Instead of a Book
Regular price
€16.99
Written with an intimacy and spontaneity even more revealing than her celebrated memoirs, Diana Athill's correspondence with the American poet Edward Field covers thirty years of pleasure and pain, fame and gossip, relationships and ailments. Edited, selected and introduced by Athill, this collection of those letters covers her career as an editor and the adventure of her retirement, revealing a sharply intelligent woman with a keen eye for the absurd, a brilliant turn of phrase and a wicked sense of humour. Vivid, direct and entertaining, Instead of a Book is a wonderful insight into a woman growing older without ever losing her zest for life.
DIANA ATHILL was born in 1917. She helped André Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. She is the author of eight volumes of memoirs - Stet, Instead of a Letter, After a Funeral, Yesterday Morning, Make Believe, Somewhere Towards the End, Alive, Alive Oh!, A Florence Diary - a collection of letters, Instead of a Book, and a novel, Don't Look At Me Like That, all published by Granta, as well as a collection of short stories, Midsummer Night in the Workhouse (Persephone Books). In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for Somewhere Towards the End, and was presented with an OBE. She died in January 2019.