The Rise and Fall and Rise of American Publishing

In January, I wrote for the Winter 2026 issue of LIBERTIES quarterly journal a lengthy consideration of the state of American publishing. LIBERTIES was founded five years ago by Leon Wieseltier, the former longtime literary editor of The New Republic, and my essay is reprinted by ScheerPost with permission. You can access LIBERTIES website at: https://libertiesjournal.com

I’ve been invited by Robert Scheer to write a monthly column. This inaugural essay will give you a sense of my commitment to the world of books and publishing and, more broadly, to the notion that ideas matter. I’m a former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review and have headed up several publishing companies, both in New York at Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and at Times Books, a onetime imprint of Random House, and in California where I am currently and for the past ten years the publisher of Heyday, a nonprofit independent press founded more than fifty years ago in Berkeley. I’m the author of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays.

As for this essay, I can sum up its essence in a sentence: I think we’ve entered a golden age of independent book publishing, more diverse and robust against all expectation that the Goliaths of mainstream publishing would snuff out the small fry. 

To read the full article on scheerpost.com, click here