Chick lit is a term used to describe a type of popular fiction targeted at women. Widely used in the 1990s and 2000s, the term has fallen out of fashion with publishers, while writers and critics have rejected its inherent sexism. Novels identified as chick lit typically address romantic relationships, female friendships, and workplace struggles in humorous and lighthearted ways. Typical protagonists are urban, heterosexual women in their late twenties and early thirties: the 1990s chick lit heroine represented an evolution of the traditional romantic heroine in her assertiveness, financial independence and enthusiasm for conspicuous consumption.
PopMatters is an international online magazine of cultural criticism that covers aspects of popular culture. PopMatters publishes reviews, interviews, and essays on cultural products and expressions in areas such as music, television, films, books, video games, comics, sports, theater, visual arts, travel, and the Internet.
Wayne Koestenbaum is an American artist, poet, and cultural critic. He received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2020. He has published over 20 books to date.
Michael Muhammad Knight is a white American novelist, essayist, journalist, and convert to Islam. His writings are popular among American Muslim youth. The San Francisco Chronicle described him as "one of the most necessary and, paradoxically enough, hopeful writers of Barack Obama's America," while The Guardian has described him as "the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature," and his non-fiction work exemplifies the principles of gonzo journalism. Publishers Weekly describes him as "Islam's gonzo experimentalist." Within the American Muslim community, he has earned a reputation as an ostentatious cultural provocateur.
Hachette Book Group (HBG) is a publishing company owned by Hachette Livre, the largest publishing company in France, and the third largest trade and educational publisher in the world. Hachette Livre is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lagardère Group. HBG was formed when Hachette Livre purchased the Time Warner Book Group from Time Warner on March 31, 2006. Its headquarters are located at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Hachette is considered one of the "big five" publishing companies, along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. In one year, HBG publishes approximately 1400+ adult books, 300 books for young readers, and 450 audiobook titles. In 2017, the company had 167 books on the New York Times bestseller list, 34 of which reached No. 1.
Arcade Publishing is an imprint of the American book publisher Skyhorse. Founded in 1988 by Richard Seaver and his wife Jeannette, it was originally an independent company publishing trade fiction and nonfiction. After declaring bankruptcy following Richard's death in 2009, Arcade was acquired by Skyhorse Publishing in 2010 and relaunched the following year.
Maggie Nelson is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.
Carroll & Graf Publishers was an American publishing company based in New York City, New York, known for publishing a wide range of fiction and non-fiction by both new and established authors, as well as issuing reprints of previously hard-to-find works. It was closed in 2007.
Daphne Gottlieb is a San Francisco-based performance poet.
PublicAffairs is a book publishing company located in New York City and has been a part of the Hachette Book Group since 2016.
Charlie Winton is CEO and publisher of Counterpoint Press.
Perseus Books Group was an American publishing company founded in 1996 by investor Frank Pearl. Perseus acquired the trade publishing division of Addison-Wesley in 1997.
New Harbinger Publications, Inc. is an employee-owned, Oakland-based American publisher of self-help books.
MacAdam/Cage was a small publishing firm located in San Francisco, California. It was founded by publisher David Poindexter in 1998. In 2003, it published around 30 to 45 titles per year, primarily fiction, short story collections, history, biography, and essays, and had twelve employees. Most notably, it published The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and The Contortionist's Handbook by Craig Clevenger, and Sunset Terrace by Rebecca Donner. Publishers Weekly describes MacAdam/Cage as "one of the West Coast's most literary" independent publishing firms.
Publishers Group West (PGW) is a book distributor founded in 1976 in Berkeley, California that has been owned by Ingram Content Group since 2016. They share their parent company's warehouse in Jackson, Tennessee and sales offices in New York, Toronto, and London.
Jack Shoemaker is an American editor and publisher, and current editorial director and vice-president at Counterpoint Press in Berkeley, California. Shoemaker has edited and published books under several imprints, including North Point, Pantheon Books, Shoemaker & Hoard, and Counterpoint. Shoemaker has published books by Guy Davenport, Romulus Linney, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Evan S. Connell, MFK Fisher, James Salter, Gina Berriault, Reynolds Price, W.S. Merwin, Michael Palmer, Donald Hall, Anne Lamott, Kay Boyle, Gary Nabhan, Jane Vandenburgh, Carole Maso, and Robert Aitken. Shoemaker supports author-driven literary publishing ventures and mindfulness and political awareness in publishing. Shoemaker was one of the first American publishers of Thich Nhat Hanh, and a major publisher of Wendell Berry.
Nightboat Books is an American nonprofit literary press founded in 2004 and located in Brooklyn, New York. The press publishes poetry, fiction, essays, translations, and intergenre books.
Andrea Kleine is an American writer, choreographer, and performance artist. She is the author of the novel, Calf, a fictionalized account of the John Hinckley Jr. story published by Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. Her second novel, Eden, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018.
The French Revolution is a novel written by American writer Matt Stewart first published online on Bastille Day in 2009. It is Stewart's debut novel and the first novel to be published on Twitter. A print version was later released on the same date the following year.
Pat Walsh is an author, independent publishing consultant/book packager, and former editor-in-chief at MacAdam/Cage.
