Literary magazines have had a mixed track record in making the switch to book publishing, but Tin House hopes to transcend that history by linking with Bloomsbury USA and hooking into Holtzbrinck for distribution.
Bloomsbury editorial director Karen Rinaldi said Tin House Books will publish about six titles per year, starting next spring with a jazz memoir by Amy Albany and a Tin House fiction collection that will feature David Foster Wallace and Mary Gaitskill. Rinaldi said there will be no mandate for magazine entries to become books or vice versa, adding that the project grew out of a desire to put new talent into more than one channel. "You develop writers, you like them, you want to work with them. Why just stop at a story or an article or a poem?" she said. The imprint will operate as a joint venture, with editors from both the house and the magazine conferring. Jeanne McCulloch will serve as editor-in-chief.
Founded by Rob Spillman and Elissa Schappell, Tin House is a quarterly that revolves on that old axis of fiction-nonfiction-poetry, with an occasional recipe thrown in.
