http://www.tomrachman.com/the-imperfectionists.html

Eleven connected short stories each featuring a member of staff at a moment of crisis of an English-language newspaper in Rome. As is usually the case with short stories there are a couple of gems and a couple of lame ducks with the rest sitting somewhere between.

• “BUSH SLUMPS TO NEW LOW IN POLLS” PARIS CORRESPONDENT–LLOYD BURKO
• “WORLD’S OLDEST LIAR DIES AT 126” OBITUARY WRITER–ARTHUR GOPAL
• “EUROPEANS ARE LAZY, STUDY SAYS” BUSINESS REPORTER–HARDY BENJAMIN
• “GLOBAL WARMING GOOD FOR ICE CREAMS” CORRECTIONS EDITOR–HERMAN COHEN
• “U.S. GENERAL OPTIMISTIC ON WAR” EDITOR-IN-CHIEF–KATHLEEN SOLSON
• “THE SEX LIVES OF ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS” CAIRO STRINGER–WINSTON CHEUNG
• “KOOKS WITH NUKES” COPY EDITOR–RUBY ZAGA
• “76 DIE IN BAGHDAD BOMBINGS” NEWS EDITOR–CRAIG MENZIES
• “COLD WAR OVER, HOT WAR BEGINS” READER–ORNELLA DE MONTERECCHI
• “MARKETS CRASH OVER FEARS OF CHINA SLOWDOWN” CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER–ABBEY PINNOLA
• “GUNMAN KILLS 32 IN CAMPUS RAMPAGE” PUBLISHER–OLIVER OTT

If you’ve seen the movie The French Dispatch by Wes Anderson, – this book feels a little bit like it.

Each story is interesting, each has something to say but instead of France, they do Italy instead. To be fair to the storyteller, it does start in Paris but slowly moves one capital over, to Rome.

You folks interested in a feature on the ortolan? It’s this French delicacy, a bird–a sort of finch, I think–that’s illegal to sell here. They stick it in a cage, poke out its eyes so it can’t tell day from night, then feed it round the clock. When it’s full up, they drown it in Cognac and cook it. Mitterrand ate one for his last meal.”
“Uh-huh,” Menzies responds circumspectly. “But sorry, where’s the news?”
“No news. Just a feature.”

The writer life is full of anguish and blocks and poverty. You never can tell where your next gig is going to come from and it just makes life sweeter. You get to live it more, travel more, love more. All the cities have a different glow for a writer:

He opens the window, breathes in, presses his knees into the guardrail. The grandeur of Paris–its tallness and broadness and hardness and softness, its perfect symmetry, human will imposed on stone, on razored lawns, on the disobedient rose bushes–that Paris resides elsewhere. His own is smaller, containing himself, this window, the floorboards that creak across the hall.

To move his story forwards, Rachman offers 11 representative figures, whose personal lives are intimately connected to the paper’s slow decline. They include Lloyd, the seventy-something Paris correspondent, his career in terminal freefall, who tries to use his son as the source of a story about French involvement in Gaza; Arthur, the obits editor blown off track by the death of his daughter; Kathleen, the hard-as-nails editor, contemplating a fling as a means of getting back at her philandering husband; and Winston Cheung, the newly appointed Cairo stringer, constantly outfoxed by veteran rival Snyder, who says things like “Dude, let’s commit some journalism.” End-of-chapter asides sketch in some of the paper’s history since its early 1950s founding.

Personal note: It’s an OK book but probably not one I’d willingly read again.