Prominent Editor’s Exit Is Setback for Amazon Publishing Unit

When Amazon hired the novelist Ed Park as a senior editor in its New York publishing office in 2011, it seemed an unlikely match. Mr. Park - a member of New York's literary elite who had worked for the Poetry Foundation, co-founded a literary magazine and edited The Village Voice's literary supplement - seemed ill suited to Amazon's algorithm-driven business. The incongruity was precisely the point. By hiring Mr. Park and later giving him his own imprint, called Little A, Amazon signaled that it was willing to take risks on works with more aesthetic than commercial value.