Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the latest pick for the Today Book Club.
Hachette Book Group filed suit against Stephen Baldwin in New York Supreme Court, seeking to recover a $110,000 advance against a nonfiction originally due in 2009 that they say he never delivered.
Harper UK is setting up a new fiction imprint, within their Harper Fiction division, called The Borough Press. Launching in 2014 — and publishing their already-announced Austen Project that has well-known authors retelling Jane Austen’s classics — it is led by Katie Espiner.
As part of a reorganization that consolidates all of the Walker Books Group imprint sales department into a unified global management team, Caroline Muir has been promoted to group sales director for foreign rights and co-editions. UK sales and marketing director Ed Ripley will also handle all English-language export sales on behalf of the Walker Group. Among new hires, Fiona MacDonald has rejoined Walker Books Group as export sales director; previously she was a sales representative at Tate Publishing. David McMillan has been named group export product and sales manager, moving over from Templar, where he was senior US sales manager.
In addition, Julia Finnegan has joined Walker as export sales executive, responsible for sales into Southern Europe, while Amelia Vahtrick has also been been named export sales executive, Northern and Eastern Europe. Finally, Melissa Keown has been promoted to sales manager, Asian markets, working from Walker’s Sydney offices.
At Harper Children’s, Alyson Day has been promoted to senior editor.
At Blue Rider Press, Jason Booher has been named art director. Previously he was senior designer at Knopf.
Abrams ceo Michael Jacobs has been elected chairman of the board for the Academy of American Poets.
The New Republic film critic and author Stanley Kauffmann, 97, died early Wednesday morning at St. Luke’s Hospital of pneumonia. Kauffmann was appointed TNR’s film critic in 1958 and published ten books of criticism, most recently REGARDING FILM: Criticism and Comment (John Hopkins University Press, 2001.) He also worked as an editor for Knopf, where he discovered the manuscript and published THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy, which went on to win the National Book Award.