Katie Lee Hull | May 2009
After making the rounds at Bologna and London, some international publishers and agents are choosing to give their expense accounts a rest and opt out of this year’s BEA. “I remember the good old times when there was just…Frankfurt!” says Marie Louise Zarmanian, translation rights manager at Editoriale Mauri Spagnol, who blames Guadalajara, Turin, and [...]
Laura Hazard Owen | September 2008
Even though much of the Manhattan publishing crowd was out of the city for at least a couple of weeks, Summer 2008 was surprisingly heavy on drama of the publishing variety. Here, we spice up your Labor Day weekend by providing a rundown of the events that shook up the city this season. SHERRY ARGOV [...]
PEOPLE Rodale President Karen Rinaldi announced that Colin Dickerman and Pam Krauss have been named VP, Publishing Directors. Dickerman will join effective September 2 and will be responsible for Rodale’s narrative nonfiction list. He was most recently Publisher of Bloomsbury USA. Krauss will join effective August 25 and will oversee the illustrated list, including cookbooks. [...]
PEOPLE March brought some big announcements from industry veterans: Teri Kelly, President of the trade and reference division at Houghton Mifflin has announced that she will leave the company where she has worked for twenty five years, once a replacement is found. And after seventeen years with the Walker Group (most recently as COO of [...]
According to HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, there was a “confluence of events” that caused Harper to launch its Speakers Bureau, the first in what has become (with Penguin‘s recent entrance), a must-have accessory for major publishers. “Ever since the Bantam Speakers Bureau 30 years ago, I’ve thought ‘Wouldn’t it be a wonderful adjunct to our [...]
Frankfurt’s Honoree Gets Into the Fast Lane Technology. Textbooks. Jhumpa Lahiri. Western book publishers have learned what to expect from their Indian counterparts. The industry has delivered, literally and figuratively, on much of what the Frankfurt Book Fair promised when they named it Guest of Honor in 1986. Presumably bestowed on a culture that could [...]
PEN Draws Droves, Caruso in Siberia, Sie ist ein Berliner Who says Americans don’t love literature in translation? The jam-packed events surrounding the PEN World Voices Festival last month suggest that editors will be scrambling to find the next José Manuel Prieto or Adam Zagajewski faster than one can say cross-cultural-post-national-poly-lingual-extravaganza. Billed as “a confluence [...]
The Flying Dutchmen De Winter Does Hollywood, Holland’s Huck Finn, And Bar Chickens Cluck in Spain Hailed as the Dutch-European postwar generation’s answer to John Irving, the popular Netherlands writer Leon de Winter has scored that mega-coup all scribblers secretly dream about: his own film starring Burt Reynolds. Cued up for its theatrical première in [...]
While much of the literary world mopes about sluggish trade book sales and a flat-lined readership, an industry group in Holland has jettisoned their melancholy and mounted a frontal assault on blasé book buying. Aggressively luring readers and making bestsellers in the bargain, this Dutch treat just might be a model for other nations in [...]