Timberg to do book on 'creative destruction'

Scott Timberg's recent series of pieces for Salon on the struggles of architects, journalists, video store clerks and others in the "creative class" has got him a book deal with Yale University Press. The book, tentatively titled "Creative Destruction: How the 21st Century is Killing the Creative Class and Why It Matters," is supposed to "detail the evisceration of an entire class of cultural workers under the onslaught of warp-speed technological change, economic slump, and both longstanding and shifting attitudes regarding the values of art and the creative life." The book was picked up by Steve Wasserman, the editor-at-large at Yale University Press who used to be books editor at the Los Angeles Times. Timberg, represented in the deal by David Patterson of Foundry Literary + Media in New York, was an arts and culture writer at the LAT — until he was laid off in 2008. He blogs for himself at Misread City.

“Former colleagues, neglected friends, neighbors I never knew had a stake in my argument, came up to me at rock clubs or at parties, or wrote to me about how I’d documented something that had been on their minds, or stuck in their respective craws," Timberg said of his Salon stories, per Wasserman. "These pieces seemed to move people emotionally in a way that nothing I’d written—in my 20 years as a journalist—ever had.”

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