Earlier this month, editors at publishing houses across New York received two separate book proposals for biographies of the late David Foster Wallace. One came from the journalist and critic D. T. Max, the other from Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky. Both writers had published intimate, reported profiles of Wallace in the months following Read More
Around 1 o’clock last Saturday, Gotham Books president and publisher Bill Shinker was eating a sandwich in a bright, spacious hall marked “Platinum” located above the main exhibition area at the Javits Center.
This time last year, Mr. Shinker said, he’d been looking forward to a week of golf with a group of publishing Read More
As the host of NPR’s On the Media, Brooke Gladstone gets a lot of books in the mail about the crisis in journalism. Most of them she finds tedious and predictable, and they pile up in her office unread. So when literary agents and editors started calling her up a few years ago asking if Read More
Matt Bai did not want to write his second book just about Barack Obama. What he wanted, he said recently, were “stationary targets” that would allow him to run at his own pace. He wanted a subject that wouldn’t involve the kind of reporting where his face would be “pressed up against the glass.”
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“I get a lot of, ‘Can you tell me about the Internet?’ ‘Do you think we need to Twitter?’ ‘Do I need to blog?’ I get a lot of that—a lot, a lot, a lot of that. They don’t believe that it’ll work, they don’t believe that you have to do it. And to me Read More
Vintage Books publicist Lisa Weinert knew that the promotional campaign for Undiscovered Gyrl was going to require some non-traditional maneuvers. And since the novel, told in the form of a blog written by a 17-year-old girl, will be aimed primarily at young women when it’s published as a trade paperback in August, Ms. Weinert figured Read More
Just over two years after leaving his job as an agent at ICM to open a New York–based literary department for the Hollywood talent agency Endeavor, Richard Abate has found himself having to plan the next phase of his career.
Mr. Abate, who is in his early 40s, oversaw a number of seven-figure book Read More
At The Paris Review’s Spring Revel on Monday night, April 13, at Cipriani 42nd Street, someone mentioned in passing that Philip Gourevitch, the editor of the literary magazine, is a real guy’s guy.
He does kind of resemble the actor Vince Vaughn! And he did look pretty beefy under his suit, though that might Read More
Until a few months ago, Writers House lit agent Simon Lipskar knew his client David Dow merely as a gifted academic. An expert on death penalty law at the University of Houston who has practiced for almost 20 years as a lawyer in Texas representing death row inmates, Mr. Dow had written several books for Read More
Denise Oswald didn’t expect to find a steady publishing job for a good long while when layoffs at Macmillan in December forced her to leave her longtime home at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Like many of the editors who found themselves unemployed this winter as a result of industrywide cutbacks, Ms. Oswald considered her options Read More
