Timothy Seldes has died. He was 88 years old.
The New York Times reports that Seldes devoted four decades to a career as a literary agent. He represented several high-profile authors including Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler, Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer, and The Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton.
Here’s more from The Washington Post: “In 1972, he bought one of New York’s most prestigious literary agencies, Russell & Volkening, which was founded in 1940 by Diarmuid Russell and Henry Volkening. Over the next 40 years, Mr. Seldes kept the agency’s original name, even though he was its principal agent and sole owner. He specialized in high-end fiction and literary nonfiction, acquiring many books that became bestsellers and canonical works of literature.” (via The Hollywood Reporter)
Tyler's story of three generations of the Whitshank family has all the typical hallmarks for which she is so well known. There is family drama and dysfunction and sorrow aplenty, but Tyler also has an amazing way of exposing family in all its ugly and beautiful glory. These characters love each other, except when they don't, [...]
It’s unusual to be completely thrown by a question from the audience, but a teenager in the audience at my most recent event managed to do just that.
The event was the Hay Festival, my fellow panellists were Sally Nicholls and Anne Cassidy and the question was this: ‘If you could be any other writer, who would you be?’
‘Homer,’ said Sally, for his wonderful stories and use of language. ‘J K Rowling,’ said Anne, ‘just think of the money.’
I mumbled something about Shakespeare, but it wasn’t really true, and over the last few weeks I’ve been wondering which writer I should have picked. Anne Tyler, whose novel ‘The Accidental Tourist’ is written so beautifully that I have line-envy on every page? Antonia Forest, because then I’d know more about the Marlows, possibly my favourite family in children’s fiction? Hilary McKay for creating the Casson family, who run the Marlows a close second? Lauren Child, because I’d love to have her visual imagination? Jodie Picoult or Joanna Trollope, because I feel I could do what they do, but then I wouldn’t have to do it and I’d have all their royalties.
No. The answer, I realised was simple. I write because I like to create my own stories. I don’t want to write other people’s books or plays, even if they are more lucrative than mine, win more awards, are better written. I don’t want to be another writer, is what I should have said. I just want to work on being an even better version of me.
How about you? Is there an author you’d like to be?
Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Anne Tyler has a new book coming out from Alfred A. Knopf next spring.
The yet-to-be-titled novel begins in 1994 and follows three generations of a Baltimore family. Check it out:
Her new novel begins in 1994 and slowly unwinds through three generations of the Whitshank family, revolving primarily around Red, a construction worker, his wife, Abby, a social worker, and their four children. The novel opens when Abby and Red receive a call from their only son, who has phoned with important news. Then, suddenly, the phone goes dead.
Tyler has been with Knopf for 50 years, half of the time the publisher has been operating.
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