Michael Pietsch

Who

The newly-promoted executive VP at the Hachette Book Group, Pietsch was previously publisher of Little, Brown, where he was the force behind such money-makers as Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.

Backstory

Pietsch worked for Godine, Scribner and Harmony Books before starting at Little, Brown in 1991 as VP and executive editor. He became an industry star when he acquired and edited David Foster Wallace's gargantuan (and gargantuanly successful) 1996 brain explosion Infinite Jest. When Little, Brown publisher Sarah Crichton got the boot in 2001, Pietsch got the nod for the job. Pietsch inherited new corporate overlords in 2006 when French publishing company Hachette Livre bought out the Time Warner Book Group, and in August '07 he was named Executive Vice President at Hachette.

Of note

Pietsch is the man behind sensations like David Sedaris, Michael Connolly, Rick Moody, Walter Mosley and James Patterson. On a less literary note, Pietsch shepherded the publication of the Gossip Girl books, the phenomenally popular series for the tween set that's now a CW show.

Scandal

Little, Brown was the publisher of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, by teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan. When it turned out that Viswanathan had plagiarized large chunks of the manuscript, Pietsch had to decide whether or not to pull the plug. At first, he stuck with the book, but flip-flopped the next day, recalling all copies of the title and canceling his $500K two-book deal with Viswanathan, then a sophomore at Harvard.

Personal

He and his wife Janet Vultee live in the West Village. They have a second home in Ossining, New York.