Beginning in March, New York magazine is going to come out every other week, becoming the latest publication to give up on weekly publication. As the Times points out, “The punishing economics of being a stand-alone weekly can be explained in one word: Newsweek.” Muckrack has a roundup of media responses. At the Awl, Choire Sicha argues that the magazine is still making money—some 3 million dollars a week, by his estimate.
In the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates weighs in on Mike Tyson’s eager-to-please new autobiography: “To the extent that Tyson has a predominant tone in Undisputed Truth it’s that of a Vegas stand-up comic, alternately self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, sometimes funny, sometimes merely crude.”
The editors of Jacket Copy have asked novelists, critics, and readers to recommend their favorite book written by an author the opposite gender, an exercise, which, at the very least, adds a bit of novelty to the notable-books lists now proliferating online. As far as straightforward guides to the best books of 2013, you can’t do much better than The Millions ongoing “year in reading” series, which has a stellar lineup of contributors, and notes many worthwhile books that might otherwise be easy to overlook.
Amazon is working on a drone delivery service called Amazon Prime Air, “a new delivery system is to get packages into customers' hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles.” We’re sure Dave Eggers wishes he’d thought of for his dystopian tale, The Circle. Amazon’s kingpin Jeff Bezos is lauded in a reverential new biography, The Everything Story, which Astra Taylor reviews in the new Bookforum: “It is both depressing and unsettling to read a book about the absolute triumph of a man who cares about nothing but winning.” As if on cue, Bezos recently told Charlie Rose, "You gotta earn your keep in this world . . . Amazon is not happening to bookselling; the future is happening to bookselling."
Andre Schiffrin—the longtime editor, author, and founder of the New Press—has died at age 78. Schiffrin championed many authors, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Günter Grass, Studs Terkel, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Noam Chomsky, Julio Cortázar, and Anita Brookner. A longtime critic of publishing mergers, he was the author The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read.
