Barnes & Noble’s big 38,700-square-foot store on Westheimer Road in Houston, TX closed on January 12 after 23 years in that location. Separately, the chain will build a new 14,000-square-foot store in the Sarasota, FL-area’s University Town Center, which vp of real estate development Jim Lampassi says is due to open by spring 2020. Meanwhile Carl Hauch — former BN vp of stores and one of the three people sharing the bookseller’s “office of the chief executive” following the firing of Demos Parneros and unwillingness of the board to search for a replacement while they evaluate a potential sale of […]
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People, Etc.
Caroline Osborn has joined Simon & Schuster Children’s as subsidiary rights manager. She was most recently in subsidiary rights at Little, Brown Children’s. Derek Reed has been promoted to senior editor, Currency, Convergent, and Crown Forum. Cami Miller has been promoted to director for mass market sales at Harper Christian. At William Morrow, Eliza Rosenberry has been promoted to senior publicity manager and Camille Collins to publicity manager. Anne Goldberg has joined Phaidon in New York, as project editor, food, reporting to executive commissioning editor Emily Takoudes. Previously she was associate editor at Ten Speed Press. Serene Hakim has been promoted to associate agent and subrights manager at Ayesha Pande […]
Parneros Formally Disputes BN’s Claim He Was a “Faithless Servant”
Former Barnes & Noble CEO Demos Parneros’ determination to dispute the bookseller’s claim he was a “faithless servant” has now resulted in a formal motion: On December 21, after some scheduling confusion regarding an intended postponement, his counsel filed the motion to dismiss BN’s second counterclaim against him. (As for the other two counterclaims, counsel heeded Judge John Koetl’s strongly-established concerns about a motion to dismiss.) Attorney Anne Clark’s 15-page filing leverages legal precedent to dispute BN’s claim that Parneros was a “faithless servant” who sabotaged negotiations with a potential buyer of the struggling company. While Parneros disputes the facts in BN’s […]
Atwood, Rooney, James, and More Top 2019 Preview Lists
With only a few days left in the year, a number of outlets have published 2019 previews, including extensive lists from Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, Esquire, Oprah Magazine, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Apple Books, and Bustle. Comparing last year’s aggregated preview list to our 2018 Best of the Best list, only three titles from the former, Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage, Lauren Groff’s Florida, and Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, carried through to the latter. This year’s Best of the Best winner, Tommy Orange’s There There, did not make any of the preview lists we collected, nor did number two Best of the Best […]
The Year In the World of #PitchShowcases
One of 2018’s early, and welcome, hits was Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, a mainstay New York Times young adult bestseller since late March, and the first in a trilogy, as well as one of our consensus best fiction titles of the year. It’s also the first big breakout for an author initially discovered in one of the increasingly popular online pitching outlets, Pitch Wars, represented by Alexandra Machinist and Hillary Jacobson of ICM. Looking back over the year and ahead to continuing trends, we wondered if Adeyemi’s success is seen as the outlier, in the way in which publishing […]
Mysterious Bookshop Staff Protests Penzler’s Letter To MWA
The staff of the Mysterious Bookshop in NYC pushed back against store owner Otto Penzler’s criticism of the Mystery Writers of America’s withdrawal of honoring Linda Fairstein as Grand Master. The store account posted on Twitter on Tuesday morning, “Let it be known that the Mysterious Bookshop staff in no way supports the letter that the Mysterious Bookshop’s owner sent to the MWA earlier this week.” Charles Perry, the store’s marketing coordinator, added to PL, “I don’t think there’s much more to say except that we were disappointed to see him use the store as a political platform.” Penzler’s letter […]