People 7/15
Ask an Expert: Kate McKean, Literary Agent and Author of WRITE THROUGH IT
Kate McKean is a literary agent at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency in Brooklyn, NY, whose clients include Alix E. Harrow, Daniel M. Lavery, and Mattie Lubchansky. She was an adjunct professor at New York University for over a decade and earned her MA in fiction writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, Catapult, and elsewhere. She writes the popular Substack newsletter, Agents & Books, at AgentsandBooks.com. When is an author ready to query their work? I think authors are ready to query when, first, they’ve addressed, edited, fixed all […]
McGraw Hill Announces IPO
After a series of false starts beginning in late 2022, McGraw Hill’s private equity owner Platinum Equity is moving forward with an IPO of the education company. They intend to offer 24.4 million shares of common stock at an expected range of between $19 and $22 per share, estimated to raise net proceeds of $467 million at the middle of that range. That cash will be used to pay down a portion of their considerable debt, leaving the company with approximately $643 million of borrowings. In truth, a version of McGraw Hill has been looking for an IPO ever since […]
People 7/14
Obituary: Martin Cruz Smith
Novelist Martin Cruz Smith, 82, died on July 11. Smith wrote more than 30 books, including the Arkady Renko thriller series, which began with the #1 bestseller Gorky Park (1981) and ended with HOTEL UKRAINE, which was published last week. He was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2019. Smith lived with Parkinson’s since 1995 and incorporated the disease into Renko’s character in later books. “He was a writer, and he did it beautifully and valiantly until the very end,” Smith’s editor, Simon & Schuster publisher Sean Manning, said.