Catapult has acquired Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts, Portland, Ore., which will join Catapult, Counterpoint Press, and Soft Skull Press as the fourth imprint of the book group. Under the deal, Catapult has purchased Hawthorne's catalog of titles, as well as the Hawthorne trademark. With the purchase, Penguin Random House Publisher Services, Catapult's distributor, will distribute Hawthorne Books. Publishers Group West has been its distributor.
Hawthorne Books was founded in 2001 by publisher and executive editor Rhonda Hughes, who will stay on with Catapult, serving as contributing editor for Hawthorne Books, acquiring on behalf of the imprint.
With the acquisition, Catapult gains a backlist that includes Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water (now a major motion picture directed by Kristen Stewart), Poe Ballantine's Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, Frank Meeink and Jody M. Roy's Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, and most recently Sidney Morrison's novel Frederick Douglass, among others.
Catapult is a publishing collective created by the founders of Electric Literature and Black Balloon Publishing, comprising the imprints Catapult, Counterpoint Press, Soft Skull Press, and Hawthorne Books. Operating within Unlikely Collaborators, the nonprofit founded by Elizabeth R. Koch, Catapult's authors have received major recognition, including an International Booker Prize, an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and several National Book Award finalists.