By Emily Witt 11/08/11 6:35pm

Editors At Large

Bourdain.

Anthony Bourdain Cooks the Books: He's Starting an Imprint, in Short Order

Anthony Bourdain knows how he can come off. The chef-turned-TV personality has written that it would be “entirely fair and appropriate” were he described as “a loud, egotistical, one-note asshole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long and who should just shut the fuck up.” But it takes only one meeting with Mr. Bourdain—the man who likes to pepper his prose with words like “fucktard” and who made “bad boy chef” a resplendent cliché—to reveal that he is a perfect gentleman.

Get his friends to start talking about him and it becomes very clear that if Mr. Bourdain wants to preserve his louche reputation, he should probably engineer another appearance on TMZ, “running buck-naked down some Milwaukee street with a helmet made from the stretched skin of a butchered terrier pulled down over my ears” (as he once envisioned it).

Instead, Mr. Bourdain—who has long suppressed his inner nerd—has recently been tapped to start an eponymous line of books at the HarperCollins imprint Ecco. Read More

By Leon Neyfakh 3/13/09 3:24pm

Penguin Press Hires Bloomsbury’s Nick Trautwein

The Penguin Press, which has been one pair of hands short since Vanessa Mobley’s departure at the end of January, has hired Nick Trautwein of Bloomsbury to edit nonfiction. 

Mr. Trautwein, who came to publishing from magazines, has been at Bloomsbury since 2006; while there, he edited such titles as Edmund White’s A Boy’s Read More

By Leon Neyfakh 12/24/08 1:41pm

The Unlikely Fall and Rise of Bloomsbury

There was a moment earlier this year when it looked like all was lost for Bloomsbury USA—when practically every major editor and executive associated with the company had quit or been fired amid budget cuts, and none who remained could claim ownership of the house they were now charged with running. All year, the principals Read More

By Leon Neyfakh 3/11/08 10:25pm

Bloomsbury Gets Its Ducks in a Row: Charkin Now President, Dickerman Publisher of Adult Trade

Bloomsbury USA announced this afternoon that Richard Charkin, executive director of its UK-based parent company, will take over for recently departed president Karen Rinaldi, while Colin Dickerman, Ms. Rinaldi’s old No. 2, will serve as publisher of the house’s adult trade operation.

The announcement comes just over a week after Ms. Rinaldi announced that she Read More

By Joe Hagan 10/14/02 12:00am

Fickle Authors Turn Agents Nasty: Not a Love Story

After journalist Michael Capuzzo’s book on shark attacks, Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence , published by Broadway, spent most of the summer of 2001 floating up the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, Mr. Capuzzo did what a lot of writers are tempted to do when buoyed Read More

By Vince Passarro 8/24/98 12:00am

Enemies: A Literary Love Story

If you can wipe from your mind the notion that this is a slice of autobiography–difficult, since the book jacket is so emphatic that this is what it is; if you can stop brooding about the legitimacy or otherwise of passing real life off as art, or what effect the public dissection of parental sexuality Read More