Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 87, died at home in Mexico City on Thursday, following complications from pneumonia. Among the many appreciations of his work and life are these from Michiko Kakutani and Hector Tobar.
Hillary Clinton‘s June 10 memoir has a title — HARD CHOICES and a final jacket: “All of us face hard choices in our lives,” she writes. “Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become.”
Author Jesmyn Ward will join the faculty of Tulane University on July 1 as the first to hold the Paul and Debra Gibbons Professorship. In the new position, she will also will work closely with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and the Newcomb College Institute. Ward currently lives in DeLisle, Miss. and works as assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama.
Colm Toibin will take over as chairman of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature starting in 2015. Salman Rushdie has led the festival since it was founded in 2005.
Maria Ribas and Paul Lamb have joined the Howard Morhaim Literary agency as literary agents. Ribas was an associate editor at Adams Media and will continue to focus on cookbooks, self-help, health, diet, parenting, and humor. Lamb was most recently senior marketing Manager at Viking, and will focus on representing non-fiction in the areas of business, memoir, political science, sociology and sports, as well as crime, mystery and literary fiction.
At Simon & Schuster Children’s, Christina Pecorale has been promoted to senior director, children’s sales, adding responsibility for independent retail and educational wholesale accounts. She succeeds Mary Marotta, recently promoted to deputy publisher. Rio Cortez will now report to Pecorale, along with Jim Conlin, Victor Iannone, Lorelei Kelly, and Michele O’Brien. In addition Gary Urda and his sales team will now be responsible for all mass merchandise wholesalers and their retail customers, Walmart, Target, Toys R Us, Meijer, and various supermarket, drug chains, and airport bookstores. Jerry Jensen, responsible for ANConnect/Walmart, Costco, BJ’s, and Sam’s Club will now report to John Hardy. Karen Lahey, responsible for Readerlink/Target, Toys R Us, and other Readerlink retail customers, will now report to Josh Wood.
Former president of the MacArthur Foundation and the New School Jonathan F. Fanton has been hired as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The position has been vacant since Leslie Cohen Berlowitz stepped down last summer after a reported criticized her making a false claim to a doctorate degree, and for the compensation she secured for herself. (She led the organization for 17 years.)
Louisville, KY-based literary press Sarabande Books has opened a second office in New York City, managed by director of marketing and publicity Kristen Radtke.
In the UK, the Independent Publishers Guild (IPG) has named Oliver Gadsby of Rowman & Littlefield as their new chair, filling Rebecca Smart’s position, and Caroline de la Bedoyere of Search Press is the vice chair.