This collection of essays first appeared last year as The Secrets of the Press, and it's hard to see why Penguin decided to denude it of that racy allure and instead make it appear like some sort of textbook. The book is much more fun than that, both for those inside the trade and without. Among the many entertaining pieces of the 27 included we'll highlight Lynn Barber on how to conduct an interview, Richard Ingrams on the game of libel and Lynne Truss on her Damascene conversion to sportswriting. The "Rare Old Times" pieces grow old quickly and, for the Irish reader, the emphasis on the London scene can be overly incestuous. But anyone interested in print journalism will have a fine time.
`. . . this is precisely what some of the literati are doing to us: they analyse everything ad nauseam, techniques, motifs, oxymorons and metonyms, allegory and connotation, hidden Jewish allusions, latent psychological keys and sociological implications, and archetypal characters and fateful ideas and whatnot. Only the pleasure of reading do they castrate - just a bit - so it doesn't get in the way; so that we remember that literature is not playing games, and, in general, that life is no picnic.
`Yet Gogol's nose and Yizhar's orange hue and the cow on the balcony and Yaakov Shabtai's uncles, and even Kafka's diabolical horses - all of them, in addition to providing the well-known delicatessen of education, information, and so on, lure us into a world of pleasure and joyous games.'
From The Story Begins: Essays On Literature by Amos Oz