Doctorow Live; Author Interviews Go Live

by Steven Zeitchik and Jim Milliot, PW NewsLine -- Publishers Weekly, 10/29/2004

Some small notes from around the industry. Holtzbrinck has created a new department, adult library marketing and named Talia Ross to oversee it. Ross will coordinate the library marketing efforts of all of Holtzbrinck's adult trade imprints. Ross, who spent three years in academic marketing at Perseus and was briefly with Springer, will report to Peter Janssen.

At the Small Press Center, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt will talk tonight with E.L. Doctorow in a new series that, in something of a departure from the center, features notable authors.

And speaking of author interviews, for the last year Google's been turning itself into something more approaching a publisher with its book excerpts. Yesterday the Paris Review announced a project that it is returning the favor.

The esteemed magazine is becoming something o a search engine, posting and making searchable the archive of all its interviews. The project's title--DNA of Literature--is decidedly biological (and quaint) but the idea is hyper-modern. The archive will include 10,000 pages of interviews and a range of authors that encompasses Nabokov, Roth, Joan Didion and Lorrie Moore. The database launches November 15, and is being sponsored in part by the NEA; its launch comes complete with a Gioia endorsement, who eschews the pessimism of a readerless future to say "There is no archive quite like the Paris Review interviews."