There's no question but that the Paris imprint which has for many years past brought out the likeliest new books, novels especially, is the Editions de Minuit. They've managed it by being hard to please editorially (as few publishers any longer are in an age of inexplicable hospitality to authorship), the Minuit never having looked to go beyond twenty books a year. And they've managed it by having someone in charge who never meant to let other people come between him and the writers he chose to publish; someone who ran the whole thing exactly as he wanted, down, literally, to the intrusion of commas into such sentences as he thought showed a need of them. This was Jérôme Lindon, who took over the firm in 1948 and ran it for 53 years up until his death in April last year.

LRB 14 January 2002 | PDF Download