Word: jacketful
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...chair without a seat belt, she headed for the mountains in a C-130 transport plane. "It was the first time I'd ever taken off in a kitchen chair," she laughed. The nine tons of donated supplies included blankets, roofing, tools and even a custom-tailored dinner jacket. Some of these she saw already piled along the dirt airstrip when she landed at the town of Anta...
...well founded. Former Major General Pyotr Grigorenko, a Russian political dissident who is currently reported being held in a mental institution in Tashkent, managed to send out notes that his wife has made public. "They decided to break me immediately," he wrote. "They put me into a strait jacket, beat me and choked me." When he went on a hunger strike, the attendants brutally inserted an expander into his mouth. Scribbled Grigorenko, "Force-feeding every day. I resist as much as I can. They beat me and choke me again. They twist my hands, hit my crippled leg." Earlier this...
...happens shouldn't be called publishing. 'Privishing' would be a better way to put it." Some books are sent to reviewers without even the vital publication-date information or a glossy photograph of the author, which definitely increases the chance of a review in smaller papers. Jacket copy can be cretinous. The blurbs from other writers are often elliptical and overblown ("Not since Dostoevsky . . ."), demolishing what credibility they might normally possess. The authors' capsule biographies still tend to suggest that to become a novelist, a boy should first try life as a carpenter, cook, salesman...
These perennial problems are not the result of a conspiracy to suppress talent but of commercial realities. Statistically, there can be few less promising enterprises than a serious new first novel. By dint of great care and devotion -especially to getting convincing jacket blurbs from established writers-some publishers do make a little money on serious first novels. But even when properly handled, the average sale of a remarkably skillful book is not likely to run over 6.000 hardback copies. The best guess at an average is 3,500, with more than half of that sale coming from public libraries...
...turned up the collar on my sports jacket and dug my hands into my pockets as far as they would go to look as tough as I could possibly look, and marched, head down, three blocks, almost to Times Square. I was watching the cracks in the sidewalk and swinging quick glances from side to side to make sure that I wasn't about to be knocked off, when suddenly I stopped and shook my head to clear it. Two feet away I saw a grown man, maybe as old as my father and the other members of the Lion...