Director of order management at Simon & Schuster Francine Leinheiser will retire on February 27 after more than 38 years with the company, and 12 years in her current position. In a statement, vp, distribution & fulfillment Dave Schaeffer praised Leinheiser as “a true Simon & Schuster lifer,” adding: “We will remember her as an organizer, a communicator, a cheerful presence and a true professional who played a major role in our success in bringing thousands of titles to our accounts on time. Now she will have some time to read many of the books that she, like many of us, have put to the side, to travel and to enjoy this next phase of life to the fullest extent possible.”
Keith Clayton is taking on the additional responsibility of vp, associate publisher, mass market for Ballantine, Bantam, Dell reporting to Kim Hovey. (He also continues in his role as vp, associate publisher, Del Rey reporting to Scott Shannon.)
ICM agent Jennifer Joel is the latest subject of Poets & Writers magazine’s interview series: “I’m always hungry for information, and on the first day that I came here I walked into Binky [Urban’s] office and asked if there was an ICM way of doing things. I don’t think that anybody had asked her that question before. She thought about it for a minute, and what she came up with was, essentially, ‘Don’t lie.’ It’s an easy rule to follow, but I actually think it’s exceptional. There is a lot of presumption—not of lying but of manipulating information. I could not have asked for better teachers and mentors than the two of them [Urban and Esther Newberg]. There are certainly no two better agents in the business. But to watch them just be complete straight shooters all the time? It takes any perceived gamesmanship out of the equation.”
Richard Price is the subject of a curious NYT profile about his new novel The Whites, which is being published next week under the “transparent pseudonym” of Harry Brandt. (When the deal was reported in 2010, originally for manuscript delivery in 2011, it carried a different “transparent pseudonym” of Jay Morris. Yet the Times depicts the pseudonym as if some kind of recent “tussle with his publisher and editor, who argued that the pen name would result in ‘commercial suicide.'”) Despite that pseudonym, Price says he is “annoyed” when reviews refer to the book as being written by Brandt, not his own name: “It seemed like a good idea in the beginning, and now I wish I hadn’t done it. This pen name is like pulling a rabbit out of a glass hat.” But Price still owes another book under his own name on his contract with FSG, which published his previous novel Lush Life.
Awards
The Carla Furstenberg Cohen Literary Prizes have been awarded to Atticus Lish for his novel Preparations for the Next Life to Bryan Stevenson and in nonfiction for Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Started last year to honor the co-founder of Politics & Prose, the prizes are given to authors of first or second books in fiction and nonfiction.
Taylor Branch will receive the 2015 BIO award from the Biographers International Organization, honoring “a major contribution to the advancement of the art and craft of the genre.”
Forthcoming
In publication announcements, Crown Archetype will issue Melissa Rivers‘ book about her mother, the late Joan Rivers, right before Mother’s Day, on May 5. IN THE BOOK OF JOAN: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation, “will share funny, poignant, and irreverent observations, thoughts, and tales about the woman who raised her.”