By Emily Witt 10/06/11 1:24pm

Publishing

Weiland.

Matt Weiland to Leave Ecco for W.W. Norton

Matt Weiland announced yesterday that he will be leaving his job at HarperCollins imprint Ecco to take a position as senior editor at W.W. Norton on October 24. It’s an exciting move for Mr. Weiland, whose books at Ecco have included Padgett Powell’s conceptual novel The Interrogative Mood and Philip Connors’s nature memoir Fire Season. A native of Minnesota and a Columbia alumnus, Mr. Weiland came to Ecco in 2008 by way of The Paris Review and Granta Books in London. He fills a vacancy left by Robert Weil, whom Norton tapped earlier this year to revive its dormant imprint Liveright & Co.

“I’ve just loved it these past three years at Ecco,” said an exuberant Mr. Weiland on the phone with The Observer yesterday. “[Publisher] Dan Halpern and everyone at Ecco are the best colleagues I’ve ever had and I’d never imagined leaving.” He said the unexpected offer from Norton “feels like some  crazy good bank shot.” Read More

By Emily Witt 7/07/11 2:02pm

Publishing

Yesterday's Faulkner, today's Gail Collins.

Robert Weil and Star Lawrence Discuss Changes at Norton

Robert Weil has answered some key questions about the recent news that he will be heading the revival of W.W. Norton & Company’s storied literary imprint, Liveright.

First, is he hiring? Yes, “a very small staff.”

Will books still need approval from Norton’s notoriously difficult-to-please editorial board? No, but Liveright will have its own Read More

By Leon Neyfakh 5/26/09 8:01pm

Norton Buys Graphic Media Manifesto

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

By Jessica Joffe 12:00am

Paula Fox

Paula Fox leaned out of her ground-floor entrance and said: “Down here. We tend not to use that entrance.” It was early afternoon on an unusually balmy winter day, and the street in front of her brownstone was empty and quiet. Much of the house was dark, but she didn’t turn on the lights.

Read More

By Sara Nelson 11/24/03 12:00am

Coming Out Soon: A Wild Gay Opera of a Book

James McCourt doesn’t see New York the way the rest of us do. You think the Frick Collection is just a place to go on a Sunday afternoon to soak up some culture? To Mr. McCourt, it’s 1950′s gay-pickup central, particularly, for some reason, among the Fragonards. Greenwich Avenue isn’t just a diagonal Village street Read More

By Minna Proctor 5/12/03 12:00am

Jong Redefines ‘Sapphic’ Along Omnisexual Lines

Sappho’s Leap, by Erica Jong. W.W. Norton, 316 pages, $24.95.

The Nile isn’t the only sodden delta in the ancient world. No. As she trips about the Mediterranean, tricky-fingers Sappho-that peerless crooner-leaves behind a trail of damp deltas that would give Anaïs Nin pause.

But this isn’t Anaïs Nin-it’s the fearless Erica Jong, whose Read More

By Adam Begley 7/01/02 12:00am

They Come in 57 Flavors: Snobs in a Post-WASP World

In the City: Random Acts of Awareness , by Colette Brooks. W.W. Norton & Company, 111 pages, $23.95.

To be a critic is to be a snob, but to do the job right, the critic must stifle his snobbery, or at least disguise it. The reviewer’s noble aim is to evaluate books on the Read More