sutton039

Copies of classical Roman busts, the Scottish National Gallery.  Photo by Randall Stephens. Susan Ware, "The challenges and rewards of biographical essays," OUPblog, April 11, 2013 One of the first things I did after being appointed general editor of the American National Biography was to assign myself an entry to write. I wanted to put myself in the shoes of my contributors and experience first-hand the challenge of the short biographical form. >>> "Paul Johnson reviews 'C.S. Lewis: A Life', by Alister McGrath," Spectator , April 20, 2013 C.S. Lewis became a celebrity but remains a mysterious figure. Several biographies have been written, not to much avail, and now Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology, has compiled a painstaking, systematic and ungrudging examination of his life and works. Despite all the trouble he has taken, his book lacks charm and does not make one warm to his subject. >>> Jonathan Freedland, ...

Randall Stephens Over at the Religion in American History blog I have a short piece on publishing.  Here's an exce rpt and link to the full piece. Few could have accused Ernest Hemingway of being too subtle. “The first draft of anything is shit,” he once quipped.  True.  And still we plod on, hoping to spin that dross into gold. We spend hour upon hour crafting, redrafting, proofing, worrying, and rewriting. Several years back the historian Stephen Pyne wrote in a forum I put together for Historically Speaking that "History is a book culture. We read books, we write books, we promote and award tenure on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. We’re a book-based discipline." *   But figuring out how to land a publisher, what press to go with, and answering a range of other questions can be daunting.  And so, I was happy when my colleague Brian Ward at Northumbria University organized an afternoon session on publishing las...