“The menace of success, the likelihood of failure – things I don't dare get near." -Jonathan Galassi.

One might imagine that the author of these lines is a timid garret dweller, the sort of man who would shrivel up if forced to live amid the shouts and bustle of the marketplace. One might imagine he would seek the refuge of the university. Sheltered by ivy, he could contemplate in peace; success, at least the kind of success that New York takes seriously, would not menace him.

But Jonathan Galassi lives in the real world, and if he is as self-effacing as he would like people to believe, he must be truly menaced. Galassi is editor in chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It's a high-pressure, high-stakes job for a guy who's earned degrees from Harvard and Cambridge universities, holds a Guggenheim fellowship, was until recently poetry editor of the Paris Review, writes poetry himself and translates verse from Italian. His specialty is Montale.

His other specialty is Scott Turow.

While the rest of the publishing industry has had to swallow not only losses but its pride, Galassi has been presiding over a miraculous resurgence at FSG, one largely fueled by the runway success of Turow's two novels- Presumed Innocent and the current best-seller The Burden of Proof. In a time of rapid conglomarization and financial recklessness, FSG remains small, independent and committed to quality. The code at FSG for making a lot of money is publishing a book "well," as if talking dollars and cents were gauche. Long known for its list of Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, the house has recently enjoyed enormous financial success from selling 750,000 hardcover copies of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and 720,000 copies of Presumed Innocent-their "nouveau riche money," as FSG's founder Roger Straus calls it...