Letters to a Friend - Tapa dura

Diana Athill is one of our great women of letters. The renowned editor of V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, and many others, she is also a celebrated memoirist whose Somewhere Towards the End was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. For thirty years, Athill corresponded with the American poet Edward Field, freely sharing jokes, pleasures, and pains with her old friend. Letters to a Friend is an epistolary memoir that describes a warm, decades-long friendship. Written with intimacy and spontaneity, candor and grace, it is perhaps more revealing than any of her celebrated books. Edited, selected, and introduced by Athill, and annotated with her own delightful notes, this collection rich with Athill s characteristic wit, humor, elegance, and honesty reveals a sharply intelligent woman with a keen eye for the absurd, a brilliant turn of phrase, and a wicked sense of humor. Covering her career as an editor, the adventure of her retirement, her immersion in her own writing, and her reactions to becoming unexpectedly famous in her old age including gossip about legendary authors and mutual friends, sharp pen-portraits, and uninhibited accounts of her relationships Letters to a Friend describes a flourishing friendship and offers a portrait of a woman growing older without ever losing her zest for life."

[T]his latest of her books, demonstrates, through the tart comments she has interposed, that, well into her 90s, she has lost none of her fire. Her undeniably patrician manner and lapidary prose style notwithstanding, it is very clear from the warmth of Athill's communications with her friend that for her, kind hearts are indeed far more than coronets, her genuine concern and sympathy with his travails shining through . One feels that Athill isn't capable of writing a rote bread and butter letter. One of the joys of this book is how heartfelt her sentences always are, so full of freshness and purpose, whether describing an experience or indulging in a spot of delicious gossip. Words across an ocean from a true friend for all seasons. --Martin Rubin"