The company did not immediately say how many jobs would be cut or who had been fired.
Caught in a credit squeeze related to the 2007 merger of Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt - publisher of Philip Roth, Guenter Grass and many others - is already in an apparent hold-down on acquiring new books, a policy that apparently led to the resignation earlier this week of a top executive, Becky Saletan.