Dallas-based literary agent David Hale Smith has joined Inkwell Management as an agent, bringing along his list featuring crime, suspense and thriller writers as well as literary fiction and nonfiction that ranges from narrative history and business to health & wellness and cookbooks. InkWell partner Michael Carlisle says in the announcement, “Inkwell’s success has come from the collegial atmosphere among our colleagues and the quality of our clients. It is with special pleasure that we invited David Hale Smith to join our ranks. He represents some of the best young writers of our time with whom we will be working to build international recognition and the bestselling careers they deserve.”
Founder of Kim Ricketts Book Events Kim Ricketts died Monday night in Seattle from complications of bone cancer and AL amyloidosis. She was 53. Ricketts founded her company in 2003 as a means of connecting authors to non-traditional venues such as Starbucks, Microsoft and other Seattle-based businesses.
Seattle Times obit
Lisa Barnes has been promoted to assistant director of publicity at Ballantine Bantam Dell, and Alizon Mosciovecchio has been promoted to senior publicist.
Greg Mortenson‘s climbing partner Scott Darnsey has seen the controversy over THREE CUPS OF TEA from Nepal and e-mailed Outside Magazine. Though cited by Jon Krakauer as a source, Darnsey now says: “I did say to Jon Krakauer that Greg didn’t go to Korphe until 1994. However, on our way out, Greg got lost a second time somewhere between the Biafo glacier region and Askole. About half a day later, Greg finally showed up in Askole saying he’d made a major wrong turn. He’d ended up in a village on the wrong side of the Braldu River. It’s certainly plausible that this was Korphe.” (That still doesn’t square what Mortenson now calls a few hours, versus the book’s account of many days.)
Darnsey also says that “Greg recounted to me his imprisonment in Waziristan when I met him in Beijing. I don’t doubt that he was held against his will.”
His larger point is that “I feel that the message, the good, and the outcomes far exceed some journalistic faux pas in the retelling of a story from ten years previous. “
Meanwhile, though in print the NYT regularly chastises book publishers for not fact-checking memoirs, NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus defends book publishers’ practices on NPR and acknowledges that both “publishers and newspapers don’t use fact checkers.”