Jill Schwartzman has been named executive editor at Dutton, an imprint of Penguin, reports Publishers Marketplace. Ms. Schwartzman’s most recent job was senior editor at Hyperion, where she acquired such titles as White Girl Problems, by David Oliver Cohen, Tanner Cohen, & Lara Schoenhals, and Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like Read More
James Franco is publishing a novel! And not only that, he has abandoned traditional publishing houses to publish with Amazon. The book is called Actors Anonymous and was acquired by Amazon’s fiction editor Ed Park from Mr. Franco’s agent, Richard Abate. Read More
Ed Park was hired to acquire fiction titles for Amazon’s new New York publishing house in September, but it was not clear if his new job meant his days as an editor at The Believer, the magazine he helped found, were over. Well, it turns out they are. Read More
Counter to prevailing trends, the online culture magazine The Rumpus is starting a print subscription program. But, like other recently announced subscription plans, The Rumpus won’t be sending you a magazine: instead, for $5 a month, subscribers will receive a letter in the mail each week from a writer. Read More
A new year, a new crop of books. The Millions book blog has posted its massive preview of books coming out in 2012. There are essay collections from William Gibson and Jonathan Franzen, selected poetry from W.G. Sebald and new novels from Toni Morrison, Michael Chabon and Richard Ford, among very many others. Read More
January stretches out before us like a desolate wilderness raging with inclement weather. What better way to fill the hours than filming your own adaptation of Ulysses and uploading it to the Internet? Other writers who died 70 years ago with works now in the public domain include Virginia Woolf, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Bergson. Read More
Critics earn paychecks (small ones) because readers value (sort of) their expert opinions. But sometimes critics do self-important things. Sam Anderson, critic at large of The New York Times Magazine, just published his selected marginalia of 2011. Read More
On the CBS show The Good Wife there is a character named Andrew Wylie. Played by the actor Tim Guinee, the character is a private investigator hired by the state attorney’s office to cause some drama by casually revealing past love affairs to all the wrong people and reviving dormant scandals. An inciter of barely suppressed gasps and sobs. But could it really be just a coincidence that he shares a name with a certain literary agent? Read More
Amazon has released its annual list of its bestselling products this year. No big surprises: the bestselling e-book was Kathryn Stockett’s The Help; the most popular print book was Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson; the latest Harry Potter movie was the bestselling DVD and Adele had the bestselling album with 21. Read More
The fees section of a monthly cell phone bill is always a somewhat murky affair, but Verizon Wireless has created on an additional charge: if you pay your phone bill online with a one-time payment instead of enrolling in an automatic payment program, they will charge you $2. That’s right, the phone company is going to start charging you money for you to pay your phone bill. Read More
