Matthew Shear, publisher of St. Martin's Press, died Wednesday. He was 57. Macmillan CEO John Sargent offered "A Final Salute to Matthew Shear from His Friends in the Flatiron" at Tor.com, where he wrote: "Yesterday we lost a great publisher, but more importantly we lost a remarkable man.
"Matthew worked with us for 18 years, and was always, in every way, a larger than life character. He had that big outgoing personality, that loud cheerful laugh and that huge gap-toothed grin that arrived when he saw you coming. And if that grin wasn't there, you knew it would be there soon enough. As a publisher, he knew a good book whenever he read one and he knew who would like it. He knew how to sell it and he almost always figured out how to make a few bucks along the way. His secret was that he didn't think it was a good book, he believed it was a good book. He didn't think we could sell it, he knew we could sell it. And once he believed in a book and in the person who wrote it, he poured his whole self into convincing everyone that they simply had to have it....
"When a great publisher passes, it is customary to offer a list of authors he worked with. For Matthew it was about all the authors large and small, and about all the people. It was about the small things he did every day for everyone."
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Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature and was praised by Robert Lowell as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats," died earlier today, the Telegraph reported. He was 74.
"I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself," Heaney told NPR in 2008. "Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing."
