paper trail

Dec 14, 2012 @ 12:32:00 am

Nan Graham

The New York Times is teaming up with Byliner and Vook to publish longform journalism e-books that will run between 10,000 and 20,000 words. The books will be written by Times reporters, and will span culture, science, business, sports, and health topics. The first title, John Branch’s Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, comes out next week. In related news, Byliner struck a deal with Ingram to release its e-books in print.

Editor Nan Graham has been named Scribner’s new publisher.

Following Dalkey Archive Press’s remarkable job posting yesterday—which more or less stated that anyone with a personal life or ambitions of getting paid need not apply—outgoing publisher John O’Brien has written a response to the Irish Times noting that “the advertisement was written in a manner he viewed as appropriate with Irish literature: that of Swift, Joyce Beckett and, perhaps most pertinently, Flann O’Brien." Adding satire to the alleged satire, a fake Twitter account for the tortured Dalkey Intern has already been created.

Via her lawyer, Lena Dunham has asked Gawker to take down her $3.7 million book proposal, which the site leaked a few weeks ago. Gawker obliged, but refused to take down twelve lines from the proposal, which it annotated with its own snarky commentary.

Buzzfeed asks forty-seven women in publishing what the best book they read this year was. (The book didn’t have to be published in 2012—just read during it). Not to rank "best of" lists, but this is the best one we’ve seen so far.

Danish scholars believe that they’ve found the first story ever written by Hans Christian Andersen. “Tallow Candle” was found hidden in an archive, and is thought to have been written before 1829—the year of Andersen’s official literary debut. The story is about “a little candle, dirtied by life and misunderstood, which eventually finds happiness after a tinder box sees the good at its heart and lights it.”