Adrienne Vaughan, 45, president of Bloomsbury USA, died early Thursday evening in a horrific and heartbreaking boating accident off the Amalfi Coast of Italy. On vacation with her family, Vaughan was thrown from a chartered 29-foot sightseeing boat when it collided with a larger 130-foot sailboat carrying about 85 people as part of a wedding party. She was declared dead on the scene back onshore by first responders before a helicopter could take her to the hospital. Her husband Mike suffered more modest injuries, and their two children were not harmed physically in the incident. CNN later confirmed that initial […]
Obits
Obituary: James Hayman
James Hayman, author of the bestselling McCabe & Savage police procedural mysteries, died on June 15 in Maine.
Obituary: Milan Kundera
Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 94, died on Tuesday in France after a prolonged illness. A communist supporter who was twice expelled from the party, his books were critical of Soviet leadership and banned in his native country. Kundera’s most popular book, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1984) was not published in the Czech Republic until 2006.
Obituary: Win Blevins
Win Blevins, 84, writer of books about the American west including STONE SONG, has died at 84. He was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Western Writers of America, and a member of the Western Writers Hall of fame.
Obituary: Robert Gottlieb
Acclaimed editor Robert Gottlieb, 92, who was editor in chief at Simon & Schuster and both president and editor in chief at Knopf, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. Gottlieb also served as the third-ever editor of the New Yorker from 1987 to 1992. As the New York Times notes, he “edited novels by, among many others, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing and Chaim Potok; science fiction by Michael Crichton and Ray Bradbury; histories by Antonia Fraser and Barbara Tuchman; memoirs by former President Bill Clinton and Katharine Graham, the former publisher of The Washington […]
Obituary: Cormac McCarthy
Celebrated novelist Cormac McCarthy, 89, died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, NM. He was the author of, among others, Blood Meridian; All The Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1992; and The Road, which won the Pulitzer in 2007. He most recently published two novels last year, Stella Maris and The Passenger. Read other obituaries from The Washington Post, NPR, and Rolling Stone.