily Mail that highlights their close relationship:

“Helena has long credited David’s 2015 memoir Fault Lines with helping her understand the dramatic history behind the ‘melting pot’ that is her maternal heritage.

The book recounts life at Royaumont with Helena’s maternal grandparents, Eduardo Propper de Callejon – the Spanish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews by issuing illegal visas – and his wife Helene, known as Bubbles, an Austrian-Jewish heiress from the Springer industrial dynasty.

‘It would make a great sitcom or drama,’ Helena has said of the family’s wartime adventures. ‘There were so many characters, so dramatic and funny and bonkers. And David captured it all.’

His death marks the passing of the last of a generation whose real-life dramas—wartime heroism, family feuds, literary scandals —were as vivid as anything in Netflix’s The Crown, in which the actress played Princess Margaret.

And as Helena once joked: ‘I’d have to approach [Crown writer] Peter Morgan. “I’ve got a whole other family story for you. Forget the fifth, and sixth seasons [of The Crown]. You’re coming with me, mate.”‘
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December 17, 2025

I was saddened by the recent passing of David Pryce-Jones (1936-2025), which I read about in a Times of London obituary. (It’s linked to here, though you may hit a paywall, so I’ve also pasted it in below in five sequential screenshots.) We became acquainted via letters and email, beginning in 2023, though never met in person. I had sent him a letter after discovering his books thanks to a biography, The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing by Thomas Harding. Harding’s book on the dynamic British publisher Lord Weidenfeld (1919-2016) was not a cradle-to-grave biography, but instead devoted a chapter to a dozen or so of the most important books Weidenfeld published in his prolific career, some of which courted controversy; among them were Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Watson and Crick’s The Double Helix, Nabokov’s Lolita, and a writer who was then new to me, David Pryce-Jones and his nonfiction book Unity Mitford, a Quest, published in 1976.

One of the five Mitford sisters, Unity had a notorious romance with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. For writing about her life some members of the Mitford family sued Pryce-Jones for libel, intent on suppressing the book, while some upper crust Brits inveighed against Pryce-Jones for spotlighting deep currents of anti-semitism in British society; he was Jewish, and as a three-year old had been evacuated from France through Dunkirk where he was when WWII began. Weidenfeld and Pryce-Jones were faced with a decision to halt publication, or go forward, despite the threat of significant monetary damages if they lost in court. They refused to back down, the book was published, and Pryce-Jones was vindicated; it is still in print today.

I found the whole story of his family, told in the memoir Fault Lines, quite inspirational, particularly the actions of his maternal grandfather, a Spanish diplomat named Eduardo Propper de Callejón who during WWII, defied contrary orders from the Franco government and used his diplomatic portfolio to sign visas for refugees; his bravery warrants a place for him alongside the heroic exploits of the American journalist Varian Fry, who helped rescue Jews in France, and the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who signed visas for many in Lithuania. Indeed, Propper de Callejón is honored at Yad Vashem. Among David’s relatives was the British actress Helena Bonham-Carter, also a grandchild of the Spanish diplomat. She explores the WWII period in this interview on youtube. Among the people her and David’s grandfather saved was the person who later started Unicef.

The Times of London obit explains that he had a complicated relationship with his father Alan Pryce-Jones, who was editor of the Times Literary Supplement. The elder Pryce-Jones can be seen in a fascinating interview he conducted with W. Somerset Maugham in 1955, also on youtube. The Maugham interview, which my adult son and business partner M. G. Turner discovered during Covid, led to me recognizing the name of David Pryce-Jones when I encountered it in Thomas Harding’s book on Lord Weidenfeld.

David was a true person of letters, the likes of which there are few today, among men or women. He was a foreign correspondent, memoirist, essayist, novelist, biographer, and devoted letter writer. Another book of his that I enjoyed enormously was Signatures, in which he tells the stories behind the many inscribed books that populated the bookshelves in his personal library, chronicling more than ninety literary relationships in his life, among them with W. H. Auden, Beryl Bainbridge, Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin, Paul Bowles, Cyril Connolly, Martha Gellhorn, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Alfred Kazin, Amos Elon, Philip Glazebrook, Arthur Koestler, Jessica Mitford, V. S. Naipaul, Edna O’Brien, Alan Sillitoe, Muriel Spark, J. B. Priestley, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Hugh Nissenson, and Dame Rebecca West, among many others. It is an extraordinarily enjoyable book. Just two pages from the Table of Contents are shown below in blue type. He led an extraordinary life, and was a kind man. RIP. 

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