Geoff Kloske

Who

Book world wunderkind Geoff Kloske is the publisher at the Penguin imprint Riverhead.

Backstory

Kloske started out as an editor at Little, Brown and made a name for himself acquiring and editing essayist and cash cow David Sedaris. He then moved to Simon & Schuster, where he became a VP and continued to burnish his record as an arbiter of literary cool with the 2000 publication of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers and books by Sarah Vowell. Kloske decamped to Riverhead in 2006, taking over a division reeling both from the departure of co-publishers Julie Grau and Cindy Speigel, and from the James Frey scandal. Kloske now oversees a list that includes Nick Hornby, George Saunders, and John Hodgman, and reports to Penguin president Susan Petersen Kennedy. The most recent Kloske-edited book to gain buzz was Shalom Auslander's coming-of-age memoir, Foreskin's Lament.

Scandal

Not content with publishing fake memoirist James Frey's sophomore lie-fest, in March '08 Riverhead put out Love and Consequences, Margaret B. Jones' heartfelt recollection of growing up as a half-native American foster kid, gang banger and drug runner in South Central LA. When it turned out that Jones was actually Margaret Seltzer—a posh white girl from Sherman Oaks in the Valley who attended the same private high school as Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, rather than a former Blood and expert crack baker—19,000 copies of the book were pulped and there was embarrassment all round (not least for Times critic Michiko Kakutani, who had raved "Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood").

In print

Kloske published a children's book in 2005, Once Upon a Time, The End (Asleep in 60 Seconds), a collection of extremely short bedtime stories illustrated by Barry Blitt.

Personal

He lives in Carroll Gardens with his wife, Jennifer Braunschweiger, an editor at More magazine.