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The market for printed periodicals will decrease by 15% through 2016 in North America and Europe, and within twenty-five years only 10% of the paper-based magazine industry will remain. Author David Renard convincingly supports these provocative statistics in The Last Magazine, slated for release this fall from Universe Publishing. Renard posits that the public’s ever-increasing hunger for immediate information, coupled with the laborious and archaic distribution system for printed periodicals, and rising awareness of the ecological impact of paper-based media will ultimately force mass-market publishers to completely rethink the concept of the “magazine”. He predicts an evolution---––or more pointedly, a revolution––in the magazine industry from paper to digital delivery. A major catalyst of this change will be the development of e-paper, a portable, flexible (unlike a computer screen), updatable, and searchable medium that combines the immediacy and breadth of the Internet with the tactile experience still sought after by the inveterate book or magazine consumer. Over the next twenty-five years the market for printed magazines will be increasingly sustained by the stylepress: Physically and aesthetically engaging creative chroniclers of trends. These will be the last printed magazines. This visual anthology showcases how the stylepress differs from traditional publications through their physicality (format, material, and packaging), unusual design, provocative and timeless content, and dedication to particular communities. The Last Magazine is a cultural commentary that challenges the future of magazines as we know it, but may also––for the most astute from the world of mass-market periodicals––provide a key to holding on to print a little longer.

How I Write is a fascinating collection of original essays, ranging from confessions to demands, from nearly seventy contemporary authors who reveal the single object that figures most importantly in their writing process. Editor Dan Crowe’s prompt has elicited humorous and candid responses that show the sometimes eccentric voodoo required by writers to get words on the page. With original contributions from writers such as Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Moody, Alan Hollinghurst, Will Self, Nicole Krauss, Anthony Bourdaun, A.A. Byatt and many others, How I Write reveals the idiosyncrasies of the big names in fiction, and speaks to the task of writing itself. At once playful and strangely poignant, this book provides a behind-the-curtain look at how the personal creative process is facilitated by superstitious practice and the odd talisman, as much as by a vivid imagination and an impeccable mastery of grammar and punctuation.