You would be hard-pressed to find another trio who more cannily served the drive for growth in recent decades than the cofounders of Authors Equity, a new publishing house launched earlier this month. Authors Equity brings Silicon Valley–style startup disruption to the business of books. It has a tiny core staff, offloading its labor to a network of freelancers; it has angel investors, such as James Clear, author of the mega-bestselling self-help book Atomic Habits and the über-successful mystery writer and Hillary Clinton coauthor, Louise Penny; and it is upending the way that authors get paid, eschewing advances and offering a higher percentage of profits instead. It is worth watching because its team includes several of the most important publishing people of the twenty-first century. And if it works, it will offer a model for tightening the connection between book culture and capitalism, a leap forward for the forces of efficiency and the fantasies of frictionless markets, ushering in a world where literature succeeds if and only if it sells.
Madeline McIntosh is at the top of Authors Equity as its CEO and publisher. She graduated from Philips Exeter and Harvard before entering publishing. She recognized already in 1994, as the New York Times put it, “that the internet would irreversibly transform publishing,” and became a specialist in online sales at Bantam Doubleday Dell. She also anticipated the growth of audiobooks, becoming publisher of Random House Audio in 2005. Three years later, she moved to Luxembourg to work for Amazon as “director of content for the international rollout of the Kindle.” She came back to Random House in late 2009 and climbed to the top, becoming the U.S. CEO of the merged Penguin Random House—the world’s largest trade publisher—a position she held until early 2023, when she resigned, becoming a head that rolled over the botched attempt at the acquisition of Simon & Schuster, which cost PRH $200 million. McIntosh is only in her mid-fifties. She made her reputation by always being a step ahead of everyone else in terms of data and technology. Where does one go from the most powerful position in publishing?
I learned about suicide in real time, like discovering the existence of airtravel by spotting a jet arcing across the sky. The thirteen-year-old was dead, but how? In her own bedroom, covered in pink and posters? You said she did it by herself? On purpose? I was a few grades below her, and barely capable of boiling pasta alone.
I tried to enter her mind in the days before, and then in the moments before. How she had prepared to face her own death, as across town my sister and I prepared to face math worksheets and a mandatory bedtime. I tried to enter her parents’ minds, too. What could their conversations be—what dialogue can you speak in a house that has become a crime scene? Among my peers, the story of the girl’s death became a grisly mystery whose strangeness was unfolded again and again, like a contraband book of scary stories.
Re-imaginings of classic literature are challenging, often unnecessary endeavors. This one is different, a startling homage and a new classic in its own right. Readers may be surprised by how much of the original scaffolding remains and how well the turnabout works, swapping a young man's moral awakening for something even more fraught.
In the U.S., it is most often thought of as a feat of engineering that demonstrated American power and ingenuity. After all, Theodore Roosevelt secured rights to the area and constructed the canal shortly after France, builders of the Suez Canal, failed on a similar endeavor. Yet, historians such as Julie Greene recently have asked us to consider the perspectives of those who built the canal.
Cristina Henríquez’s engaging “The Great Divide” takes up that historical call by using the power of fiction to further imagine the lives of those who built and lived near the canal.
We live in an age increasingly defined by the upending of well-established orders. “Fervor,” in its unpacking of a family after the loss of its Holocaust-survivor patriarch, serves as a parable for the loss of a global accord created from the ashes of World War II. The book models the entropy that sets in when we forget why fragile harmonies are fashioned, however imperfectly, out of chaos. Enriching his story with detail and above all heart, Lloyd has crafted a lasting allegory of our dark historical time.
“Newshawks in Berlin: The Associated Press and Nazi Germany” explores the challenges the world’s largest news organization faced in trying to balance journalistic ethics with ability to cover World War II within the confines of a dictatorship. The book is a fair but blunt assessment of AP’s work during that time.