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
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
Old New York is still all around us, if you know where to look. At least, that’s the idea that Frank Jump is selling. 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
The demise of Oprah’s Book Club might have left publishing bereft, but there was plenty to celebrate in 2011: Amazon Publishing blithely ignored the sniping of the Big Six and installed itself as a player in New York, a billboard of Jeffrey Eugenides in a vest competed with the toothsome blondes gracing Times Square and Read More
Ever wonder how all those celebrity memoirs get published? Writing at The Daily Beast, former Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael Korda describes how book publishers get seduced by Hollywood glitter: “Stranded in Beverly Hills, where movie stars and studio heads and successful directors outranked them, where you can’t walk to anywhere, and where people who matter arrive at the porte cochère of the hotel or the restaurant in a glittering car or limousine, sometimes to be greeted by a storm of photoflashes, they were fair game, thirsting for tea or drinks with even the most passé of movie stars and prepared to find them glamorous and fascinating.” Suckers! Read More
It’s such a long list! And it doesn’t even include HBO, the vacuum of literature/possibly the single biggest financial backer of writing in New York City. Publishers Weekly has compiled the round-up, which includes everything from Gillian Anderson in Great Expectations to Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (which was depressing enough in picture book form, thank you very much.) Read More
Yesterday marked ten years since the untimely death of the German writer W.G. Sebald. The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog commemorated the occasion with a post about Sebald’s work, where Mark O’Connell noted his influence on the writers Teju Cole, Will Self and Geoff Dyer, who “have been inspired by Sebald’s figurative and literal Read More
If publishers could collage a portrait of their ideal consumer of novelty gift books, it would probably look something like this: begin with a hapless urban 20-something whose life is “out of control” (Fuck! I’m in My 20s). She has an iPhone and sends a lot of text messages (Damn You, Autocorrect!). She continues to Read More
Literary magazine Virginia Quarterly Review has announced it has a new publisher, Jon Parrish Peede, the former director of literature for the National Endowment of the Arts. VQR editor Ted Genoways also named Donovan Webster as the magazine’s new deputy editor, following the suicide of former deputy editor Kevin Morrissey last year. Mr. Webster is a former senior editor for Outside, who has also written for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Magazine.
Morrissey’s death left the magazine in disarray and Mr. Genoways faced an audit from the University of Virginia over the management of the publication. The audit temporarily closed its offices and suspended publication. (In response, The Observer published a defense of Mr. Genoways by Tom Bissell, if you’re interested.) Read More
