By Drew Grant 5/24 9:32am

Magazine publishing

What is this?

What Is Town & Country?

We’ve never understood who the target demographic of Hearst’s Town & Country were supposed to be. Certainly not people who actually live in a town or countryside, but perhaps those who can afford to have a summer home in a grassy estate? Cafe society and young socialites, ostensibly, but are those people really subscribing to “old media” anymore? And isn’t cafe society as antiquated as print, anyhow?

Adding to this confusion is the strange hodge-podge of articles that are thrown into the magazine helmed by Jay Fielden. At times, the entirety of T&C is seemingly comprised of an island of misfit articles; rejects from other Hearst publications for one reason or another. Since Town & Country still needs to keep up the pretense of being a monthly glossy in order to keep the brand alive (the Wedding and Homes editions are still lucrative, and let’s not forget that it’s the oldest magazine in America!) we end up with a subscription that puts Greta Gerwig and Audrey Plaza on the cover one month, and summer camp fun the next. Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 10/27/11 4:25pm

off the record

gawker

Katie Roiphe Critiques Emily Gould-Era Gawker

In an essay published on Slate last week, Katie Roiphe aired this musty bit of media gossip: Emily Gould’s editor asked Ms. Roiphe to blurb her book, And the Heart Says Whatever. This despite the fact that Ms. Gould had called Ms. Roiphe a “big immature baby” in a post during her tenure at Gawker.

“Admittedly Read More

By Drew Grant 10/13/11 12:27pm

Events

IMG_0206

Jon-Jon Goulian and Emily Gould Face Off in Literary Death Match

Last night at Drom, a metaphor comparing (of all things) the hand of a friend about to give one his first pubescent homosexual handjob and a sucking starfish helped to win The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt author Jon-Jon Goulian first place in the Literary Death Match. The 5-year-old event is currently on a two month tour through 31 cities, the New York version of which included an unlikely cast of literary, tech, and comedy types.

Mr. Goulian was matched for a seven-minute reading in the first round against Emily Gould, who read a new piece about a girl in Kansas who had kind of a shitty boyfriend and didn’t like to jog (but did it anyway). Read More

By Emily Witt 10/05/11 8:53am

EBooks

subscribeskinny2_large

The Gould Standard! Emily Books Launches as IndiE-book Club

Emily Gould’s bookstore, Emily Books, has launched. But they are only selling a single e-book: No More Nice Girls, an essay collection by the former New Yorker music critic Ellen Willis that was originally published by Wesleyan University Press in 1992. But available digitally exclusively at Emily Books!

You might wonder what kind of bookstore only has one book. Well, the entrepreneurial Ms. Gould and her business partner, Ruth Curry, have an answer: “Emily Books is not a regular bookstore.  It’s more like a club, actually,” they write in their introduction to the site. “We only sell ebooks, and only a few of them.” Users can subscribe for one year for $159.99 (not $160), and have a new book selected by Ms. Gould and Ms. Curry materialize from the ether onto their tablets and readers each month. Read More