Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at Americas Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

John Farrar (1896–1974), a quick-to-anger “High Episcopalian editor,” and Roger Straus (1917–2004), a wealthy, charismatic “Jewish prep-school jock,” joined forces in 1946 to launch a New York publishing house. In 1955, Straus hired the immensely talented editor Robert Giroux (1914–2008), a working-class “Jersey City Jesuit.” Journalist Kachka tells Farrar and Giroux’s intriguing stories with zest, but Straus is the sun around which this scintillating history revolves. Possessed of “lordly benevolence and canny calculation,” Straus ran a cosmopolitan, intellectual, if shabby kingdom where sex was the currency of the realm, a CIA connection opened doors to overseas writers, parties served as publicity campaigns, and the prestigious literary house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux published a record-making 25 Nobel laureates. Writing with vigor, skill, and expertise and drawing on dozens of in-depth interviews, Kachka shares risqué gossip and striking insider revelations and vividly profiles the house’s world-shaping writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Tom Wolfe, and Susan Sontag. Kachka’s engrossing portrait of an exceptional publishing house sheds new light on the volatile mixture of commerce, art, and passion that makes the world of books go round. --Donna Seaman