Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has officially filed for bankruptcy in order to restructure 3.1 billion in debt. But HMH has plenty of plans for the future: For one, it will publish Amazon’s new imprint under the New Harvest title.
Tonight at the New School, Eric Banks joins Charles Petersen, Joan Wallach Scott, David Nasaw, Mark Alan Hewitt, and others to discuss the controversial “Central Library Plan” and the future of the New York Public Library.
Thanks to a new initiative by Esquire, “men’s fiction” may be the next obnoxious category seen in bookstores—or at least on e-readers. The magazine is launching a new series of “Fiction for Men” e-books, which will begin with short stories by Aaron Gwyn, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jess Walter, and coincide with the publication of new fiction by Stephen King and Colum McCann in the summer issue of the magazine. Meanwhile, “men’s fiction” has already become a running joke on Twitter, with Elif Batuman, Jennifer Weiner, and plenty of others weighing in on the label.
“A promising debut…” Translation: “This author already signed a two-book deal.” At Ploughshares, Andrew Ladd deciphers ten adjectives overused by book reviewers.
In honor of the launch of The New Yorker’s new literary blog Page Turner, the magazine features the best of their literary cartoons from over the years.
Exorcist author William Peter Blatty (Georgetown, class of 1950) is taking his alma mater to Catholic court for moving too far away from Church doctrine. Blatty, who is a devout Catholic, says the “last straw” came when the university invited Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius to speak. Sebelius has come under fire from conservative Catholics for backing a measure that requires religious organizations to pay for employees’ birth control.
The Toronto Star has republished Ernest Hemingway’s reporting for that paper, along with annotations from his editor and a number of Hemingway scholars. The articles are divided into seven Hemingway-eseque categories, including “Sport,” “Vice,” “At Home,” and “War.”