Ed Park (as illustrated by The Believer)

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.

In the January issue The Believer's editors bid farewell to Mr. Park. "Ed singlehandedly revived the exclamation-point industry, an industry whose smelters had shuttered and whose lobbyists found themselves homeless in the ice age of irony," they write, in a mournful farewell.

What was less expected was Amazon Publishing's latest move: hiring one of the editors of The Believer to acquire fiction for the imprint. Ed Park, whom The New York Times once called "The Wizard of Whimsy", will now represent the literary side of the Seattle company's New York publishing house. His hire indicates that Amazon will be competing with publishers in all kinds of books, not just in the realm of bestselling megabooks, and also that the company is willing to look beyond the ranks of traditional publishing employees in its hiring. Mr. Park, as far as we have ascertained,* does not have a background at one of the Big Six houses. In addition to being a founding editor of The Believer and a novelist, he has worked as an associate editor for The Poetry Foundation and an editor at The Voice Literary Supplement.

Mr. Park is the fourth big hire at Amazon Publishing, following David Moldawer, who was hired as a senior editor from McGraw-Hill, Julia Cheiffetz, who was hired as editorial director from HarperCollins and Larry Kirshbaum, who was named publisher back in May. If these four have something in common, it's a relatively strong interest in social media (which in the context of publishing basically means they have Facebook pages or blogs, but still) and some possible motivations for being frustrated with traditional publishing. Ms. Cheiffetz worked at HarperCollins imprint Collins HarperStudio, which quickly folded after launching with much fanfare; Mr. Moldawer left his previous job after less than a year there and Mr. Kirshbaum went from heading Time Warner Books to running an agency, where he realized his attempts to be both publisher and agent would be "cleaner" if he just went into digital publishing.

This is also not the first time Ms. Cheiffetz has placed a vote of confidence in Mr. Park: back in 2007, she acquired his novel Personal Days in a pre-empt for Random House.

*Regarding our questions about Mr. Park's hire, Amazon's spokesperson replied, "We don’t have anything to share yet on the new hires, so we’ll decline the interview at this time."

But instead of calling itself a weekly, the digital-only paper of McSweeney's-like squibs, poetry, essays, and fiction (with occasional contributions from writers like The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones) is now calling itself "seasonal" due to its semi-erratic publishing schedule.

Started in 2006 by Believer co-editor and Personal Days author Ed Park, The New-York Ghost went from mini cult to the subject of a New York Times 'City' section profile by Sani Knafo in 2007, which dubbed Mr. Park The Wizard of Whimsy. (Disclosure: This writer worked with Mr. Park at another paper five years ago but has had no contact with him since.)

As a possible explanation for the newsletter's long absence (the last issue—topically re-dubbed The Wasilla Ghost—came out October 7, 2008 and consisted of a poem by Aimee Kelley that began, "Dick Cheney's home is only visible/in winter. Those months he sits/underground dreaming"), the new issue begins with a surprisingly confrontational imaginary dialogue with a reader:

This "prologue" is separated from the rest of the issue by a perforated line. Readers are advised to "Detach & Abandon" it.