Editor Gerald Howard looks back on the glory days of the American trade paperback. Howard worked at Penguin Books in the 1980s, when a productive rivalry with Vintage spurred a contemporary fiction boom: “There was a lot of fun to be had in publishing in those years by being ‘Contemporary.’ It was definitely a moment and people who worked in trade paperback in those years remember it fondly.”
At the Associated Press, Hillel Italie recaps a tumultuous year in publishing. As Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp puts it: “A lot of what has happened this year—if it were a novel, I would say that it had a little too much plot.”
Rolling Stone, Billboard and Vibe are merging their business operations.
Elizabeth Hinton has announced that her book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s will be published in May by Liveright.
At the New Yorker, Anthony Lane writes that the late John le Carré “missed nothing”; at The Atlantic, Tom McTague notes that the novelist and former agent of MI5 and MI6 revealed the truth about the English ruling class. For more on le Carré, see Andrew Meir’s 2017 Bookforum essay.
Tonight at 7, Artforum and Bookforum will host a virtual conversation with artists Reynaldo Rivera and Linda Simpson, moderated by Artforum reviews editor Alex Jovanovich.
