Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae is retiring after twenty-eight years at the helm of the venerable independent press. Ethan Nosowsky, an editor at Graywolf, writes: “There are many wonderful publishers who are not terrific managers; there are many terrific managers who are not inspiring publishers. There are perhaps some inspiring publishers who are also somehow terrific managers but there is no way they are also brilliant fundraisers. Fiona is so good at all of these things. I have always admired the way that she is extremely ambitious for Graywolf and has very high expectations of herself and of her staff, but pushes things forward with a human touch.” Graywolf has won numerous prizes during McCrae’s tenure (including National Book Critics Circle awards for Geoff Dyer and Maggie Nelson), and netted a $3.5 million profit in 2021. Associate publisher Katie Dublinski will become interim publisher on July 10, as the press’s board searches for a new publisher.
Doubleday has bought Tao Leigh Goffe’s After Eden for a reported six figures. According to the publisher, the book is “a hemispheric investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the Western imagination and as a dark laboratory of Western experimentation,” and will “radically transform how we conceive of race, natural history, colonialism, and the climate crisis.”
After Trump left office, a number of his top aides—including former chief of staff Mark Meadows—cranked out tell-all memoirs. But they aren’t selling.
The Library of Congress has named historian George Chauncey—author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 and Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Gay Equality—the 2022 winner of the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. The Kluge prize comes with $500,000. Chauncey, who has offered testimony or acted as an expert witness in more than thirty cases tied to LGBTQ rights, is the first scholar specializing in LGBTQ studies to be honored with the award.
Tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 5pm Eastern Time, Marina Warner—known for her studies of religion and fairy tales—will discuss her new book, Esmond and Ilia: an Unreliable Memoir, with D. H. Lawrence biographer Frances Wilson. The event, which will take place on Zoom, is sponsored by Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore. You can register to attend here.