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ViacomCBS has promoted Jonathan Karp to CEO of Simon & Schuster, effective immediately, succeeding Carolyn Reidy, who passed away earlier this month.

Karp most recently served as president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing that includes Atria Books, Avid Reader Press, Gallery Books, Scribner, Simon & Schuster and associated sub-imprints and lines. Now he will oversee all of Simon & Schuster’s domestic and international publishing operations.

ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish called Karp “a key member of the leadership team that consistently delivered strong results” for the nearly century-old Simon & Schuster, “while expanding its readership across genres and formats. He is a highly skilled executive who is deeply committed to the collaborative process of publishing, and will no doubt build upon a storied legacy of success.”

Karp may at some point be leading the storied publisher under a new owner. ViacomCBS said in late February it was looking to sell the...

Sometimes it's nice to shelve a thick novel in favor of something a little bit shorter. Story collections are making a big comeback, and this week People staffers can't get enough of them. From the darkly funny dystopian tales of Sam Lipsyte to the latest from critical darling Alice Munro, check out what we're reading. Then let us know what books you can't put down. Alex Apatoff, Style News Editor Her pick: Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell I'm not going to lie to you: this collection is weird. But that's part of why it's so wonderful. No...

Even the sharpest literary satirist of his generation can’t afford to ignore Valentine’s Day, especially if his wife is turning 45 the next day. And so Sam Lipsyte, whose last narrator disdained the “rom-com pone” of, say, Nora Ephron, with its “coffee bars and turtlenecks, all that greeting-card ontology,” finds himself in the cramped aisles of Duane Reade on February 14, searching for a card earnest enough to be gifted ironically. “We may have to go to Rite-Aid,” he says, sighing. “The serious ones are the funniest ones,” he declares, after crossing the street into our second fluorescent-lit pharmacy. Encroaching mortality pressures many urbanites into marathons and egg whites, but at 44, Lipsyte seems to have shuffled contentedly into what once looked like premature middle age. Bearish and bearded, swaddled in zippered sweaters, crowned with the barest wisps of black hair, he comes across as both a rumpled double of...

On Tuesday, HBO made two announcements in the realm of acquisitions. The network said it would be producing "True Detective," a crime series based on the hunt for a serial killer in Louisiana starring Matthew McConnaughey and Woody Harrelson. It also confirmed reports it was passing on the pilot for Jonathan Franzen and Noah Baumbach's adaptation of Franzen's novel "The Corrections," which starred Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal and was being produced by Scott Rudin.

It's tempting to interpret the twin announcements as evidence of HBO's broader plans. A sign, perhaps, that the smash success of its two highest-performing shows, "True Blood" and "Game of Thrones," has convinced the network that the path to success is the lurid, fantastical one favored by hormonal young men.

Time will tell. But for now, there's no reason to ring the alarm bells, cancel your subscriptions and sign up for Showtime in anticipation...

Getty Images Producer Scott Rudin at the Eleventh Annual AFI Awards on January 14, 2011 in L.A.

HBO passed on “The Corrections,” a series based on the novel by literary phenom Jonathan Franzen, but producer Scott Rudin called the cable network “great partners” and said “they’re free to do what they want.”

The pilot was adapted from Franzen’s novel of the same name – about the multilayered story of a dysfunctional family in the Midwest – and directed by Noah Baumbach,...

On Tuesday, HBO made two announcements in the realm of acquisitions. The network said it would be producing "True Detective," a crime series based on the hunt for a serial killer in Louisiana starring Matthew McConnaughey and Woody Harrelson. It also confirmed reports it was passing on the pilot for Jonathan Franzen and Noah Baumbach's adaptation of Franzen's novel "The Corrections," which starred Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal and was being produced by Scott Rudin.

It's tempting to interpret the twin announcements as evidence of HBO's broader plans. A sign, perhaps, that the smash success of its two highest-performing shows, "True Blood" and "Game of Thrones," has convinced the network that the path to success is the lurid, fantastical one favored by hormonal young men.

Time will tell. But for now, there's no reason to ring the alarm bells, cancel your subscriptions and sign up for Showtime in anticipation...

David Plakke Media NYC Author Mark Leyner

Perhaps you know Mark Leyner as the brazen satirical writer whose absurdist novels inspired a generation of comic novelists, including Sam Lipsyte and Gary Shteyngart. Or perhaps you know him as the author of the bestselling popular medical book, “Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You’d Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini.”

Or perhaps you’ve never heard of him at all. Leyner, who in the 1990s was...

Reuters Author Salman Rushdie poses for a photograph after an interview with Reuters in central London in this October 8, 2010 file photo.

Salman Rushdie was skeptical when a digital start up approached him about creating a soundtrack for one of his short stories. “I had to be convinced this was a good thing,” he said. “Normally when I read, I don’t like music playing.”

He agreed to give it a try. This week, Booktrack released a digital version of Mr.

Michael Chabon's "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" could be coming to a screen near you.

According to Collider, director Stephen Daldry wants to turn the novel into a miniseries for HBO.

"I would love to do something for TV," he said. "I wanna do Kavalier & Clay on HBO as an eight-parter. It'll be so much better as a series, honestly."

There's just one catch -- Daldry doesn't have the rights to the book. Paramount does -- though Daldry himself was signed on at one point to direct a film version, the project has continued to languish.

"I spent a year working on it with Michael Chabon, so we're pretty close," Daldry told Collider. "And the rights, good question. Will Paramount give them to me? I don't know. It'll be a really good one. It'd go great with 'Boardwalk Empire.'"

HBO is already working with Chabon and...

Jackie Kelman Bisbee and Lance Acord, partners in Park Pictures, announced today they have formed a narrative feature company, Park Pictures Features with independent film darling Galt Niederhoffer and award-winning producer Sam Bisbee. Park Pictures Features’ first project will be the family comedy, “Robot & Frank,” starring Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon, James Marsden, Liv Tyler, Jeremy Strong and Liev Schreiber, as the voice of the Robot. Written by Christopher Ford, the film marks the feature film directorial debut of Park Pictures’ director Jake Schreier. The film is currently shooting in New York. Niederhoffer, Bisbee, Kelman Bisbee and Acord are producing the film. The film is executive produced by White Hat/Tbb. Matt Lloyd is the Director of Photography.

Park Features’ next projects are the directorial debut of Lance Acord, and a new project from British director, Ringan Ledwidge. The company will also produce the adaptations of Sam Lipsyte’s best-selling novel,...

Jackie Kelman Bisbee and Lance Acord, partners in Park Pictures, announced today they have formed a narrative feature company, Park Pictures Features with independent film darling Galt Niederhoffer and award-winning producer Sam Bisbee. Park Pictures Features' first project will be the family comedy, Robot and Frank, starring Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon, James Marsden, Liv Tyler, Jeremy Strong and Liev Schreiber, as the voice of the Robot. Written by Christopher D. Ford, the film marks the feature film directorial debut of Park Pictures' director Jake Schreier. The film is currently shooting in New York. Niederhoffer, Bisbee, Kelman Bisbee and Acord are producing the film. The film is executive produced by White Hat/Tbb. Matt Lloyd is the Director of Photography.

Park Features' next projects are the directorial debut of Lance Acord, and a new project from British director, Ringan Ledwidge. The company will also produce the adaptations of Sam Lipsyte's best-selling novel,...

Getty Angela Lansbury

Angela Lansbury has her own way of working–and it doesn’t include method acting.

“After I perform a part, I leave it behind in the dressing room,” the 85-year-old actress told Speakeasy. “American actors are too in love with method. That’s what drives some of them to drink.”

Lansbury was attending a luncheon held at the Four Seasons in New York City to celebrate “The Book of Mormon,” a new musical from the creators of “South Park,...

Ceridwen Morris

With “The Ask,” Sam Lipsyte graduated from the ranks of the overlooked and became a bestselling novelist. “I spent a lot of years on underrated lists,” Lipsyte said. “I just saw myself for the first time on an overrated list. I felt I had truly I arrived.” Lipsyte, who also published a story collection and two previous novels, talked to Speakeasy about how “The Ask,” out now in paperback, has and hasn’t changed his life.

The Wall...

Courtesy of Thomas Beller Bingham (left) and Beller, circa 1995

1.

A literary magazine’s relationship to time is a strange thing. A newspaper is pegged to news of the day; a weekly magazine can be dated by the content and style of the ads -– the more cutting edge the product (a computer, a car), the more absurd and enjoyable the ad in hindsight. A glossy magazine has the fashions of the day in the ads and in the photo shoots,...

Open City The last issue of the magazine

Open City is ceasing publishing after 20 years. The literary journal was founded in 1990 by Daniel Pinchbeck and Thomas Beller, and published works by Sam Lipsyte, David Berman, Ed Park and many other notables over its 30-issue run. Joanna Yas became the first full-time employee; a year later, in 1999, publisher and driving force Robert Bingham died and, shortly thereafter, Pinchbeck exited the magazine, leaving Yas and Beller as co-editors. Yas recalled for Speakeasy...

Tina Brown, Peter Beinart, John Avlon, Michelle Goldberg, and other Daily Beast writers and contributors pick their favorite books of 2010.

Tina Brown

Related story on The Daily Beast: This Week's Hot Reads

It takes a daring biographer to turn her sharp eye on her own life as Antonia Fraser does so movingly and beautifully in her memoir Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter. It's a compelling diary of a passionate love affair, marriage, and 40-year conversation of two soul mates in the milieu of London's chattering classes.

Harvard superstar professor Niall Ferguson wrote a superb book, High Financier, that I hope every Wall Street banker is receiving along with their fat bonus checks because Siegmund Warburg was a banker with style, integrity, and a serious intellect-rare qualities these days.

Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart's The Icarus Syndrome is one of the most important books of the last...

Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tiny Japanese sculptures ... which books most excited our writers this year?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.

"New technology, new markets, global interconnectivity, doesn't matter," veteran fixer Leo Moss says to neophyte Milo Burke in this darkly comic novel by Sam Lipsyte. "It's still the rulers and the ruled." Lipsyte considers "late capitalism" through Burke -- a college development officer -- and his relationship with new-media titan Purdy Stuart, who makes the book sing. "Do you realize that one day we'll be heating our houses with trout?" Stuart tells Burke. "Is that one of the ideas at the ideas festival?" Burke asks. "It's just fantastic here," Stuart replies. Fantastic, indeed. -- David Lidsky

tue, march 02

 

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