Other Writings
Selected Articles
- Six years on from B&N takeover, CEO James Daunt takes stock
- The bookshop bigwig chats about his Barnes & Noble tenure, the democratisation of chain stores and why public libraries are vital to the bookselling ecosystem.
- The Bookseller
- October 23, 2025
- What The New York Times Missed About Cormac McCarthy
- The story of how Cormac McCarthy came to be published is more complicated, and says more about the history of the book business, than readers might think.
- Publishers Weekly
- June 30, 2023
- How Free Is Free Expression?
- A 4000-word, 150-year historical sweep through book censorship in America, for the PW 150th anniversary issue.
- Publishers Weekly
- April 19, 2022
- Sonny Mehta: A Brief Appreciation
- Remembering One of the Very Greatest Publishers of All Time, Knopf’s Sonny Mehta.
- The Bookseller
- January 2, 2020
- Morris Ernst, Bennett Cerf, and Ulysses
- Towards correcting the story of the battle to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses.
- New York Review of Books
- October 24, 2019
- Remembering Toni Morrison, Editor
- The author’s recollections of Toni Morrison as a book editor.
- Publishers Weekly
- August 19, 2019
- Remembering Peter Mayer
- Remembering the life of the former CEO of Penguin Books.
- Publishers Weekly
- May 18, 2018
- The Books and Books Business
- The Bookseller
- May 1, 2015
- Cosby, and Other Cautionary Tales: A Writer Examines the Responsibilities of Biographers
- Publishers Weekly
- January 5, 2015
- Why Penguin and Random Must Merge — And When They Almost Did
- The Daily Beast
- November 9, 2012
- Independent Presses and ‘Little’ Magazines in American Culture: A Forty-Year Retrospective
- Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP)
- 2001
- Community Voices Fathers Day Memories Bright lights in the big city: The measure of one man’s life
- The Philadelphia Inquirer
- June 17, 2001
- Cases; Life’s End: Little Help, No Dignity
- The New York Times
- January 9, 2001
- Publishers Caught in a Web
- The Nation
- January 26, 2001
- A Bookmaker’s Tale
- The Nation
- June 10, 1999
- When Women Know Too Much
- The New York Times
- October 12, 1994
- The Best-Seller Blues: Hard Lessons from a Cosby Book
- New York Times Book Review
- June 10, 1990
- The Borzoi Three-Quarterly
- Publishers Weekly
- October 26, 1990
- The Organization of Publishing in China
- The China Quarterly (Vol 107)
- September 1986