Michael Pietsch
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Michael Pietsch was a long-time publishing executive and editor who served as the chief executive of Hachette Book Group,[1] and also as editor and publisher at Little, Brown and Company.[2]
He was known for working with both literary and mass-market commercial authors.[3] Among the authors he worked with are Malcolm Gladwell, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, Stacy Schiff, David Baldacci, and Michael Connelly.[2] He is known for being the editor of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.[4]
Career
Early in his career, Pietsch worked at Harmony Books and Scribner.
He joined Little, Brown in 1991.[3] As a young editor he acquired a postmodern novel by a then little-known writer named David Foster Wallace for $80,000.[5] He spent years urging Wallace to cut hundreds of pages from the manuscript and impose at more structure on the disparate plot strands. When the book, Infinite Jest, was finally published in 1996, it became a literary sensation.[5]
He was named Hachette's chief executive in 2012.[3]