Beverly Horowitz Adapts Heather McGhee for YA

The Book Case

ABC News

Fiction, Arts, Books, Society & Culture

4.1 • 766 Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2023

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Quite a few of you have written us that you would be interested in hearing from a book editor, so we went out and find one of the best. Beverly Horowitz, Senior Vice President of Delacorte Press which is a division of Random House, joins us for a fascinating talk about what she does and how she does it. She has been editing for decades and recently has taken to adapting popular and important non fiction books for YA readers, a process that also fascinated us. After talking to Beverly, one of her authors joins us to give an author’s perspective on the process: Heather McGhee, the writer of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. The Sum of Us is not necessarily a “simple” book for YA audiences, it presents complex arguments about how institutional racism hurts our policy making and our economy. How did the two of them work with this book and adapt it to YA audiences? What does Beverly do with an author who won’t take her advice? How does a book go from the author’s printer to the book store shelves? We answer all of that on this week’s episode of The Book Case. Don’t miss it! Books mentioned in this podcast: The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee Look Homeword, Angel by Thomas Wolfe Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (Born a Crime by Trevor Noah YA edition) My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor by Sonia Sotomayor Beloved by Toni Morrison Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion I Will Find You by Harlan Coben Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome book casers. It is another week, another bookcase. We're really excited about this episode. But before we get excited too much, and we talk too much about why we're excited, I'm going to introduce my co-host. Here's my co-host. Take it away.
0:18.0	And I'm Charlie Gibson, Kate Gibson. Nice to join you. We are very
0:21.6	interested in this podcast. And if you listen, I think you'll learn a lot about the book business.
0:28.0	This is a subject that we want to explore in this podcast and others to come. How does the book
0:33.9	business work? How has it changed? We'll get into all that. But today we're
0:38.1	going to talk to an editor. Beverly Horowitz is her name. She's been editing books since 1981.
0:44.1	And she's worked with some pretty important authors. Yeah, she has. And we've heard from a lot of you,
0:49.2	I remember we had a conversation a few weeks back with Nelson DeMille. And he talked a little bit
0:53.5	about his editing process. And some of you wrote to us and said, it would be great if you could talk to
0:57.6	an editor. So we found like the quintessential editor, Beverly Horowitz has done it all. And she
1:03.6	almost single-handedly discovered Judy Bloom. She's been around the business forever. She has worked
1:09.8	a lot, too, in children's literature. So we get to ask her a
1:14.2	little bit about the difference between editing and editing young adult or children's literature.
1:18.9	And in the last few years, she's developed this amazing specialty that I always was fascinated by
1:25.8	when I worked in a bookstore. She adapts popular, often with social justice implications, memoirs, and nonfiction for young
1:33.6	adult audiences.
1:35.6	And I'm fascinated by that.
1:37.7	So I couldn't wait to talk to her.
1:39.9	Yeah.
1:40.2	And she doesn't, she makes a very strong point that she doesn't dumb down the books for young adults, but she does make them a more approachable for young adults.
1:49.8	Some of the examples, she took Trevor Noah's book, Born a Crime, and worked on a Young Adult version of that.
1:56.3	She did Sonia Sotomayor's book, Sonia on the Supreme Court, and her amazing story of growing up,
	...

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