SLPAD - 94 - Low-Lands - 7 - market

[Mark Kohut]

New World Writing had a legendary acquiring editor, whose name I have
forgotten (at the moment).
Agents dealt with him?--not sure; maybe it was a woman---like they would a
publishing house, like a leading
editor at any of the prestigious ones. The leading legacy magazines--Sat
Eve Post; others---were not paying
nor publishing as during their golden age. (if I remember correctly,
Fitzgerald earned a comparative mid 100 grand (now)
one year when either two or three stories were published. )

It was World writing....I remember Beckett's First Love; a Moravia, a
Landolfi.....others.....

i used to collect these when in NYC...They often showed up at The Strand
outdoor table for 48c.....I read much in many.
I had the Catch--18 one; the early Kerouac; and others.

Anyway, agents and publishers also knew that publication in New American
Review was also early marketing---buzz as they say.
Pynchon's agent Candida Donadio worked very well with the editor; she
corralled many best writers of the time BECAUSE she
could make them sell. She agented Heller, for example.

NWR was gone by the time I entered bookselling. But its sales were probably
higher than NAR because the distribution was through
the newspaper/magazine outlets.....This wonderful mag appeared on
newsstands, in train stations, everywhere.......there was waste this way
but there was great reach......NAR did not get that the same way......but
it was healthily marketed and did sell very well.
I have some of those too, besides a story of TRP having lunch with someone
related. I am convinced, on no real evidence, that this is where TRP first
read
Ian MacEwan, some kind of friend or friendly acquaintance (or else he would
not have signed that letter decades later, imo)

On Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 12:12 AM Michael Bailey <
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> Diverging a little, even though I can hardly wait to get to the house
> description, this piece was published in 1960 in volume 16 of New World
> Writing, a paperback periodical first published by New American Library's
> Mentor imprint - and then, starting with said volume 16, by Lippincott.
>
> Wikipedia lists an impressive number of impressive authors - seemingly a
> step up from the outlet for "The Small Rain" which was Cornell Writer,
> itself pretty respectable.
>
> Kerouac, Gaddis, Picasso, Norman Mailer, Shirley Jackson, ee cummings,
> Borges, Tennessee Williams, Octavio Paz, Saul Bellow, W.H. Auden, Samuel
> Beckett, the first chapter of "Catch-18" and so forth.
>
> I can't find volume 16 online for sale at all; other numbers are, many of
> them, under 20$ though I did see one for almost 100. (Looking again, ones
> with well-known author signatures are going for up to 900)
>
>
> Impression I get is there were more of these literary outlets back then. I
> was thinking all the _Slow Learner_ stories except for "Secret Integration"
> came out in "little" magazines, but although I couldn't find circulation
> figures for New World Writing, the Wikipedia article on its successor, New
> American Review, shows a peak of 100,000 which is pretty good, isn't it?
>
>
> There's a current online successor of sorts:
>
> https://newworldwriting.net/
>
> Founded by Frederick Barthelme as Mississippi Review when he was working at
> the University of Southern Mississippi, changed to Blip when he left there,
> and to New World Writing in 2012 with the following comment
>
> "BlipMagazine has changed its name to New World Writing after the great
> literary magazine of the 1950s. They were, of course, thinking of world
> writing, whereas we are thinking more of the (perpetually) new world. We
> hesitated in any case, as it is a grand old name and we are perhaps
> insufficiently grand. Still, with some squinting, we are in the ballpark,
> or near the ballpark, or in a position from which we can sort of see the
> ballpark. Or so we hope and imagine."
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>