Jarred Weisfeld was just about ready to file his $10 million defamation suit against Macmillan Publishers when he brought Rod Blagojevich to their building to see if St. Martin’s Press, the big commercial unit there, might want to publish the former Illinois governor’s memoir.
“I was completely upfront with them,” the agent said recently. Read More
Cecily von Ziegesar’s half-brother Peter finalized a deal with St. Martin’s last week to write an as-yet-untitled "family memoir." According to a posting on the Publishers Marketplace deal-wire (sub. required), the book will cover the childhood Mr. von Ziegesar spent living in the "wealthy and privileged enclaves of the northeast" and the relationship he Read More
St. Martin’s Press will end its partnership with the Harvard-based, student-produced travel guide series Let’s Go after more than twenty-five years. St. Martin’s, which provides Let’s Go with final edits, printing, distribution, and advertising, will continue to put out Let’s Go guides through fall 2009–one set of 15 books will come out this November, Read More
When the German conglomerate Bertelsmann swept all 100-plus imprints of its publishing division, Random House, into one corporate mothership in late 2002, bookworms were marched from all over town and installed in cubicles in a gleaming new skyscraper with a lobby lined with books and a corporate logo outside announcing the company’s one-big-happy-family status.
Have you any idea, I wonder, how insane people are who write plays? Call them idealists, or dreamers, or the noblest of them all, but anyone who wakes up one day and says to himself “I think I’ll write a play today” must be nuts.
It isn’t easy being a playwright. First, you have to Read More
Elegy for Iris: A Memoir , by John Bayley. St. Martin’s Press, 276 pages, $22.95.
My sister and I have a pact. If either one of us falls into a coma or is otherwise incapacitated, the other will step in to pluck her eyebrows and the occasional chin hair and to make sure her teeth Read More
