Sloane Crosley will join Vanity Fair as a contributing editor, writing the monthly Hot Type column, as Elissa Schappell leaves the magazine after 20 years of writing that column to work on a book project. Crosley’s first column will appear in the October issue. Graydon Carter says in the announcement of Crosley: “Her years in the literary world and her experience as an essayist and a novelist have given her a bird’s eye view of the industry that will no doubt prove invaluable in corralling the best books out there for our readers.”
Katie Zanecchia has joined the Ross Yoon Agency, based in New York, as a literary agent. She was digital rights manager at Writers House and content manager at CreativeMornings.
At Perseus Distribution, Kim Highland has been promoted to the new position of dedicated sales director for the division, reporting to Heidi Sachner. The dedicated national accounts team for Perseus Distribution will report to Highland.
Chuck Meyers has joined the University of Chicago Press as senior editor, political science and law. Previously he was director of the University of Kansas.
At Penguin, Sam Raim has been named associate editor. He moves over from Penguin Classics, where he was assistant editor.
Maria Middleton has joined Random House Children’s Books as art director. Previously she was associate art director at Abrams.
Awards
The Lambda Literary Award winners in several categories were announced at an awards ceremony Monday night, with Eileen Myles and Hilton Als both receiving lifetime achievement awards.
Initiatives
LitHub has launched Book Marks — an aggregation of book review clips that assigns a composite “letter grade.” In many ways, it’s a prettier, public-facing version of the sizable Book Review Index of full-length reviews from major newspapers that we’ve maintained for nearly 14 years for members at PublishersMarketplace.com (comprising a database of just under 97,000 reviews).
Just like today’s schools, most of the grades awarded by LitHub are at the top range, from a B+ up. As we’ve demonstrated through our corollary Top Reviewers interface, the books to which limited review space is devoted are overwhelmingly recommended titles. Of the 600+ reviews from the 15 most-frequent reviewers we tracked over the past 12 months, for example, just 10.7 percent were discernibly negative. And as trade veterans know, often a negative review from the likes of Michiko Kakutani is a more powerful driver of attention and sales than a negative one.