Free Ithaca by David Davidar Page A

need to have a slate of big books for next year (and, hopefully, a couple they could drop into the current year to turn it around, something they haven’t had to do in all the years that Seppi was their mainstay) to present to Gabrijela and the directors at the quarterly board meeting next week. He has nothing that makes the cut as of now. He will know whether there is anything big out there when he has done his rounds of the agents, but it is the leanest time of the year and he isn’tgetting his hopes up. He hopes his editors’ ideas for books that they can commission or authors they can shake loose from the competition are truly brilliant, although he fears that he might be expecting too much of them – they will not be able to conjure up world-beating books at a moment’s notice. Further souring his mood is the fact that he will have to let go of Fiona, the managing editor, soon after the meeting.
    He still finds firing people the most difficult task he has to perform as a senior executive. To make things more difficult, he shuns the most efficient way to get rid of employees in which all he is required to do is make a short, noncommittal speech to the person concerned, following which Naomi, Litmus’s terrific head of HR, takes over and leads the poor devil through the various stages that Kübler-Ross and other gurus have identified – shock, denial, anger, panic, bargaining, depression, acceptance and then the fade into oblivion. He finds this abhorrent and patronizing. Colleagues, especially long-term colleagues, are not units of inventory or items on the balance sheet to be managed by the impersonal tricks the human resources department has up its sleeve. He has always taken the time and the trouble to do the firing himself – erring on the side of generosity and refusing to come up with negative reasons, usually exaggerated, to diminish the employee, and make it easier to let her go. Naomi certainly, and even Gabrijela, who is renowned for her loyalty to her employees, have found his method difficult to take on occasion. He understands their point of view – that he is needlessly prolonging the process, and there is no evidence that slow, compassionate strangling is better for the employeethan the swift bite of the guillotine – but he is not going to change. These people did their bit for him and the company; he will not disrespect them, which appears to be the default position of management. He will do everything he can for them, even if it means he is on edge for days beforehand, and filled with despondency for weeks and months afterwards. To make matters worse, Fiona is his best friend in the office; she was the managing editor when he joined the department as an assistant, and she has applauded and stood by him through every twist and turn of his career at Litmus. She is to be the first victim of the planned cost cuts; Gabrijela and he did everything they could to save her but in the end there was no way out. And if they aren’t able to come up with projects that generate positive cash flow quickly there will be more jobs lost. Litmus is the last of the significant London publishers to start laying off people, but without a Seppi it is not immune to the recession. He has been back in London for just three days and already the calm and certainty of his Bhutanese holiday have been swept into the far recesses of his mind.
    His colleagues know that he likes to start his meetings on time, and just before nine the room fills with a rush. First in is Yanara. He greets her, liking to speak her name out loud, the consonants and vowels rolling off the tongue like castanets. Of Cuban descent she is exquisite – a tall, willowy woman with an exuberant mane of auburn hair. A non-fiction editor of genius, Yanara does repeatedly what none but the best are capable of; she finds books or authors that anticipate a trend or shift in consumer taste, unlike the majority of non-fiction editors who follow trends and are then