It’s not every day that the publisher of All the President’s Men takes a back seat to a Great America theme park, but Sept. 7 was such a day for Simon & Schuster. That was when New Yorkers found a new media superpower, spawned by Viacom Inc. and the CBS Corporation and wriggling into the Read More
Literary agent Andrew Wylie, he of the highbrow client list, fiercely practices the art of the advance. Regularly, Mr. Wylie wins six-digit advances for non-best-selling literary authors. But he’s also known for geographic advances-into England, Spain and Japan-and now it looks like he might be in for a windfall of cultural currency.
At the end Read More
It was a Friday, so John Updike of Beverly Farms, Mass., had passed the day on the greens at the Myopia Hunt Club in nearby South Hamilton where the Herbert Corey Leeds Memorial Tournament was under way. “Golf takes all your time but gives you little back except a sunburn and sore feet,” said the Read More
The second day of August brought a blue sky and a fine breeze to the southern edge of Central Park, and with it the pedestrians came. Some admired freshly penned likenesses by street artists. Others sat in the plaza and listened to the fountain. Along Central Park South, from the Plaza Hotel to the New Read More
Democratic Presidential hopeful Bill Bradley was one of the last people to see Joe Wood before the 34-year-old New York-based writer and book editor went up Mount Rainier on July 8 and didn’t come down. Mr. Bradley was in Seattle for the Unity ’99 Journalism Conference, a gathering of 6,000 black, Hispanic, Asian and Native Read More
Its arrival has been as secretive as that time Holden hid in Phoebe’s closet.
In the fall of 2000, Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., plans to publish a memoir by J.D. Salinger’s daughter, Margaret (Peggy) Salinger. The book, entitled Dream-Catcher , is about her childhood and as such will incorporate Read More
Judging by the turnout for his 46th-birthday party, Bertelsmann A.G.’s chief executive, Thomas Middelhoff, has successfully tunneled his way into America’s media landscape. What a strange, brief trip it’s been. Seven months ago, Mr. Middelhoff ascended to the top spot of the world’s third-largest media conglomerate, a sprawling empire based in Gütersloh, Germany, that produces Read More
If the memorial tribute to William Gaddis held at the American Academy of Arts and Letters on May 6 was going to be anything like the writer’s books, it would have been long and somewhat daunting. Things didn’t turn out that way. The formal part of the service stretched but an hour and a quarter, Read More
Would you pay $150 for what might very well be an original Paul Theroux handwriting scrawl of the phrase “Fuck you”?
The fact that a Massachusetts rare book dealer just sold the above curiosity-bundled with a Theroux first edition and a piece of correspondence between the bookseller and Mr. Theroux’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin-is the latest Read More
Over the next month or so, something unprecedented will happen in the publishing world. A book published by Barnes & Noble Inc., the restless giant of book retailing, will be reviewed in the stalwart pages of the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World . Granted, Barnes & Noble isn’t publishing Read More
