Sally Kim has joined Putnam as vp, editorial director, moving over from Touchstone, where she held the same position. Putnam and Dutton president Ivan Held said in the announcement: “Sally is the perfect person to both help carry on Putnam’s bestselling tradition and to lead our editorial team in the evolving marketplace. She has vision, market acumen, an eye for talent on the page, terrific agent relationships, and the right sensibility to help each editor bring in top books in each of Putnam’s areas of strength.” Kim added: “I can point to so many books on Putnam’s rich and distinguished […]
New Releases/Forthcoming
People: Meyer “Reimagines” TWILIGHT for 10th Annniversary; and More
Stephenie Meyer announced on Good Morning America a “surprise” new novel in the Twilight series, LIFE AFTER DEATH: TWILIGHT REIMAGINED, released today as bonus content bundled with the original book’s 10th anniversary edition. (The publisher had billed the anniversary edition as offering hundreds of pages of unspecified “bonus content”; this is the bonus.) The new 442-page story is a “reimagining” which flips gender, where Bella is now Beau and Edward is now Edythe. Meyer said in the novel’s foreword that she wrote the story as a response to comments that Bella was a “damsel in distress,” saying: “My answer to that […]
People, Etc.
At Doubleday, Michael Goldsmith has been promoted to publicity manager, reporting to Todd Doughty. Journalist and author of 18 books Phil Patton, 63, died last week from complications of emphysema. Nantucket author of DEAR MR. JEFFERSON and several historical novels Laura Simon, 66, died last Friday. Forthcoming The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has commissioned translations into modern English of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and intends to have those new versions ready to perform on stage in three years. John McWhorter makes the case in the WSJ for what Conrad Spoke calls a “revolutionary 10% translation” that enables “every student to make contact with the original text.” […]
Forthcoming: Books from Kondo, Woodward and Heaney
Ten Speed Press will follow up Marie Kondo‘s bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up with a new book releasing on January 5. The new title, Spark Joy, “presents a comprehensive, illustrated manual on how to declutter and organize specific items throughout the house, from kitchen and bathroom items to work-related papers and hobby collections.” They will also publish a companion volume, Life-Changing Magic: A Journal, on December 29. Tidying Up has sold over 1.5 million copies. Simon & Schuster announced the publication of Bob Woodward‘s The Last of the President’s Men for publication October 13. The book focuses on “the untold story of Alexander Butterfield,” now 89, […]
Briefs
Liz Esman has joined Crown as senior publicist, Crown, Hogarth, Broadway Books and Tim Duggan Books. Previously she was a publicist at HarperCollins. In addition, Morgan Carattini has been promoted to publishing manager for Crown, Archetype, Hogarth, Broadway Books, Tim Duggan Books, and Three Rivers Press. The Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin has acquired Kazuo Ishiguro‘s archive for a reported $1.1 million. Among the unpublished works included in the archive are an early pulp western, as well as a short novel called To Remember a Summer By. Entertainment Weekly has an excerpt of THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S […]
Amazon’s Fall Favorites
Amazon has released their Fall Reading Preview package, picking their top books across multiple sub-categories. The highlighted lists include Amazon Editors’ “personal under-the-radar picks”: The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood Submission by Michel Houllebecq Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe: The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin Along with the bookseller’s slate of top 20 commercial blockbusters: Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter The Survivor: A Mitch Rapp Novel by Kyle Mills M Train by Patti Smith Humans of New York: Stories […]