After threatening a blog, out of a year and more threatening their own author under contract, Abram’s silence speaks volumes. It is the principle that senior editor, Tara Break, had not only personal responsibilities, which she might abandon or abuse as she pleases in private life, so obsessed with her ‘rights’ but no one else’s, but a professional duty of care too, in a tiny department, that she completely jettisoned in an act of massive disrespect, negligence and ultimate cruelty too. Of course she had professional responsibility there, but is never one to take any true responsibility, and would naturally hide behind a firm, or a group and watch the destruction of David Clement-Davies’s work and career, actually his life, but also the removal of her boss Harold Rove too. Lovely. She uses words like evil, heard by David’s own editor too, new Vice President, who did nothing to solve or aid a difficult situation either, suddenly making everything about her ‘power over her list’, but both might take a look in the mirror.
While Abram’s utterly dishonest synthesising issues around Tara Break, privacies or whatever, really masks the conflicts the story then became about, like author’s rights, contracts, broken professional promises, professional defamation, above all honesty and proper and essential working conditions under contract, they are also wrong about the principle of duties of care, well before that. Not to mention the growing anguish that was known about in a department, that went silent to an author with two books there, and three under contract. If the issue of Hew, Screw and Glue is not technically the big one, though it led to the disaster, because a personal fact of friendship and awful betrayal was so involved, so hypocritically too, then the difficulty of Tara Break’s lack of priorities on tour was, and a weird psychology and family history too. An ultimate arrogance and unilateralism that are astonishing. Susan Van Metre’s threats months before were, and her breach of a writer’s privacy to Penguin editor Sharyn November very much was. So was the personal alliance between Sarah Van More, Tara Break and her new man, as the distortion of the whys and how’s for months was, where in an ‘enquiry’ Tara Break and her colleagues did not even mention the Hew, Screw and Glue issue. But above all the conspiracy inside a department for months was too, that should be considered not only arrogant, abusive and horrible, but illegal. The personal and professional invasion of it was appalling and it completely distorted all supposed discussions about books, or how you get to them. As we have said, so much is proved by the removal of Harold Rove, but Abrams CEO Mike Jacobson will do nothing about it, because he got his scapegoats, after his bogus ‘enquiry’. There was no ‘due process’ at all. Love has not been talked about enough, which out of Fell was almost impossible to bear, in shattered relationships and friendships, but it went beyond a person, it went into what supports literature itself. Hence attempts to bring peace, repeatedly denied too. “You mention contracts and you will destroy trust” said ‘agent’ Ginger Clarke, but Tara Break destroyed trust, then Sarah Van More. Then the bully tactics of a whole New York firm engaged, and denial of true freedom of speech or defence.
They cannot attack in court because they know they will lose, and it would open the door to so much that was wrong, but they will not apologise or compensate, because they do not give a tuppeny damn about real lives or books, careers beyond their own, or the harm Tara Break and they did and stood over so awfully. So unnecessarily too. Sadly we cannot afford to fight them in court and memory is a real enemy. They also know about these open ‘slanders’, as they would have it, in a blog, because an Oxford lawyer put himself on our ‘mailing list’. Very well, knowing about a thing but not acting is also a form of acceptance but Americans are getting a rather bad reputation in the just power stakes. There, Abrams and the complete expression of ‘power’ without real responsibility, contractual abuse, and a chain of secrets and lies that also saw a major publishing CEO trying to defame someone to the US Author’s Guild, as they had shut the door on their legal and contractual duty to give dialogue on two books already there. Welcome too to Sarah Van More’s real standards in getting to the top, a person who used The Sight in her interview with Harold Rove, but be very careful of love, friendship and literature in New York City. Abrams certainly don’t believe in such things and have stained a company’s reputation too. Perhaps Tara Break should remodel the Statue of Liberty, but she prefers corrupt politics and any possible harm ‘out there’, even to people she said she loved and asked friendship of. It is actually the meaning of tragedy.
PA PRESS
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