Coffee House Press is launching an imprint with Emily Books, the hybrid e-book publishing project started by Emily Gould and Ruth Curry. In the spring of 2016, the Minneapolis-based publisher will begin publishing two Emily Books titles a year, for which Gould and Curry will do the acquisitions and editing. The focus of the list will be on “transgressive writers of the past, present and future, with an emphasis on the writing of women, trans and queer people, writing that blurs genre distinctions and is funny, challenging and provocative.”
The Baffler, which is in the process of opening an office in New York, has recently brought on a handful of new people and named Noah McCormick as publisher. Kim Stanley Robinson is the new fiction editor; Edwin Frank is the new poetry editor, and Rick Perlstein will write regularly for the print edition. The Baffler has also hired four new bloggers: Jacob Silverman, Scott Beauchamp, Sady Doyle, and Helaine Olen. Both Noah and his father, Win McCormick, the publisher of Tin House, have supported the magazine in the past.
Seventeen hundred copies of The Communist Manifesto sold in the first week of the printing of a recent bargain edition, called Little Black Classics, put out by Penguin. Nietzsche’s Aphorisms on Love and Hate is also not doing too badly.
The LA Review of Books is starting an online literary magazine, The Offing, that features poetry, fiction, essays, memoir, and art. The website will launch March 16.
Vanity Fair is launching in Mexico, with an initial print run for the first issue of ninety thousand copies. Other international editions of the magazine appear in France, Spain, Italy, and the UK.
In January, SkyMall filed bankruptcy. Now, however, there are plans in place to revive the brand with a revolutionary new business model: “We’re going to include items in the magazine that people actually want to buy,” says Scott Jordan, CEO of ScotteVest, who plans to purchase the publication.