Alane mason biography of donald
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False Starts, or This Novel-Writing Shit Isn’t Easy
When I was trying to sell my first book, a collection of short stories, my eventual editor at W.W. Norton, Alane Mason, asked to speak to me on the phone. “Are you working on a novel?” she asked. “Uh, unfortunately, no,” I said. “Well, do you have an idea for a novel?” Alane persisted. I made something up on the spot, a plotline about hapa—or half Asian, half white—characters living in Tokyo, where I had spent my childhood as the son of a career Foreign Service officer. “Wonderful!” Alane said, and promptly offered me a two-book deal for the collection and the unwritten novel.
It was a different world back then; publishers regularly did such things. Now they’ve wised up, asking to see some chapters or a full manuscript before committing to a contract, since there’s no telling if a storywriter will ever be capable of producing a decent or appealing novel. That was certainly the case with me, as I’d never even attempted anything longer than a novella. Who was to say I could do it?
There are lots of guidebooks on how to write a novel, and some of them have a few tidbits of good advice, but in the end they’re all pretty facile and useless. Everyone’s idiosyncratic as
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The Pleasure of Editing—and Knowing—Randall Kenan
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Publishing Perspectives
“We are all related, our lives and fates are interdependent.”
by Beth Kephart
In 2011, Alane Salierno Mason, vice president and senior editor of W.W. Norton & Company, published 17 new titles — Stephen Greenblatt’s bestselling and National Book Award winning The Swerve, Andre Dubus III’s bestselling memoir Townie, Diane Ackerman’s memoir One Hundred Names for Love, and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Birds of Paradise among them — extending an already established list of commended, risk-taking volumes.
Alane Salierno Mason
Many of the books on Mason’s 2011 list were international in scope, and impact. There was The Enchanter by Lila Azam Zanganeh, for example, along with Odessa by Charles King and Siberian Education by Nicolai Lilin. The Storyteller of Marrakesh by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya was also on Mason’s list, as well as Oil on Water by Helon Habila. France and Italy. The Black Sea. Turin. North Africa. Nigeria. The world at large; the world in miniature.
At the same time, Mason continued serving as godmother (which is to say founder and president) of one of the most extraordinary internationalizing literary endeavors around — Words Without Borders. Launched in 2003 as an online magazine for international literature designed to “con