Leon Neyfakh

Writing on the Guardian's books blog, David Barnett reports that a couple of publishers are getting back to basics and doing choose-your-own-adventure books again. He notes a few symptoms of the apparent resurgence.  read more »

• First, the Fighting Fantasy series, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2007, has been reissued in full.
• Second, there's a book called You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero, which takes mundane contemporary life as its subject and forces the reader to make decisions like, "If you want to have sex with your ex-girlfriend, consider getting back together with her, then think better of it, go to page 183.
  
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Back in early June, Rachel Donadio wrote an item for The New York Times' Papercuts blog about a vacation she'd taken in Rome. The long-planned trip meant that Ms. Donadio, an editor at the Times Book Review who regularly contributes essays on various literary topics to the section's back page, could not attend Book Expo America, the publishing industry's annual trade show that was happening at the same time.

You might say Ms. Donadio had chosen Rome over books that week!

Now she's doing it again, this time for keeps. According to an e-mail she sent to friends this morning, Ms. Donadio (a former Observer reporter) is leaving the Book Review and relocating around Labor Day to Italy full time to serve as The Times' Rome Bureau Chief.  read more »

When Pam Dorman decided this past May to return to Viking Books—where she’d been an editor for 19 years—she had not been gone for very long. It was just two and a half years ago, in January 2006, when she announced she would be leaving to start her own boutique imprint at Hyperion.

By the time of the switch, Ms. Dorman had established herself at Viking as an editor with a rare intuition for spotting debut novels of a certain character that could sell millions of copies. Bridget Jones’s Diary was hers. Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, too. Also Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and Jacquelyn Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean.  read more »

The boy from Alabama who recently threw a punch at the New York literary world in an intense, widely read letter to The New York Times Book Review came through town this past weekend. Alec Niedenthal, 17, had been to the city once before, but not since his vaguely threatening manifesto made him a micro-celebrity among literary types here and brought him to the attention of literary agents and editors.

In his letter, Alec warned that “the next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, [Foster] Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes” but rather “from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam.  read more »

So, hands please: Who assumed Pitchfork had already put out, like, a million books? It’s basically the oldest Web site on the Internet. Considering how little it takes these days, you’d think they’d have seized on the branding opportunities much sooner. But, no: Turns out Pitchfork—for the uninitiated, a hugely influential music site that has been spiritedly covering indie music and shaping hipster consciousness since it appeared in 1995—is just now getting ready to publish its first professional book.

According to Pitchfork editor in chief Scott Plagenhoef, the book will be a paperback guide to the 500 best songs released since 1977.  read more »

In the back of The New Republic this week is a glowing review by Frank Kermode of James Wood's forthcoming book How Fiction Works.

Wood, of course, spent twelve years as The New Republic's chief literary critic before abruptly leaving last summer for a staff job at The New Yorker. And so, while it's not the liveliest piece in the world ("Commentary of the kind here offered will very often give rise to conflicting readings, and I do not often find myself in serious dispute with the author. Wood's book is full of acceptable insights on a long list of novelists and topics..."), Mr. Kermode's review is a compelling one when you consider just how much The New Republic meant to Mr. Wood during those twelve years, and how much he meant to it.

Rick Stengel had a piece in this week's issue of Time, the magazine he edits, about Nelson Mandela. It was the cover story: "The Secrets of Leadership"; in the piece Mr. Stengel went through eight prescriptive slogans (example: "Keep your friends close - and your rivals even closer") and explained how they relate to Mr. Mandela's life and work.

This is not a new subject for Mr. Stengel--in 1993 he and Mr. Mandela collaborated on Mr. Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. After they finished the book, Mr. Stengel writes in this week's Time piece, he "felt a terrible sense of withdrawal; it was like the sun going out of one's life.  read more »

Collins, a division of HarperCollins, agreed to pay legendary Celtics center Bill Russell, 74, over $1 million dollars to write a book about his old coach, the late Red Auerbach. Hard to know, as always, whether that figure is just someone's guess or the real thing. We heard it from two sources, but Collins publisher Bruce Nichols did not immediately return an e-mail asking whether it was high or low. 

Auerbach, who died in 2006, won nine NBA championships as coach of the Celtics, and seven more after he became the team's GM in 1967.

Mr. Russell's book will be called Red and Me; Collins intends to publish in spring 2009. Power-agent Flip Brophy of Sterling Lord Literistic brokered the deal. 

A good piece in this weekend's Sunday Times of London about literary agents who chase estates with the same energy they usually exert in the pursuit of living writers. Much of it focuses on English business, but hometown hero Andrew Wylie is at center stage, partly because he recently landed the estates of Nabokov, Waugh, and Bolano.

The author of the piece, Ed Caesar, suggests that the reason Mr. Wylie wanted Waugh on his list so badly was that he thought it might serve as good bait for Graham Greene's people since Greene and Waugh were friends and admirers of each others' work.  read more »

A review in Publisher's Weekly tends to be a book’s first—some of the titles in last week’s issue won’t be on sale until the end of September—and for this reason, the dozens of reviews printed there each week, at about 200 words, are regarded as influential.

A “starred review” is a prize—a guarantee, almost, that booksellers, librarians, and book editors across the country will all take a look at a title when they get the galley in the mail. No guarantee that they’ll go for it—not even editor-in-chief Sara Nelson would ever argue that PW unilaterally sets the tone for a book’s reception—but in a field as crowded as this one, a mere look is a valuable thing.  read more »

Elizabeth Sifton, a veteran editor at the boutique publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has found herself at the center of a controversy surrounding the authorial origins of a prayer--“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change"--that has traditionally been attributed to her father, the Christian theologian Reinhold Neibuhr. Until very recently it was accepted that Neibuhr came up with the phrase in the early 1940s, but The Times reports today that a law librarian at Yale named Fred Shapiro has dug up evidence that it was actually invoked by various speakers around the U.S. as early as 1936.  read more »

Houghton Mifflin proved itself to be an admirably nimble house this morning when news came that Jon Wertheim, a sportswriter under contract there, had agreed to write a book centered around last weekend's historic Wimbledon match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Mr. Wertheim, who wrote a cover story on the match for this week's issue of Sports Illustrated, was already working on a book about Federer for Houghton but has, according to Publisher's Weekly, decided to narrow his focus on the rivalry with Nadal.

It's not exactly surprising, considering how thrilled Mr. Wertheim was about this weekend's match.  read more »

A new collection of short fiction—including the first chapter of an unfinished novel—is coming from the late William Styron, according to InkWell Management agent Michael Carlisle.

Mr. Carlisle, one of the founding partners of InkWell and a close childhood friend of Styron's kids, said the collection, like the rest of Styron's work, will be published by Random House and overseen by the legendary editor Bob Loomis.  

Mr. Carlisle said the stories in the new collection-three of which have been previously published, but only in literary magazines-are all in some way about soldiers returning home from war.  read more »

The Columbia Publishing Course, that postgraduate rite of passage for so many of the book industry’s worker bees, was the scene of a dust-up last Monday when an afternoon panel discussion took an unexpected turn. At stake was nothing less than the honor of fearsome literary agent Andrew Wylie and his firm. If the youngsters in the audience had known better, they might have shielded their eyes.

Earlier that day, one of those youngsters had asked Lindy Hess, the head of the program, why Mr. Wylie seemed to have such a dark reputation. (Can-of-worms alert! This is what happens when people who have never worked in publishing suddenly find themselves immersed in and disoriented by the set of myths and unfamiliar traditions that, taken together, form the consciousness and the heartbeat of this industry.  read more »

Culture + Travel, the idiosyncratic young magazine known for its high-minded approach to travel writing, has been hit with substantial budget cuts about three months after trade journalism vet Bruce Morris joined its parent company, Louise Blouin Media (LBM), as chief operating officer.

To C+T readers, the most obvious change involves the magazine’s publication schedule: Starting this November, it will move from a bimonthly schedule to a quarterly one.

Circulation is also apparently going down—according to Mr. Morris, copies of the magazine will be sent to a total of 40,000 subscribers. Last August, that number was at 75,000, according to an interview conducted at the time with C+T’s editor-in-chief, Kate Sekules. Ms. Sekules had been brought over from Food and Wine a few months earlier, about a year after the magazine first launched in the fall of 2007 under the leadership of ex-Condé Nast editorial director James Truman. Mr. Truman, who was the founding C.E.O. at C+T’s parent company, resigned in October of 2006.  read more »

Writing in The Washington Post this weekend, Twelve publisher Jonathan Karp levels a precise, sober critique of the publishing industry in which he predicts that "quality" books built on years of work will eventually regain their value in the marketplace. Karp's piece, an articulation of what has been the implicit philosophy behind the 12-books-a-year business model of his imprint, argues that as much as high-minded traditionalists in the business like to invoke it, the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow is an obsolete one. He draws instead a line between books that are conceived with expedience in mind to those which are "built to last.  read more »

The first thing you noticed Wednesday night when you walked into Hugh Hefner's old Playboy suite on the 23rd floor of 730 5th Avenue were the dozens of fur coats hanging from hooks like racks of lamb and the blasting Russian rap music.

Between this and the elaborate pastries imported from the jungles of Brighton Beach and the severe blonde woman dressed like an alien (slicked-back hair, reptilian Armani sunglasses) smoking a cigarette right there, inside, even though there was a spacious balcony overlooking the park three feet away, you could tell right away that at this party you weren't going to be served any hamburgers or hot dogs.  read more »

These days, calling Andrew Wylie “the Jackal” is about as lame as calling Bruce Springsteen “the Boss” or Richard Nixon “Tricky Dick.” It’s an ancient fossil of a nickname masquerading as a mischievous inside joke, about as amusing as a Big Johnson t-shirt.

Sometimes, though even tired nicknames are apt. Mr. Wylie certainly lived up to that kitschy little epithet last week when he poached three huge writers—Chinua Achebe, Roberto Bolaño and Vladimir Nabokov—from other literary agents and added them quietly to the client list that is posted triumphantly on his Web site.

Of these three giants, only Mr.  read more »

Here’s a fairytale: A 28-year-old Columbia M.F.A. student named Reif Larsen wrote a novel about a whimsical child from Montana who likes maps, and suddenly all kinds of famous editors in New York were calling his agent, Denise Shannon, and telling her they really wanted to publish it.

Norton offered to preempt with an advance in the neighborhood of $400,000 if Ms. Shannon took the book off the market and sold it to the publisher right then and there. The editorial director of Dial Press, an imprint of Random House’s Bantam Dell Doubleday group, offered to pay half a million for the same privilege.  read more »

TV rights for I Was Told There'd Be Cake, the best-selling essay collection by Vintage publicist Sloane Crosley, have been sold to HBO for series development. This according to an announcement posted on the Publisher's Marketplace bulletin board over the weekend.

That's all we know for now, except that CAA did the deal. Watch this space for an explanation from Ms. Crosley herself; we will update when she returns our call.

Less than a month after Dmitri Nabokov announced, following years of indecision, that he would publish his late father Vladimir’s unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura, he has hired a new literary agent to represent the Nabokov Estate.

That agent is Andrew Wylie, who is as famous for his expert handling of posthumous work by heavyweights like Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling and Richard Yates as he is infamous for his tendency to lure high-profile clients away from less powerful agents.

It is unclear whether Nikki Smith of New Jersey-based agency Smith-Skolnik Literary Management, who has repped the Nabokov Estate since 1986, is still involved, or how far she got in the process of finding a publisher for Laura before Mr.  read more »

Leigh Haber, who has been running her own nonfiction imprint at Rodale Books since last year, has left the company amid tension with general manager and publishing director Karen Rinaldi. Ms. Rinaldi, who spent nine years as the founding publisher of Bloomsbury USA, became Ms. Haber's boss in April.

Ms. Haber, who made tons of money for Rodale as the editor of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, had her last day in the office yesterday. She had been "in and out" for several weeks prior to that.  read more »

There was a reading last Tuesday night at a performance space in Chelsea attended by a lot of young publishing types. Some of them had jobs at places like Farrar, Straus & Giroux, The New York Review of Books and the Wylie Agency; some worked at Harper’s magazine and others were in creative writing programs. A lot of these people carried bags full of notepads and things. But one man, seated in the front row, did not. He had only a book, which he held tenderly in his hands.

The book was Philip Roth’s Indignation, and it was a beauty! The cover bifurcated diagonally, half orange and half green; the title written in bold, black Franklin Gothic along the middle split; the author’s name, in pale yellow lettering, in the upper-right-hand corner.  read more »

Last week, Barnes & Noble did a funny thing and classified David Sedaris's new book of essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, under fiction in the weekly best-seller list they send out to publishers. It was a strong move, because Mr. Sedaris had just told Time that he definitely considered it nonfiction. "I've always been a huge exaggerator," he said, "but when I write something, I put it on a scale. And if it's 97% true, I think that's true enough. I'm not going to call it fiction because 3% of it isn't true."

And so it sorta seemed like B&N was calling Mr.  read more »

New York takes a swing at the Jane Friedman mystery at the top of this week's Intelligencer, reporting a possibly controversial decision that Ms. Friedman made in April at the London Book Fair when she moved a book party for Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany out of the HarperCollins booth because she found him too anti-Israel.

That "because" is disputed by a source close to Ms. Friedman, who tells New York that the author's politics had nothing to do with Ms. Friedman's decision to move his party out of the HC booth. The same source says that Ms. Friedman's abrupt exit from the company was not related to any of this.

Russell Brand, the British comedian most recently seen playing a sexy rock star in the Judd Apatow-produced comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, has inked a $3 million dollar book deal with HarperCollins Worldwide, according to a source involved in the negotiations. That jaw-dropping sum got the house world English rights, which means they’ll be able to publish the book—described to Media Mob as a collection of comedic “rants”—through any of their international units and sell whatever rights they don’t want to other publishers.

Because Mr. Brand is a much bigger star in England than he is anywhere else, the UK unit is covering the lion’s share of that massive advance, our source said. Stateside, the book will be published through HC’s Collins division and overseen by editor Gillian Blake.  read more »

Denis Johnson's follow-up to Tree of Smoke, the National Book Award-winning Vietnam novel, will be serialized in 10,000 word excerpts in Playboy over the course of four months starting in July. The book, described as a Chandlerish noir set out west, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in fall 2009.  read more »

John S. Zinsser, who edited hundreds of classic works of fiction down to their bare essentials starting in the 1960s as an editor at Reader's Digest Condensed Books, died late last month of a heart attack at the age of 84.

The Times has the full obit. Short version: He lived until he died.

At 11 a.m. last Wednesday morning, Jane Friedman presided over a meeting with her publishers and some marketing people on the 15th floor of the HarperCollins building in midtown. The meeting was about digital outreach, and offered an occasion to discuss ideas for how the News Corp.-owned publishing house could use computers to sell more books. This meeting, a regular thing, was held once every two or three weeks as part of an initiative called Publishing+ that Ms. Friedman started a few years ago. Last Wednesday’s meeting was devoted to discussing a podcast for BlogTalkRadio.com, as well as an original video that the publicity department had managed to place on a bunch of blogs to promote a recently published memoir about life in a polygamist cult.  read more »

David Sedaris insisted last week that his essays, which are famously full of embellishments, should be filed under non-fiction because only about 3% of what he writes is untrue. "I've always been a huge exaggerator,"he said in an online Q&A on Time's Web site, "but when I write something, I put it on a scale. And if it's 97% true, I think that's true enough. I'm not going to call it fiction because 3% of it isn't true."

   read more »

A few months have passed since Bob Miller left his longtime post atop Hyperion to start an experimental new imprint at HarperCollins designed to avoid big advances and bookstore returns—two of the most crippling structural issues facing contemporary publishing. So far, Mr. Miller has been operating quietly by himself, using his time to meet with literary agents and retailers, figuring out exactly how to realize his plan, and interviewing potential hires.  read more »

HarperCollins staff are reeling today in the wake of last night's stunning announcement that their CEO of ten years, Jane Friedman, has been replaced by her 41-year-old deputy, Brian Murray. At the weekly marketing meeting held this morning in the central conference room on the second floor of the HarperCollins building, Ms. Friedman briefly addressed staff from all over publicity, marketing, sales and editorial, telling them that today would be her last day.

According to several people who were present, Ms. Friedman—who normally oversees the Thursday morning marketing meetings—spoke with sadness, and left the room to a standing ovation when she was done. Mr. Murray addressed the room of shell-shocked employees immediately afterward, reassuring them that while Ms. Friedman was irreplaceable, the future of the News Corp.-owned publishing house was in good hands.

In what might have been an attempt to quell rumors about the possibility of News Corp. putting HarperCollins up for sale, Mr. Murray said he had had a reassuring conversation with Rupert Murdoch during which the News Corp. chairman indicated that no drastic changes were imminent.  read more »

That's the big question today in the publishing world, which was collectively stunned last night when it was reported that Jane Friedman had resigned as the CEO of HarperCollins after 10 years on the job and handed the reins of the company over to her 41-year-old deputy.

Did Ms. Friedman, who is 61, see Peter Olson's recent resignation from Random House and subsequent appointment to the faculty of the Harvard Business School and think, 'Gosh, that sounds nice"? Or did she make her exit in anticipation of a terrible fourth quarter?

Right now nobody knows, and many are puzzling over Ms. Friedman's exuberant behavior over the weekend at the Book Expo convention in Los Angeles.  read more »

It's official: Jane Friedman has resigned as CEO of HarperCollins, and her number two, 41-year-old Brian Murray, is taking over "effective immediately."

The news came as a shock to Ms. Friedman's colleagues tonight, though a poor first quarter performance reported in November did inspire some rumblings among publishing insiders that a change in leadership was conceivable. As we noted earlier, at least two of the publishing division heads at HarperCollins were caught by surprise tonight, and indicated that they were given no advance warning of the change. Earlier tonight, when rumors of Ms. Friedman's departure surfaced on Gawker, one high-ranking person at HarperCollins said it was someone's idea of a joke, while another said, simply, "stunned here."  read more »

Jane Friedman, the CEO of HarperCollins, is stepping down after ten years on the job "pretty much right away," a source close to her said. Brian Murray, who has been serving as HarperCollins group president for about four years, will replace her at the helm of the News Corp-owned publishing house "in the next few days."

According to our source, Ms. Friedman made the decision to leave her post on her own, and had been involved in planning a transition for some time, though a post that appeared tonight on Gawker.com cited a rumor saying she had been fired. That rumor has apparently moved Ms. Friedman and News Corp to bump up their official announcement, which is said to be forthcoming.

At least two of the publishing division heads at HarperCollins were taken by surprise when news of Ms. Friedman's imminent departure leaked out tonight; both indicated that they had no advance warning that this was coming.

   read more »

Los Angeles – Markus Dohle looked happy to be there, he really did. Clean-shaven and dressed in a stripey, light-gray suit, the sunny but intense 39-year-old walked around and smiled broadly at every person who shook his hand, and whenever anyone made a joke, he laughed with his whole body, sometimes even rocking back and forth. His auburn hair, punctuated with a playful blond streak, was slicked back and parted carefully on the side. He looked a little like a news anchor, with his tough jaw and dimples.  read more »

Cum Laude, that Cecily von Ziegesar book for grown-ups we wrote about last week, has found a home at Hyperion, where it was acquired by publisher Ellen Archer, possibly as part of a two-book deal.  read more »

39-year-old Markus Dohle was installed as the new CEO of Random House yesterday morning; today, he sent a letter to his staff affirming his excitement and declaring his intention to preserve the company's "longstanding support for the independence of our publishers." There wasn't much in the letter besides that, except a short description up top of the weekend he spent in Los Angeles at the Book Expo. Mr. Dohle flew to L.A. from Germany on Friday, because, as he writes, he "couldn't wait I just couldn't wait" until his official start date "to begin [his] new job."

More on Mr. Dohle's time in LA in tomorrow's edition of Pub Crawl; in the meantime, the full text of Mr. Dohle's note after the jump.  read more »

The New York Times ran an incendiary letter over the weekend, written by a 17-year-old from Birmingham, Ala., named Alec Niedenthal, who wanted to tell the editors of the Sunday Book Review that the future of literature belongs to him. Mr. Niedenthal, who graduated from high school last week and is preparing to attend the New College of Florida, used dramatic language to express this idea. This made him sound like a passionate, big-brained visionary.

"You've heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone right under your collective noses," Mr. Niedenthal wrote in his letter. "The next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes."

He went on: "It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe."

Mr. Niedenthal's rhetoric has not gone unnoticed: In the days since his letter appeared, he has received e-mails from editors at Grove/Atlantic and HarperCollins interested in seeing his work. (His father has also expressed his interest.)

Media Mob thought we should get familiar now, before he gets any more famous. Below, excerpts from our Q&A with the sad young literary man.

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Most publishing people are back now from Los Angeles, where they got together over the weekend with thousands of booksellers and got them familiar with the biggest titles in their catalogs. All this was for Book Expo, a convention that happens every spring. This year, the atmosphere at the show was positively geriatric, its obsolescence never harder to ignore and its purpose never less tangible.

We’ll have our own account in this Wednesday’s paper, but in the meantime, a sampling of coverage from elsewhere:  read more »

Random House has a new CEO today. Markus Dohle, 39, officially started this morning after a weekend spent at the Book Expo in Los Angeles. Mr. Dohle has already spent some time here in New York since being appointed to his new position by the head of Random House corporate parent Bertelsmann, spending a week in introductory meetings with Random’s division heads and other executives during the week of May 18th. The meetings, during which Mr. Dohle is said to have used mostly to ask questions, added up to an informal crash-course in the book trade, which is new territory for the industrial engineering and economics major.  read more »

LOS ANGELES, May 30—Ira Silverberg had not seen his former client Laura Albert in almost a year. The last time was in a Manhattan courtroom, when Ms. Albert stood trial for pretending to be a young man with H.I.V. named JT Leroy. She wrote books under this name, and had Mr. Silverberg, a literary agent, sell them to publishers without telling him who she really was. When Mr. Silverberg found out, he was heartbroken and furious. He denounced Ms. Albert publicly and shut down the account.

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The city center. The bustling downtown. The urban core, the central business district, the immense skyline. The beating, beating heart of a major metropolitan area. Also the outdoor escalators, and the free books everywhere ...

Oh hi, New York publishing! Welcome to Los Angeles. Book Expo is about to start. Panels aplenty, lots of booksellers walking around the Staples Center basking in flattery and galleys. Dinners constantly. Salman Rushdie constantly. Also a talk from Jeff Bezos about ... something! An unveiling. It's supposed to be Steve Jobs-like. Maybe something about the Kindle? Maybe an add-on accessory that lets you print out stickers?

After quittin' time, it's going to be parties though. We did some asking around and made a list of the big ones. Not a comprehensive one by any means, but a list nevertheless. Do with this information what you will.  read more »

Gossip Girl creator Cecily von Ziegesar went out with a proposal last week for a novel she’s been working on called Cum Laude. It’s about a preppy girl from Greenwich; a hippie from Manhattan; and a jock-turned-artist from Westchester, whose work is said to display some violent tendencies toward women. There is also a college-age boy and his beautiful younger sister, who suffers a terrible fate. This is according to an editor at one of the finer literary houses in town, who read the first 150 pages of the proposal before passing on it.  read more »

Pam Dorman had been an editor at Penguin Viking for 19 years when she announced in 2006 that she was leaving to become the editorial director of Voice, an imprint of Hyperion dedicated mainly to women's fiction. Today she announced that she is returning to Viking to start her own eponynous imprint.  read more »