Harper’s Magazine 

The series began in 1992 with “Pafko at the Wall” by Don DeLillo. In a publisher’s note, John R. MacArthur shared a bit of history about the Folio section, adding some editorial history about fears for long form writing in magazines. Check it out:

Like many things in the history of Harper’s, Folio was conjured from a mix of editorial vision and practical necessity. When Tina Brown was appointed editor of The New Yorker in June 1992, I assumed she would begin running much shorter pieces. Harper’s response, I told Lewis Lapham, Michael Pollan, and Gerry Marzorati at a hastily organized lunch, should be from time to time to run much longer pieces that might not only satisfy the cravings of frustrated New Yorker readers but also accommodate Harper’s contributors who simply needed more space to say what they wanted to say … We’re still committed to concision, of course, but in this age of web-driven snippets, we believe there’s all the more need for writers to be able to think in depth and at sufficient length to tell complex stories.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Stephen King

Graham has spent 18 years at the imprint, working with authors that included Don DeLillo, Miranda July, Frank McCourt, Annie Proulx, and Colm Toibin. Scribner Publishing Group president Susan Moldow had this statement in the release:

“As if Nan hadn’t amply proven how deserved this promotion is by her firm hand in shaping the list and staff and insuring the growth of the Scribner imprint over the last eighteen years, her performance of late surely demonstrates that she continues to exercise her singular editorial instincts, abilities, and leadership qualities at the highest levels.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Story Prize director Larry Dark had a conversation with the three finalists at the ceremony last night. Dark and Story Prize founder Julie Lindsey chose the finalists, drawing from a pool of among 92 books from 60 different publishers and imprints.

Here’s more from the release: “Millhauser is renowned for both his short stories and novels. He is the author of four previous story collections and seven novels, including Edwin Mullhouse and Martin Dressler: The Life and Times of an American Dreamer, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. His work has been translated into fifteen languages, and his story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist.” (Photo via Michael Lionstar)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Over at MTV News, sixteen upcoming movies were pitted against one another to determine the winner of the “MTV Movie Brawl 2012.” In the final round, almost four million votes were cast and Cosmopolis (a Don DeLillo adaptation starring Twilight actor Robert Pattinson) emerged victorious over The Hunger Games (starring Oscar-nominated actress Jennifer Lawrence).

In an interview with MTV, director David Cronenberg explained how he first learned about the brawl: “Cosmopolis, while I think in terms of what it is as cinema is pretty hefty, but in terms of budget and promotion, it’s an underdog compared to something like the Dark Knight franchise. I really didn’t think we would have much of a chance. That really got my attention.”

In the video embedded above, MTV caught up with Cosmopolis actor Paul Giamatti to get his reaction on the movie’s win. Several of the Movie Brawl film are literary adaptations including John Carter, The Avengers, Snow White & the Huntsman, The Hobbitand The Dark Knight Rises.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Below, we’ve collected free samples of the nominated books. The winner will be revealed in a ceremony at New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 21.

The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo (Scribner)

We Others by Steven Millhauser (Alfred A. Knopf)

Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The subscription-only online archive is available for the one-year price of £12.99, approximately $20. Collecting all the issues since the 1979 debut of the journal, the archive features early work from writers like Nick Hornby, Salman Rushdie, and Joyce Carol Oates. In addition, the journal unveils free nuggets from the archive, like Don DeLillo‘s “At Yankee Stadium“–an early draft from Mao II.

Editor John Freeman had this statement: “No more hunting through charity shop bins, or stealing them from your friends. Wherever people are, they’ll be able to enjoy and discover the magazine’s fabulous thirty-year breadth.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Yesterday the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center acquired the archive of writer David Foster Wallace. The collection includes annotated books from the author’s bookshelf, like that scribble-filled copy (pictured, via) of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.

The collection contains a vast sample of the late author’s writing life: poems, stories and letters he wrote as a young man; college writings and teaching materials; and “heavily annotated books by Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and more than 40 other authors.” In addition, Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell (of the Frederick Hill Bonnie Nadell agency), wrote a touching introduction to the collection.

Here’s more from Nadell: “[W]hat scholars and readers will find fascinating I think is that as messy as David was with how he kept his work, the actual writing is painstakingly careful. For each draft of a story or essay there are levels of edits marked in different colored ink, repeated word changes until he found the perfect word for each sentence, and notes to himself about how to sharpen a phrase until it met his exacting eye. Having represented David from the beginning of his writing career, I know there were people who felt David was too much of a ‘look ma no hands’ kind of writer, fast and clever and undisciplined. Yet anyone reading through his notes to himself will see how scrupulous they are.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

On this snowy New Year’s Eve morning, a team of famous PEN America members gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library to protest the 11-year sentence of Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo for the crime of subversion.

As you can see by this exclusive GalleyCat video, the list of speakers at this dramatic event included: E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, A.M. Homes, and Edward Albee.

Here’s more from the release: “There are currently almost 1,000 writers on PEN’s list of writers and journalists in danger because of their work. Leading the list is Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s most prominent writers and a past president and member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, which is doing on-the-ground PEN advocacy in China. Liu was convicted of ‘inciting subversion of state power’ for co-authoring ‘Charter 08,’ a petition calling for political and human rights reforms in China, and for seven sentences in five articles he published on the internet that are critical of Chinese authorities.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Over at eBookNewser, our digitally obsessed sibling, you can read more about the new publishing schedule at Simon & Schuster–where eBook versions of 35 of its early 2010 titles will be held for four months. The site also has a link to the delayed eBook publishing schedule, which includes books by Don DeLillo, Karl Rove, and Jodi Picoult.

The post also includes a statement from a S&S spokesperson about the delays: “We believe this publishing sequence will benefit the performance of all the different formats in which these titles are published, and in the long term will contribute to a healthier retail environment for the greater book buying public.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The website Don DeLillo’s America recorded the novel’s description and captured that cover image. The book focuses on a war strategist who lives in the desert, his peace broken by a visit from a filmmaker and his daughter–a combination that causes a “devastating event.”

Here’s part of the catalog description, from the site: “[I]n Point Omega, he takes on the secret strategist in America’s war machine. In the middle of a desert “somewhere south of nowhere,” to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualize their efforts – to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition…At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a filmmaker intent on documenting his experience.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The new issue features a cover by graphic novelist Chris Ware, along with work by Don Delillo, Elaine Showalter, and Tony D’Souza. For UK readers, the magazine is giving away free tickets to the Small Wonder Short Story Festival this week. The new issue also includes writing by Chicago authors Aleksandar Hemon and Stuart Dybek–both interviewed on a Chicago porch for a web video feature.

Here’s an excerpt from the video: “I came to [Chicago] when I was 28. Everything I learned about living with people, about living in the world, I learned in Sarajevo … What I was looking for in Chicago was what I loved in Sarajevo. Which brings me to think you acquire a sensibility in a city. That’s where you grew up. It’s defined by that city. And this you transfer wherever you go.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

According to Variety, Cronenberg will write the screenplay and direct the film, which is scheduled for shooting in 2010, traveling between Toronto and New York.

Here’s an excerpt from John Updike‘s review of the book: “In a land of chunky, garish, anxiousto-please books, Don DeLillo’s thirteenth novel, ‘Cosmopolis,’ is physically cool, as sleek and silver-touched and palely pure as a white stretch limo, which is in fact the action’s main venue.” (Via Publishers Weekly)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Contest entries must make use of one of these three titles: “Twenty-Ten,” “An Insurrection,” and “Never, Ever Bring This Up Again.” The contest celebrates the launch of the magazine’s new online fiction section, which currently contains stories Stephen King and Don Delillo.

Here’s more from the release: “A date, a thing, and a statement. No exceptions. Make of them what you will, do with them something great. But no taking an old story and slapping one of our new titles on it. We’ll know, and we won’t be happy. Second rule: Your story cannot exceed 4,000 words. We are serious about that, too.” (Via Practicing Writer)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

What do Joan Acocella, Paul Auster, David Markson, Don DeLillo, John Updike, William Vollmann, Deborah Eisenberg, Stephen Sondheim, Reynolds Price, Richard Ford, Garrison Keillor, Jim Harrison, Mary Gordon, John Corigliano and many, many more luminaries in the literary, artistic and music worlds have in common? They all sat on the stage at the American Academy of Arts & Letters‘ Annual Ceremonial, held in the organization’s Harlem-area auditorium to honor the best and brightest in the arts. Some, like Gold Medal for Fiction winner Updike, have been members for nearly half a century; others, like Dana Spiotta, Junot Diaz, Tony D’Souza and Adam Rapp, received generous monetary awards honoring their recent writing-related outputs.

It may just be my own biased viewpoint that makes me think the Academy is a well-kept secret within the current state of the arts community, but then, it might not: while the turnout was strong, it was decidedly bereft of publishing professionals and those under the age of 35. And Academy President Ezra Laderman‘s opening remarks, highlighting how “we’re in an extraordinary time for the arts” thanks to questions about intellectual property, the decline of a proper arts curricula in any American school and eschewing artistic endeavors for market forces, had just the barest whiff of the old school. And yet it was remarkably clear how much the Academy, and its members, care about the arts and about ensuring that promising writers and artists continue the non-profit’s legacy, and how old school values produce a certain dignity that’s easy to admire. One need only listen to Updike’s spare remarks about how his induction into the Academy as its then-youngest member helped further his career by exposing him to peers as well as “magi-like writers” whom he revered. Bestowing awards onto Diaz and Spiotta is a step to the future, and I look with interest to see which younger writers the Academy recognizes from here on in.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.