I promised to keep discussing condensation from time to time in this blog, and today we have some insights from Somerset Maugham, famed novelist, playwright and short-story writer. He felt strongly that, with few exceptions (we wonder what he thought of Tom Sawyer, pictured?) good fiction can be found to contain ‘a lot of dead wood’. Want to comment? Send us a note.

From Somerset Maugham’s On Literature

An American publisher once put before me the suggestion of reissuing in an abridged form the ten novels that I considered the best ever, with a preface to each one written by me. His idea was to omit everything but what told the story the author had to tell, expose his relevant ideas and display the characters he had created so that readers might read these fine novels, which they would not have done unless what might not unfairly be described as a lot of dead wood had been cut away from them; and thus, since nothing but what was valuable was left in them, enjoy to the full a great intellectual pleasure. I was at first taken aback, but then I reflected that though some of us have acquired the knack of skipping through books to our profit, most people have not, and it would surely be a good thing if they could have their skipping done for them by a person of tact and discrimination. I welcomed the notion of writing the prefaces to the novels in question, and presently set to work.

Some students of literature, some professors and critics, will exclaim that it is a shocking thing to mutilate a masterpiece, and that it should be read as the author wrote it. That depends on the masterpiece. I cannot think that a single page could be omitted from so enchanting a novel as Pride and Prejudice, or from one so tightly constructed as Madame Bovary; but that very sensible critic George Saintsbury wrote that ‘there is very little fiction that will stand concentration and condensation as that of Dickens’. There is nothing reprehensible in cutting. Few plays have ever been produced that were not to their advantage more or less drastically cut in rehearsal. One day, many years ago, when we were lunching together, George Bernard Shaw told me that his plays were much more successful in Germany than they were in England. He ascribed this to the stupidity of the British public and to the greater intelligence of the German. He was wrong. In England he insisted that every word... Read More...

Readers of Encounters—Australia and New Zealand's non-fiction series from Reader's Digest—will be delighted, and probably not very surprised, to know that two Encounters authors wrote books that are top picks on the National Year of Reading's list for 2012! Eight novels and memoirs were chosen as best representing the Australian experience. The two books that we published with pride some time ago, in Encounters, are Listening to Country by Ros Moriarty, and Well Done, Those Men by Barry Heard. Well done, those authors, for creating such clear mirrors in which Australians may learn about themselves.

Barry's memoir takes the reader into one of the most shattering conflicts in recent history: the Vietnam War. Most tellingly of all, his emotional account opens up the aftermath of that war. Barry didn’t consider he’d had a worse time in Vietnam than any other patriotic veteran. But years after the war was over, it just about destroyed his life. Well Done, Those Men, is the inspiring story of his recovery. After his book was published in Encounters he received over fifty letters from readers.

To read an extract, cli ck here.

Ros Moriarty is not Aboriginal, but in August 1982, she married John, a member of the Yanyuwa people of the Gulf of Carpentaria. On their honeymoon they returned to John’s home country, Borroloola. Hers is an intimate, moving journey into the land and culture of Aboriginal Australia.

To read an extract, click here.