Jill Schwartzman is joining Hyperion as a senior editor, acquiring pop culture, humor, memoir, biography, narrative nonfiction, popular history, and up-market commercial fiction. She was senior editor at Random House Trade Paperbacks. Former Barnes & Noble director of digital content Mike Ferrari has joined Borders, as merchandising director, trade books. Reporting to svp, merchandising Larry Norton, he will oversee categories including mystery/thriller, fiction, romance, science fiction, graphic novels, sports, local titles, business, computers, literary fiction, poetry, performing arts as well as Spanish books. (Before he joined B&N many years ago, Ferrari had worked for Walden.) Paris Review co-founder and former […]
Obituary
Editor Larry Ashmead Dies
Larry Ashmead, 78, best-known for his 18 years as an editor at Harper & Row and then HarperCollins (after starting at Doubleday, working at Simon & Schuster for 15 years, and then moving to Lippincott), died of pneumonia on Friday, after battling melanoma. After retiring from Harper in 2003, Ashmead was then affiliated with InkWell Management as an agent from 2005 to 2009. (The agency also represented Ashmead’s book about funny names entitled BERTHA VENATION: And Hundreds of Other Funny Names of Real People, published in the UK by Profile.) In 1994, he was LMP’s pick for Editor of the […]
Remembering Elaine Koster
Agent and former publisher of NAL Elaine Koster died on Tuesday in New York, at age 69. In the second phase of her career Koster founded an eponymous literary agency in 1998, where she represented Khaled Hosseini among others. While publisher at NAL, she famously acquired paperback reprint rights to Stephen King’s CARRIE from Doubleday for $400,000 at the beginning of his career Chandler Crawford at the Chandler Crawford Agency, who represented translation rights for the Koster Agency’s books, said: “I am heartbroken that Elaine has died, though I take comfort in knowing how much she did for the publishing […]
Grand Central Associate Publisher Les Pockell Dies at 68 of Cancer
Grand Central associate publisher for the past decade Les Pockell, 68, died at home on Monday. Publisher Jamie Raab tells the AP “she liked to call him ‘The Professor’ because Pockell knew so much about so many subjects and would become visibly animated in discussion. ‘He was the smartest person we knew.'” His former boss Larry Kirshbaum “remembered Pockell as a thinking man who stood out at a relatively commercial publishing house. He was also regarded as a mentor with a great deal to teach and a willingness to let others take the credit.”AP
People, Awards, Etc.
LAT book editor David Ulin is shifting roles and will serve as a book critic for the paper. Nothing was said about who will take over Ulin’s post.LAT Borders Group chief financial officer Mark Bierley will spend his extra time in the additional role of chief operating officer for Borders Inc., now overseeing finance, IT, merchandising planning and supply chain, as well as real estate and strategic planning. Rosalind (Roz) Thompson has been appointedsvp, human resources, starting July 6. Most recently she was a principal at Orange Hill Associates, an HR consultancy she established in 2007. Catherine Onder has joined […]
Remembering Joyce Engelson, Paul Nathan and Mark Gates
Richard Marek reports to us that longtime book editor Joyce Engelson died on Christmas of pneumonia. In her long career she was editor-in-chief at Abelard Schuman, executive editor of The Dial Press, editor-in-chief of Richard Marek Publishers at St. Martin’s and Putnam, editor-in-chief of Dutton, and editor at large for Crown. Among the hundreds of authors she edited were Richard Condon, Samuel Shem, Norman Cousins, Heywood Hale Broun, Irving Howe, Gael Green and Ishmael Reed. Marek writes: “Known for her fierce honesty with authors – young editors at Richard Marek Publishers used to stand by her office door when she […]