TV and film actress Sarah Jessica Parker has announced a new career in publishing, apparently part-time. She made her name in the HBO series Sex and the City. According to the story in T: The New York Times Style Magazine:
…Parker would rather see her initials on the spine [of a book] than her name on the cover, and next year she will. Hogarth, the publishing house founded in 1917 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, is mounting SJP for Hogarth, where, as editorial director, Parker will help to find, edit and publish three or four new novels a year…Parker said yes in a second [to the job offer]. “I have always loved to read for the same reason I love to act,” she says, “which is that other people’s stories are more interesting to me than my own.”
When asked about her literary tastes by the Times reporter, Parker gave an interesting answer:
From the Modernist period, her favorite novelist isn’t Virginia Woolf, who wanted to have no country, but rather Evelyn Waugh, whose characters are most in need of home. Home is what draws Parker, too, to the origins of Hogarth. “Because Virginia and Leonard Woolf were printing books out of their home, and because they were publishing work by their friends, they were telling exactly the stories they wanted to tell,” she says. “I love most the idea of community here, and that the history of the imprint is personal. There was nothing mercenary about it. The Woolfs were storytellers.”
