MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
January 29 – February 6, 2009 Edition

Riverhead Names

Rebecca Saletan

Editorial Director

New York, NY (Authorlink News, January 27, 2009)–Geoffrey Kloske, Vice President and Publisher of Riverhead Books, today announced that Rebecca Saletan has been appointed Editorial Director of Riverhead Books. Ms. Saletan was most recently Senior Vice President and Publisher of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. At Riverhead, she will primarily concentrate on acquiring and editing a broad range of narrative nonfiction, in such areas as science, travel, natural history, current affairs, the environment and food, as well as literary fiction. Her appointment is effective March 2, 2009.

Mr. Kloske commented, “I’m very pleased to welcome an editor of Becky’s exceptional talent and breadth of experience to Riverhead’s outstanding editorial team. Her ability to find and develop both thought-provoking nonfiction and distinctive literary fiction is highly-regarded throughout the industry. She will be a great fit with Riverhead’s top-tier editors, who have been so successful at building the Riverhead brand and adding to our impressive list of bestselling, award-winning authors.”

Ms. Saletan said, “I feel lucky beyond measure to be joining Riverhead, an imprint whose books I have long admired and whose success I have long envied, and to be joining a company whose strength, forward-thinking, and commitment to the business of books are a model to the industry.”

Ms. Saletan has a strong track record for acquiring and editing extraordinary authors and books that get at the currents under the surface of daily life with imagination and force. Of particular note: Mohsin

Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which was a New York Times bestseller and shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize; Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, a New York Times bestseller; and Ivan Doig’s The Whistling Season and The Eleventh Man. She also was the editor of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 1996 New York Times bestseller, It Takes a Village. In prior positions, she worked with such distinguished, critically acclaimed authors as Philip Roth, Peter Matthiessen, and William Langewiesche.

Ms. Saletan joined Harcourt in 2004 as Editor in Chief and was soon promoted to Associate Publisher, then Publisher, a title she continued to hold at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt after the two companies were brought together in 2008. Before coming to Harcourt, she was Editorial Director at North Point Press and Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She was previously Senior Editor at Simon & Schuster, after holding various editorial positions at Random House. She began her publishing career at Yale University Press after graduating from Yale with a B.A. degree.

Riverhead Books is a distinguished and critically acclaimed imprint of Penguin Group (USA). It is home to many New York Times-bestselling and award-winning authors, including Khaled Hosseini, Junot Díaz, Kathleen Norris, James McBride, Daniel Pink, Nick Hornby, Sarah Vowell, Shalom Auslander, Dinaw Mengestu and Aleksander Hemon, among others.

Penguin Group (USA) Inc. is the U.S. member of the internationally renowned Penguin Group. Penguin Group (USA) is one of the leading US adult and children’s trade book publishers, owning a wide range of imprints and trademarks, including Viking, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, The Penguin Press, Riverhead Books, Dutton, Penguin Books, Berkley Books, Gotham Books, Portfolio, New American Library, Plume, Tarcher, Philomel, Grosset & Dunlap, Puffin, and Frederick Warne, among others. The Penguin Group (http://www.penguin.com) is part of Pearson plc, the international media company.