Welcome to Season Two of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of Editing. This season, in a series of live conversations, Merve Emre asks the smartest and savviest editors how the sausage gets made. What happens behind the scenes at a magazine? How does an idea become a book? And how do you work with those strange and difficult creatures we call writers?
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From the episode:
Merve Emre: I first started following Yahdon’s work through the Instagram feed of the Literary Swag Book Club, which he describes as New York City’s best-dressed book club. For almost 10 years, Yahdon has convened a group of curious and stylish readers, who’ve read over a hundred books together, in an effort to reconcile their love of appearances with their love of the intellect. Or as Yahdon has written, “There’s always this dichotomy between if you’re smart, you can’t really care about being fly, and if you’re fly, you’re vapid.” As an editor, he’s worked on many acclaimed and well-known books. Yahdon is a friendly force with many passions and his career draws together intelligence and glamour, the love of making art and the love of building communities, and a profound care for writers and readers alike.
For a full transcript, head over to the New York Review of Books.
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Yahdon Israel is a senior editor at Simon & Schuster and founder of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that intersects literature and fashion to make books accessible. He brings an entrepreneurial spirit to these pursuits as the founder of a popular book club, host of a literary podcast, creative writing teacher, event producer, as well as his work in support of several prestigious literary awards.
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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by
Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf
The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.