Leon Neyfakh

Sloane Crosley used to be a book publicist at Vintage. She still is one, actually, though the longer her collection of essays, published in April by Riverhead as I Was Told There’d Be Cake, remains on The New York Times best-seller list, the weirder that fact becomes. Shouldn’t she quit pretty soon? Isn’t that what happens now?  read more »

Some time before it became crystal clear that, despite all laws of nature, James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning would be an unqualified hit, there was a moment when agents and editors wondered if the man who’d agreed to publish it might have reason to worry for his job. Back in September, Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham had stunned colleagues and rivals by forking over a seven-figure advance for the privilege of putting out Mr.  read more »

Publishers sure do love it when sick professors write books. First, Randy Pausch, the terminally ill computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon, sold his book The Last Lecture to Bob Miller, then the president of Hyperion, for a reported $6.7 million.  read more »

Rivka Galchen spoke in favor of science last Tuesday night at the Russian Samovar before an audience of English majors, most of whom probably couldn’t remember how to light a bunsen burner. Ms. Galchen, 32, was participating in a reading series curated by editors from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, the prestigious publishing house that will issue her thrilling and affecting debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, on May 27.  read more »

Janet Maslin loved Bright Shiny Morning. The teaser text on the New York Times books portal is "James Frey stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park with his new book." Ms. Maslin's review, published today, is not only an unequivocal rave, but a tribute to Mr. Frey's choppy trademark style: "His publisher called it a dazzling tour de force.  read more »

Arianna Huffington made The New York Times on Friday morning for a blog post she wrote on her Web site about John McCain. In that post Ms. Huffington wrote that a few years back McCain told her at a dinner party that he did not vote for George W. Bush in 2000. This made McCain look like a hypocrite, and his campaign responded by calling Ms. Huffington “a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva.”  read more »

Media Mob got an e-mail a few minutes ago from a publicist at Simon & Schuster informing us, in the subject line, that "Facebook is subject of new S&S acquisition." Holy cow, we thought! Mark Zuckerburg finally agreed to sell? To Simon & Schuster? They've had a pretty good year, sure, but what would a publishing house want with Facebook? Maybe someone up high thought they were really buying a book?

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The publishing industry was vocally unsurprised on Monday when The New York Times’ Mark Landler reported that Peter Olson, the towering and strange CEO of Random House, had fallen out of favor with leadership at Bertelsmann, the German conglomerate, and would soon be relieved of his duties after 10 years at the helm. “I heard this ages ago!” was the note most tried to sound. Big deal!

Thus, two important publishers exchanged lighthearted e-mails: “Are you getting the job?” “No, are you?” A third explained over the phone, “It finally reveals what we have all kind of known.” Industry record keeper Michael Cader posted a link to the Times story on his Web site, Publisher’s Lunch, with a summary that began, “The NYT’s man in Frankfurt Mark Landler echoes the story (and persistent rumors) we cited recently …”  read more »

Editors at MSNBC.com removed and retracted a story about James Frey last Thursday afternoon after receiving some angry phone calls from members of Mr. Frey’s publicity team. In the story “Frey Still Having Trouble Keeping Facts Straight,” which ran in the Scoop gossip column, reporter Courtney Hazlett suggested that Mr. Frey, the disgraced memoirist whose debut novel will be published by HarperCollins next Tuesday, had been caught in a fresh tangle of lies.

First, Ms. Hazlett questioned a story about meeting Norman Mailer that Mr.  read more »

The New York Times is reporting that Peter Olson, who has been C.E.O. of Random House since 1998, will step down "in the next few weeks." Two unnamed executives from Random House's parent company Bertelsmann tell the Times' Mark Landler that pressure on Mr. Olson to vacate his post is coming from Bertelsmann's recently-appointed chief executive Hartmut Ostrowski, who "has lost patience with the performance" of Random House's U.S.  read more »

It was one year ago that Farrar, Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi first started trying to convince Mitzi Angel, the editorial director at a small literary imprint of HarperCollins UK, to move to America and come work for him. “Mitzi just walked into my office one day and I thought, ‘Wow, I want this person to work here,” Mr. Galassi said. “I felt that the minute I met her. I’ve been chasing her ever since.”  read more »

On May 1, former Houghton Mifflin publisher Janet Silver starts her new job as an editor at large at Nan Talese’s boutique literary imprint at Doubleday.

Back in January, Ms. Silver and several other editors at Houghton Mifflin were made redundant as part of the company’s merger with Harcourt.

But Ms. Silver and Ms. Talese may have the better end of the stick: The author list Ms. Silver built at Houghton, which included Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer, did not play a small role in Ms. Talese’s desire to recruit her.

“I called Janet and she sent us a list of the authors she had worked with and the ones who’d said they wanted to come with her, if not immediately then eventually,” Ms. Talese said. “We ran down the financials and ... we made an agreement with her that she would stay up there in Massachusetts. It was all done in a rather good fashion.”  read more »

Vladimir Nabokov’s Laura, the unfinished novel he was writing at the time of his death, is being shopped to publishers and will probably have a home within a few weeks, according to the agent who oversees his estate alongside his 73-year-old son, Dmitri. Dmitri Nabokov—henceforth Mr.  read more »

James Frey’s novel Bright Shiny Morning is coming out in two weeks, which means the publicity department at HarperCollins is in the thick of what has to be an unusually challenging public-relations campaign.

With director of publicity Tina Andreadis in charge, the team has done a knockout job so far. The biggest coup is the softball profile of Mr. Frey that will appear in this month’s Vanity Fair, which paints Mr. Frey as a wounded victim of market forces.  read more »

Portfolio, the business imprint of Penguin Group USA, paid over $350,000 for the rights to a book by Peter Elkind about the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Mr. Elkind, who wrote a cover story about Mr. Spitzer for Fortune in 2005, will be collaborating with filmmaker Alex Gibney, who is working on a Spitzer documentary, the release of which will be timed to the publication of the book.  read more »

An incendiary essay by New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier about Martin Amis’ recent essay collection on 9/11 and the evils of Islamism ran on the cover of the New York Times Book Review last weekend. The review was an evisceration, built on Mr. Wieseltier’s contention that Mr. Amis aestheticizes politics and tragedy for his own narcissistic purposes.

Sample snippet: “Amis is the sort of writer who will never say ‘city’ when he can say ‘conurbation.’ In his first article about Sept.  read more »

Speaking at Harvard yesterday during a discussion with literary critic James Wood, Jonathan Franzen said that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times.”

He was referring, of course, to Michiko Kakutani, who presumably got on Mr. Franzen's bad side with her brutal review of his recent memoir, The Discomfort Zone. In that review, Ms. Kakutani wrote: "there is something oddly preening about [Franzen's] self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable." Also: "Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about [Franzen's unhappy marriage] or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery."  read more »

Liz Perl has resigned her post as the publisher of Rodale Books and taken a senior marketing position at Simon & Schuster's adult publishing group. Ms. Perl, who served at the helm of Rodale from the spring of 2006 until last March when former Bloomsbury USA head Karen Rinaldi was installed as general manager and publishing director, became well-known in the publishing community during the 1990s, when she worked at Penguin as director of publicity and later as director of marketing.

In her new capacity as senior vice president of marketing, Ms. Perl will oversee advertising and promotion at S&S's flagship imprint, as well as Atria, Free Press, Pocket Books, Scribner, and Touchstone-Fireside. She will report to Michael Selleck, S&S's executive VP of sales and marketing.

Calls to Ms. Perl and Ms. Rinaldi have not yet been returned.

Memo to Rodale staff from Ms. Rinaldi after the jump.  read more »

The inscrutable Mike Huckabee has secured a book deal with Sentinel, the conservative imprint of Penguin Group USA that also recently acquired Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs.

From the announcement: "Governor Huckabee's book will lay out his optimistic vision for America's future and explain how the conservative movement can return to its principles, unify its factions, and take back America."

More on this later, maybe!

Sixty-six-year-old Carole Mallory has had many famous lovers, among them, she says, Robert De Niro, Sean Connery, Richard Gere and Rod Stewart. “I rejected Jack Nicholson,” she told Pub Crawl in a phone interview Friday. “And I enjoyed Warren Beatty.”

Towering above them all was the late Norman Mailer, whom Ms. Mallory, a former model, actress and journalist, met at Elaine’s one night in 1983 and dated for nine years thereafter.  read more »

Word from Knopf is that Sonny Mehta is still in negotiations with Andrew Wylie about what to do with The Beginners, the controversial volume of unedited, Gordon Lish-less Raymond Carver stories that Knopf originally published in 1981 as What We Talk About. Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, has long been trying to get The Beginners into print, arguing that it is more faithful to her late husband’s vision for his stories than the version that was published. Mr. Wylie took up the Carver account last year, after differences over the drafts project led Ms.  read more »

Dale Peck and Rick Moody are not in a fight anymore. They actually e-mailed recently, and next Tuesday night, they will appear, together, at a book-themed charity bake sale at the Montauk Club that will benefit Sangam House, a nonprofit writer’s colony in India. This is a startling thing, because Mr. Peck once reviewed one of Mr. Moody’s books in The New Republic and called him “the worst writer of his generation.” Something like a feud followed. Six years later, it is, at least superficially, coming to an end. On Tuesday, according to event organizer D. W.  read more »

Literary agents at ICM are preparing for a visit from Bob Miller, the veteran publisher who left his longtime post atop Hyperion earlier this month to start an experimental publishing “studio” at HarperCollins. Mr. Miller has declared his intention to eschew industry conventions by paying authors small advances and offering them a more generous profit share of 50 percent.  read more »

Often what people first notice when they meet Jon-Jon Goulian are his pelvic bones, which are magnificent. Other times it’s the menacing tattoos that run up and down his arms and across his neck, which sort of make him look like a race car. His jaw is quite striking, too; he is always using it to flirt, interrupt himself and chew gum with impressive vigor.

Mr. Goulian, 40, is a graduate of N.Y.U. Law and an alumnus of The New York Review of Books, where he worked as an assistant to the editor, Robert Silvers, from 2001 until 2005.  read more »

Jon-Jon Goulian, the bewildering intellectual androgyne who spent four years assisting Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books, has sold a memoir to Random House for what a publishing source said was a sum in the high six figures.

Executive editor Kate Medina acquired the book in a preempt; literary agents Edward Orloff and Sarah Chalfant of The Wylie Agency, who submitted the proposal to several houses around town before receiving Ms. Medina's offer, brokered the deal.

Mr. Orloff said Mr. Goulian's book is tentatively titled The Man In the Gray Flannel Skirt: A Memoir Of Androgyny, presumably a reference to his days as a cross-dresser.

Though he hails from La Jolla and looks more like a street-tough surfer than a member of New York's delicate and droopy intelligentsia-in-training, Mr. Goulian's menacing tattoos, skin-tight tanktops, and frenetic manner have made him one of the most recognizable unknowns in New York letters. And although he has never published a book and has been more or less unemployed since he left the New York Review in 2005, he has achieved nothing short of iconic status in the publishing community here.  read more »

Last week, the novelist and former literary critic Dale Peck closed a gasp-inducing $3 million book deal. Admittedly, $3 million in this case sounds like more than it is. First off, it’s for a trilogy. And second, Mr. Peck has to split it with his co-writer, Tim Kring, creator of the hit television show Heroes. In the words of the agent who sold it, the idea is Robert Ludlum meets Don DeLillo, the story of a man who discovers that he has superpowers because of LSD experiments conducted on him in secret by the C.I.A.  read more »

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld secured a book deal yesterday from Sentinel, the conservative publishing imprint of Penguin Books USA. Sentinel publisher Adrian Zackheim acquired the book via Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, who represents many of Washington's most powerful figures when they decide to write books and often gets them enormous, seven-figure advances.

Mr. Barnett did not conduct an auction for the book, according to someone familiar with the negotiations who would not speak for attribution. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld was presented with "several large offers" before deciding to go with Sentinel.

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Heroes creator Tim Kring is collaborating with literary critic and novelist Dale Peck on a sci-fi/alternative-history trilogy that was sold at auction to Crown yesterday for an advance said to be worth a staggering $3 million.

According to an industry source, the book is set in America, and runs from the 1960s to the near future. The protagonist is a man named Chandler Forrest whose participation in LSD experiments administered by the C.I.A. has given him superpowers.  read more »

The book world jumped a little in its seat last week when HarperCollins C.E.O. Jane Friedman announced that she’d hired Hyperion president Bob Miller to form an “innovative and creative” new publishing unit. It was shocking enough that Ms. Friedman had managed to hire Mr. Miller away from Hyperion after 17 years to run the new shop. But the business model the two of them had in mind?  read more »

Members of Norman Mailer's family are in the process of developing a new writer's colony based at Mailer's longtime home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, it was announced at Carnegie Hall this evening at the end of a memorial honoring the late writer.

Lawrence Schiller, who collaborated with Mailer on a number of books and counted him among his closest friends, said that an advisory board, consisting of Günter Grass, Joan Didion, William Kennedy, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, has been formed.  read more »

Over the weekend, news spread among the vast global network of Lonely Planet travel guide writers that one of their own had gone native.

His name is Thomas Kohnstamm. He worked for Lonely Planet for three straight years, contributing to guidebooks on South America and the Caribbean. Now, at 32, he has written a book of his own, to be published on April 22 by an imprint of Random House. It’s about his experiences as a delinquent travel guide writer who cut every corner because he was so short on time and money.

The main idea, Mr. Kohnstamm explained yesterday, is that “even on a good day, a fair amount of what ends up in a guidebook is arbitrary, and therefore people shouldn’t necessarily treat them as gospel.” The book is called Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? It’s Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, but with tourism.  read more »

When Rob Weisbach announced last week that he was resigning as president of Weinstein Books, many in the publishing world said they wouldn’t be surprised if the imprint he created three years ago from the ashes of Miramax Books would be allowed to die as quietly as it lived.

Mr. Weisbach’s famously mercurial filmmaker boss, Harvey Weinstein, seemed to have lost interest in the book business after he and his brother left their home at the Disney Company, and it was widely known that Mr. Weisbach had been looking for a new job for months.

“There’s only so much Harvey to go around,” said one insider source, “and his attentions were focused on the core businesses of the Weinstein Company: film and television and home entertainment … which leaves very little Harvey for books. Ultimately, Rob was there with virtually nothing to do. And eventually even high-paying jobs where you have nothing to do become onerous.”  read more »

Dan Barber, the chef and restaurateur who operates the celebrated Greenwich Village restaurant Blue Hill, has found a publisher for that book of food stories he was shopping last month. According to his literary agent David Black-- whom Mr. Barber met when he came to dinner at Blue Hill-- the book was acquired by the Penguin Press about a week after the proposal went out.

The Penguin Press, one of the most prestigious publishers of non-fiction in town, is a logical home for Mr. Barber, a vocal advocate of sustainable agriculture and locally-grown food whose intellectual predelictions are not dissimilar from those of Michael Pollan, who is also published there.  read more »

Steve Ross, president and publisher of the Collins division at HarperCollins, is at the Ziegfeld right now, a couple of blocks from the company tower, seeing the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light with his entire staff. Mr. Ross said in an e-mail that it was a morale-boosting event—a Friday tradition, in fact, that he started when he was president of Crown.  read more »

The publishing world was stunned yesterday by two major resignations, as Rob Weisbach, founding president of Weinstein Books, and Bob Miller, founding president of Hyperion, both announced that they were vacating their positions to pursue other opportunities.

No word yet on what Mr. Weisbach's next move will be—he hasn't returned our calls, though a Weinstein spokesman told us he does have a job in publishing lined up—but Mr. Miller is heading to HarperCollins, where he will head a new, nontraditional publishing "studio" that will put out 25 short, low-priced hardcover titles per year. Mr. Miller will work with a small staff and report directly to company CEO Jane Friedman, with whom he has been friends for almost 30 years.  read more »

Robert Miller, the founding president of Disney's publishing operation Hyperion, has stepped down to take a job at HarperCollins. Hyperion's publisher Ellen Archer, who has been with the company for nine years, has been promoted to president effective immediately. Ms. Archer will report to Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney-ABC Television Group.

Hyperion loses its president just three months after losing its editor-in-chief Will Schwalbe in January.  read more »

Rob Weisbach, president and C.E.O. of Weinstein Books, is leaving the company "to pursue other publishing opportunities," reports Michael Cader at industry resource Web site Publisher's Marketplace. Harvey and Bob Weinstein brought Mr. Weisbach in as head of Miramax Books back in 2005, just as they were preparing to split from Disney and form their own company. When that new company was formed, Mr. Weisbach moved into the job he has held until today.

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Last summer, HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman gathered her executive staff in a conference room on the 11th floor of the book publisher’s office and introduced a smiley, excitable fellow who had just been hired to make some big changes at the company.  read more »

Matthew Benjamin, the editor best known for acquiring surprise blockbusters The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls, is coming back to the Collins division of HarperCollins after a seven month-long stint at the indie house Workman Publishing. He will serve as a senior editor in the wellness/lifestyle unit of the division, which has been on an aggressive hiring spree as of late, where he will report to Mary Ellen O'Neill.  read more »

The Collins division of HarperCollins had gone almost two weeks without announcing a new hire. That ended this morning when they sent out a press release about Caroline Sutton, whom they've recruited from Ballantine and installed as executive editor within their health/wellness operation.

Ms. Sutton is the fourth executive editor Collins has hired since January. (The last one was the conservative Adam Bellow.) HarperCollins is growing the Collins division really, really aggressively, and allowing Steve Ross, who was installed as president last summer with the mandate to revive the Collins brand, to spend all kinds of money on assembling a formidable team.

Ms. Sutton starts at Collins on April 14th.

Doubleday has acquired North American rights to bestselling Shadow of the Wind-author Carlos Ruiz Zafon's new book, following an intense seven figure auction that came to a head when Doubleday's publisher, Steve Rubin, found himself facing off against Deb Futter, the new editor-in-chief of Grand Central Publishing's adult division whom Mr. Rubin trained in the ways of the business when she worked for him. Both Mr. Rubin and Ms. Futter were apparently in the auction-- conducted by Tom Colchie on behalf of Spanish-based literary agent Antonia Kerrigan-- until the very end.

Ms. Futter and had been working at Doubleday for many years, and serving as deputy editorial director there when she left for her new job. She started at Grand Central in January.

Alison Rich, the executive director of publicity at Doubleday, confirmed that Mr. Rubin had acquired the book, and that Doubleday editor-in-chief Bill Thomas will edit. Ms. Rich would not comment on the size of the advance. It is tentatively scheduled for publication in summer 2009, with a paperback from Broadway paperback to follow a year later. Mr. Zafon's first novel was published in the United States by the Penguin Press.   read more »

It was a cheeky idea, listing Chris Napolitano as a co-host last night at Hotel QT. Imagine, the editor of Playboy magazine co-hosting a party in honor of a book on Christianity, Daniel Radosh’s new one: Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.

Some of the people Mr. Radosh interviewed as part of his research for the book came to the party, too. Everyone else was either a Scribner editor or Nick Denton/Maer Roshan. Jeff Bercovici and Alex Balk were there, too; also fully nine people besides Mr. Napolitano who worked at Playboy and maybe a dozen Oberlin grads.

A 58-year-old Vietnam veteran named Chris MacIntosh, who hosts a Christian rock radio show out of a college station in Long Island, stood by the wall in the back. Mr. Radosh had come up to his studio to visit him when he was working on his book.  read more »

“Oh my God, my life was a total mess,” said 42-year-old Cathy Alter. “Seriously, I was married for almost five years, unhappily. … We hadn’t had sex in a really long time. I felt like his mommy—it just wasn’t good for me. I just felt kind of mean all the time. Mean and angry. And when I finally left and went through my divorce, I went crazy. I felt like I was back in college. I was sick all the time. I was hanging around with some really fast people—partying, drinking. These two guys I knew had ‘Sunday Fundays,’ where you’d start with mimosas and drink all day long and have a nightcap at midnight.”

Not so long before these dark days, Ms. Alter had been calling herself a writer: Her byline appeared with some regularity in prominent magazines and newspapers, and in 2004 she put together a book, Virgin Territory: The Road to Womanhood, for a major publishing house. Now, she was working a dead-end day job and spending all her free time getting loaded. For lunch she ate animal crackers and Doritos from a vending machine, and for a midday snack she was having sex on her desk with a guy named Bruno who worked in the cubicle next to hers.  read more »

“It’s okay with me. It’s a surf-and-turf kind of deal.” Sixty-nine-year-old Richard Ellis was talking about the fact that in May, two months before Knopf publishes his book Tuna: A Love Story, Putnam will be publishing a book by Susan Bourette called Meat: A Love Story. Mr. Ellis’ book is about the endangered bluefin tuna, which he calls “the fastest, smartest, most highly evolved fish in the ocean.” Ms. Bourette’s book is about traveling the world to taste and think about different kinds of meat.  read more »

Laura Bush is writing a children’s book with her daughter. Publishers in New York want Michelle Obama to write a grown-up book, by herself. Although her husband Barack has not yet secured the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Ms. Obama has been approached by “over a dozen” publishers so far, according to Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a communications director for Ms. Obama.

Most of the calls have been going through Robert Barnett, the D.C. lawyer who represented Ms.  read more »

Ben Loehnen was just a rookie editor at Random House when he convinced Professor Chip Heath of Stanford Business School to write a trade book based on his academic work on organizational behavior in business. When Mr. Heath agreed, Mr. Loehnen bought the rights to the project in what turned out to be a very shrewd preempt. Appealing to the same species-wide impulses satisfied by Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die has shipped 200,000 hardcover copies to date.  read more »

Anton Mueller, who was laid off from Houghton Mifflin last month, has found a new job at Bloomsbury USA, a house that recently suffered an upheaval when founding President Karen Rinaldi resigned and went to work for someone else.  read more »

You know that funny Web site Stuff White People Like, the one with the