Due to prohibitive financial circumstances, the independent publishing house Atlas & Co. will not be able to publish the books scheduled for its spring 2009 list as planned, and will aim instead to release them the following fall.
Founded just last year by veteran New York editor James Atlas, the house has inspired affection Read More
"It’s as if the publishing house was an author in its own right," James Atlas told the Observer’s Leon Neyfakh for today’s article on Atlas & Co.’s quest to brand their books. Doree Shafrir told you, branding is everywhere.
And so, every book in his spring catalog—technically Atlas & Co.’s first ever—will prominently Read More
Most Americans don’t care who puts out the books they read. Sure, they might have heard of Random House, and Simon & Schuster probably rings a bell. But when it comes to brand loyalty, the thinking in the industry is that readers care about authors, not the companies that publish them.
James Atlas, the Read More
The cultural critic Lee Siegel is known as something of a terror for his slashing, razor-sharp essays and reviews. His savage eloquence has ticked off a lot of folk, and his not entirely deserved reputation as a hatchet man—news flash: There’s plenty of stuff Lee Siegel likes—has a way of setting people off. In the Read More
One opened The New York Times expectantly, two days after Saul Bellow’s death, ready for the Op-Ed tributes that seemed as certain to appear as The Times itself: Surely one or more of American literature’s surviving phallocrats, a Mailer or a Roth or an Updike, would contribute a brief but feeling essay, hastily composed yet Read More
Saul Bellow, Nobel laureate and dean of Jewish-American fiction, passed away on Tuesday, April 5. He was 89. Bellow, in such novels as Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Mr. Sammler’s Planet and, more recently, Ravelstein, examined the persistent anxieties of modern life with a romantic depth and a relentless, if Read More
My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale, by James Atlas. HarperCollins, 240 pages, $25.95.
James Atlas used to really annoy me. He was a trustee of my college literary magazine, memorable for wearing a bow tie. I remember the lot of them (almost all men, of course) convening a few quaking Read More
The Penguin Lives boutique biography series-a collaboration between Viking publishing, former New York Times Magazine editor James Atlas and former deputy mayor and financier Kenneth Lipper-is kaput.
Mr. Atlas, the general editor for Penguin Lives, told Off the Record that after publishing 22 of the diminutive, handsomely designed hardcover books pairing noted authors with Read More
Bellow: A Biography , by James Atlas. Random House, 686 pages, $35.
Writers’ lives are boring, the axiom goes. Maybe someone should have come up with a corollary about great writers, whose lives often are a little too interesting for comfort.
Why should this be? There is a kind of monstrosity to literary greatness. Read More
The excerpt from Jonathan Franzen’s forthcoming third novel that appears in the spring issue of Conjunctions brings to mind the 19-page essay that he wrote for Harper’s in April 1996. Many novelists, myself included, have never forgotten the Harper’s piece, “Perchance to Dream,” Mr. Franzen’s account of the obsolescence of the novel as a literary Read More
