Denise Oswald, currently the executive editor at Ecco, has been hired to be the new editorial director at Pantheon Books.
Haruki Murakami fan Masamaro Fujiki has made a playlist of every song the author has written about in his fiction and on his website. The list currently features 3,500 songs.
The New York Times is looking to hire a new Sunday Review Editor. According to the job posting: “You need to be creative and ambidextrous, with strong editorial judgment and an obsession for Times standards. You will work with Opinion’s editors and writers, as well as our award-winning graphics and design teams to develop storytelling that will challenge assumptions, expose the world to varying points of view while being urgent and accessible.”
The Polish essayist and poet Adam Zagajewski—who wrote about exile, the legacy of totalitarianism, and imagination—has died.
Elizabeth A. Harris writes about a new influencer in book sales: TikTok. “Videos made mostly by women in their teens and twenties have come to dominate a growing niche under the hashtag #BookTok, where users recommend books, record time lapses of themselves reading, or sob openly into the camera after an emotionally crushing ending.” Says Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble: “These creators are unafraid to be open and emotional about the books that make them cry and sob or scream or become so angry they throw it across the room, and it becomes this very emotional forty-five-second video that people immediately connect with. We haven’t seen these types of crazy sales—I mean tens of thousands of copies a month—with other social media formats.”
HarperOne has purchased Ijeoma Oluo’s Be a Revolution for a reported high six figures. Oluo’s previous books are Mediocre and So You Want to Talk About Race. According to the publisher, the new book “will show how people and communities are working to create real systemic change—in areas like education, media, science, health, housing, and agriculture—with the goal of achieving intersectional racial equity.”
Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 7 PM EST, Vivian Gornick will discuss her new essay collection Taking a Long Look with author Marco Roth. You can register to attend this virtual event here.
