Thanks to NetGalley and Quirk Books for the advanced reader copy.

This book wasn't what I'd hoped for. It felt more like mini biographies of well-known "canonical" writers than truly looking at how those writers went about revising their work.

REVISIONARIES by Kristopher Jansma has some fun stories about authors that I look forward to sharing with my students. I wish Jansma covered a wider range of writers and that fewer of the "revisionaries" were included because they died before some of the work could be finished.

As a revision and editing obsessive, I welcome this book – with, unsurprisingly, a few minor notes!

I was delighted with this book, but I was also relieved when it hit the middle point and started to deal with some works that were written during the authors’ mid-career periods. Up to this point, Revisionaries had mainly dealt with juvenilia or books that were not completed because the author died; no real mystery there, and less opportunities to relate the stories of these books to the concept of revision, as they were not really revised (though the author does point out where Austen and Alcott’s juvenilia informed their later novels).

The case studies of Highsmith, Wright and Ellison – who did not die before their tricky magnum opuses were complete or published, like Wallace, Baldwin and Plath – were of greater interest to me. These authors were writing their unpublished novels mid-career, but in many cases, the subject matter they were covering was simply too spicy (lesbianism, racism, police brutality) and out of step with the times. In many cases, these stories are less about revision than authors dealing with the waning of their talents while suffering from addiction or depression, and/or biting off more than they could chew.

With Sylvia Plath, one can’t help but think that the solution for her would be to have married a rich man who mucked in with the kids. I found the Plath section a bit disappointing, not least because it’s so sad but because some of the content from her burned book Falcon Yard is surely in the short story Stone Boy with Dolphin, which the author doesn’t mention, even though it comes closer to ‘revision’ than a lot of the examples offered here. This is not a story buried in a stack somewhere, it is in a relatively well-publicised collection from Faber that's been on the market since 1977 with a re-release in the late 90s/early noughties. There are also some weird omissions - Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish? Fitzgerald and his editor Perkins get a chapter, but not on Gatsby, where they worked well together and revised the book significantly - on a later, fragmentary work. Where's The Waste Land? We have so few examples of how revision works, it seems weird to omit three solid case studies.

Jansma is youngish – I would say that, as he’s my age – and has perhaps overestimated his profile and how much we are interested in how these themes have informed his own work. However, this shouldn’t take away from the facts: Revisionaries is playful, original and possibly a cure for writer’s block. And who wouldn’t want that?