SLPAD - 94 - Low-Lands - 7 - market

[Michael Bailey]

>From Reddit:
Pynchon's editor was Corlies "Cork" M. Smith, who bought the short story
"Low-lands" for *New World Writing* when he worked at Lippincott in 1960.
After *Lot 49,* Cork took Pynchon with him to the Viking Press


Thanks for the bkgd, Mark!
Mr Smith probably isn't the one you were thinking of, as he came after the
acquisition by Lippincott, but it does buttress the impression of NW as a
prestigious outlet.


Wow - imagine making the rent with 2 stories.

Of course, having to be Fitzgerald would be rigorous (-;

I went to the Strand a couple years ago, while quick-trip touristing in NYC
(subways are so much nicer now than the last time I was there in 1982) (so
much to see: 30,000 steps on the Fitbit & still couldn't sleep that night)
- brought home John Crowley's book _Ka_ told from pov of a crow.




On Wed, Sep 20, 2023, 7:00 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>