We asked sisters Bea and Leah Koch, who own The Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles, the only exclusively romance bookstore in the country, to write the seasonal preview for our recently-published sampler, Buzz Books 2018: Romance (free downloads are available for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple’s iBooks, and Google Play). In addition to the 14 featured pre-publication excerpts in the sampler (noted in boldface below), the Kochs picked a wealth of noteworthy forthcoming romance titles to look for. These posts will present abbreviated versions of their full preview, which you can read in the free sampler. Today’s post focuses contemporary romance; tomorrow we will […]
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Kristin Fassler is joining Atria Publishing Group in the newly created position of vice president, director of integrated marketing on August 1. She was most recently vice president, director of marketing at Random House, overseeing the Ballantine Bantam Dell imprint. Dana Trocker, director of marketing, will move to Atria from the Simon & Schuster trade imprint, reporting to Fassler. Also reporting to Fassler will be Atria’s two deputy directors of publicity, David Brown and Lisa Sciambra; associate director of publicity Yona Deshommes; and assistant director of publicity Ariele Fredman. Paul Olsewski, vice president, director of publicity, will be leaving Atria, and the role […]
Ondaatje, Kushner, Powers Among the Booker Longlisted
The Guardian posted the Man Booker Prize longlist early, in advance of Wednesday’s scheduled announcement, and then promptly took it down. But the list survived in the Google cache and across social media (and now is public). Titles from US authors include Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (Jonathan Cape/Scribner), Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Granta/Drawn and Quarterly) — the first graphic novel to grace a Booker list — and Richard Powers’s The Overstory (William Heinemann/Norton). The only previous Booker winner on the longlist is Michael Ondaatje for Warlight (Jonathan Cape/Knopf), while the other Canadian listed is Giller Prize winner Esi Edugyan for Washington Black (Serpent’s Tail/Knopf). Two debut novels are […]
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Kendall Storey has joined Catapult/Counterpoint/Soft Skull as associate editor and publishing manager. Previously she was associate editor & publicist at Archipelago Books and co-director of Archipelago’s children’s imprint Elsewhere Editions. At Princeton University Press, Michelle Komie has been promoted to publisher, art and architecture; Hannah Paul has been promoted to associate editor for economics and political science; and Lauren Bucca, Thalia Leaf, Pamela Weidman, and Kristin Zodrow have each been promoted to editorial associate. Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, 57, died of pancreatic cancer. He had a book under contract with Ecco, originally signed in 2016 for Anthony Bourdain Books, which he called “a culinary coming […]
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At Bonnier Publishing USA, Brett Duquette, formerly senior editor at Sterling Publishing, has joined Little Bee Books and Yellow Jacket; Rachel Gluckstern, formerly production editor at Scholastic, has joined BuzzPop as editor; Lauren Carr, formerly publicity coordinator at Scholastic, has joined the children’s group as publicist. Stephani Stilwell has been promoted to designer and Michael Ploetz has been promoted to coordinator, marketing and publicity. Also having their jobs eliminated at Picador as a result of the “realignment” we reported on Thursday are creative director Henry Yee (who worked there for 26 years) and senior designer LeeAnn Falciani, who leave in August, and associate editor Pronoy Sarkar, whose […]
Scholastic Has Stable Finish to Soft Year
Scholastic reported results for the fiscal fourth quarter and full year ending May 31, with a stable finish to a year that suffered from comparison to the “prior year’s outstanding success of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” as well as some significant one-time charges. Fourth quarter sales of $496.2 million were down $3.4 million, but operating income of $73.9 million gained $9.6 million versus a year ago. Consolidated trade sales were $45.8 million, up $2.5 million (or 6 percent) for the quarter. Operating income in the larger children’s book publishing and distribution segment — which includes book clubs and book fairs […]