Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie

October 21, 2024
In this boisterous debut essay collection, Wasserman, the publisher of Heyday Books, discusses his literary friendships, lefty politics, and opinions on publishing’s technological shifts. The selections chronicle Wasserman’s “precocious adolescence” in 1960s Berkeley, where as a high school student he learned radical politics from informal seminars conducted by left-wing activist Tom Hayden; his turn in the 1970s as editor of the Los Angeles Times opinion page, for which he coaxed an elusive Orson Welles to write an artful obituary for French director Jean Renoir; and his stint as editorial director for Times Books in the 1990s, where he successfully fought to publish Sister Souljah’s No Disrespect over the objections of his boss. Wasserman comes off as the quintessential book world insider, reflecting on his friendships with Susan Sontag (“something of an Auntie Mame figure for me”) and Christopher Hitchens, whose rightward turn in the early aughts Wasserman laments in an elegiac remembrance. Elsewhere, Wasserman dishes on hobnobbing with Barbra Streisand, Jacqueline Onassis, and Gore Vidal, and ruminates on his formative visits to Cuba, the promise and pitfalls of the Black Panther Party, and the prematurely pronounced death of the print book amid the ascendant e-book market of the aughts. Erudite yet chatty, this gossipy grab bag of reminiscences will be catnip for book lovers.