Wendi Gu has joined Janklow & Nesbit as an associate agent, working with Brooks Sherman in the children’s books division. She was most recently an agent at Greenburger Associates and will continue to represent fiction for young adult and middle-grade readers, picture books, and select adult fiction and nonfiction.
Julie Tibbott, who was previously a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s, has joined Jill Corcoran Literary Agency as an agent.
Jim Dassise, West Coast college field sales manager for Penguin Random House, will leave the company after 17 years on September 15. He can be reached at jdassise19@gmail.com and is based in Portland, OR.
The NYT speaks with the new editor of the New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma. “It was a monarchy, and I think perhaps it will be a slightly more democratic operation,” Buruma said. “Certainly I think I’ll be more collaborative.”
On refreshing the magazine’s contributors, he says: “I think the worst thing you can do as a middle-aged editor is to try and second-guess what young people would like to read, what interests them, and then go off in some awkward way like the minister in a church who whips out a guitar and starts singing folk songs.” He adds, “I think the way to do it is to find young writers, and then you’ll automatically move to things that they’re interested in, and that’s one of the ways of rejuvenating the publication.”
Awards
Denise Mina won The McIlvanney Prize for Scottish crime book of the year for The Long Drop. She is the first woman to win prize. At the same festival, Lara Thompson won the new Virago/The Pool New Crime Writer Award for her debut novel One Night, New York.
Forthcoming
Viking will publish the late William Trevor’s final collection, LAST STORIES, on May 15, 2018. They say he “had been working on this collection for the last ten years and he intended it to be his final work.”