To be fair, Elizabeth Koch seems highly unlikely to pull this kind of thing. Given the Koch brothers' well-earned reputation for secrecy, it makes you wonder what kind of control they have had at PBS and elsewhere that we haven't heard about. Sometimes this comes with no strings attached, but as the New Yorker noted in 2013, David Koch successfully pressured PBS about two documentaries critical of the 1-percent and the brothers themselves, Alex Gibney's "Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream" and the film that became "Citizen Koch," to varying degrees of success. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, or millons they’ve given to public broadcasting. They also support culture – as in the David H. Their combined fortune is somewhere around $100 billion. They’ve endowed all kinds of shadow groups and bogus think tanks, including groups that deny climate change, sway elections, destroy campaign-finance laws, restrict voting, privatize social security, and so on. Charles and his brother David are not just right-wing libertarians, of course, but inherited their oil-and-gas corporation from their father, a founder of the John Birch Society, and have spent much of the time since destroying the safety net for the rest of us. And given the cautious way corporate publishers operate with any author who is not already famous – it’s good for anyone thinking of writing a book that there is another independent house out there.Ĭatapult’s founder is Elizabeth Koch, the 39-year-old daughter of billionaire Charles Koch. These sound like consummate mid-list titles, the kinds of books crucial to the health of the literary world – a lot of the best work comes from midlist authors even while the category has been destroyed by the market. Engels,’ a debut novel imagining the life of an illiterate Irishwoman who became the lover of Friedrich Engels, co-author of ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ “ “Coming in October: Irish author Gavin McCrea’s ‘Mrs. “Catapult’s first book, released Tuesday, is ‘Cries For Help, Various,’ a surreal and at times laugh-out-loud collection of short stories by National Book Award nominee Padgett Powell, a longtime collaborator of Ms. The good news first: A new independent press is launching in New York: Catapult, as it’s called, “has an annual budget in the high six figures,” according to the Wall Street Journal, “and aims eventually to publish 12 books a year.” It’s founded by a Syracuse MFA grad who studied with George Saunders, and she’s brought aboard the well-regarded Electric Literature co-founder Andy Hunter to serve as publisher and Pat Strachan, a longtime editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Little, Brown as editor-in-chief.Īnd they seem to be publishing the kind of valuable work that could easily get lost in a marketplace increasingly oriented around blockbuster authors and celebrity memoirs. Here’s an exclusive sample of what the World Citizen titles have in store.The literary world just got a weird mix of good news and bad news. We think it’s a better way to offer in-depth analysis than, say, telling you to listen to these 20 podcasts.” These books give us room to explore the topic, and are meant for keeps. A lot of people get their information about these issues in small, disconnected chunks. Siegel says that “The Wealth Hoarders,” the sample chapter of Unrig included below, “really shines a light on what’s happening and can inform your understanding of fast-changing events. “Using webcomics to get this material into the collective bloodstream is important,” he says. They are also exploring alternative means of distribution – such as providing extended sample chapters to outlets such as FORBES – for previews of content that matches reader interest. “That’s part of our problem.” He says First Second has compressed the process by teaming writers and artists at the earliest stage of creative development. “Making these books is insanely labor-intensive,” says Siegel. The process of making comics, especially long-form works like graphic novels, can take years to develop, edit, publish and distribute through channels like bookstores. #Plutocracy movie series#One challenge that a traditional publisher faces in a project like this is that facts on the ground are changing constantly, so developing a series on current events risks titles being outrun by new developments before they reach the shelves. (First Second Books, 2019) George O'Connor/First Second Books First page of "The Wealth Hoarders," a chapter from UNRIG by Daniel Newman and George O'Connor.
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