Mark Sarvas has read James Wood’s new book three times already. That’s a lot, especially considering Farrar Straus & Giroux, its U.S. publisher, only put it out yesterday. But Mr. Sarvas, a lit blogger (his site is called The Elegant Variation) who recently published his first novel, really, really likes James Wood. He has a Google alert on his name, even, and thinks this new book he’s written, a concise and spirited defense of realism called How Fiction Works, is going to be “a key text of this age.”

“It just feels fundamental to me,” Mr. Sarvas said Monday. “I’m going to urge it on anyone who’s thinking about setting pen to paper to write a novel.  read more »

New York Times columnist David Carr’s forthcoming addiction memoir The Night of the Gun, the carefully reported—that is, not vaguely remembered and pieced together—tour de force that was excerpted on the cover of The New York Times Magazine this past weekend, features lots and lots of minor characters. Dealers, cops, girlfriends, pals, fellow junkies—they all pass in and out, some staying in Mr. Carr’s bumpy orbit for years and others sticking around only as long as they needed to.

One of these minor characters is a guy named “DonJack,” who comes up a couple of times over the course of the book but never really comes to life.  read more »

When Pam Dorman decided this past May to return to Viking Books—where she’d been an editor for 19 years—she had not been gone for very long. It was just two and a half years ago, in January 2006, when she announced she would be leaving to start her own boutique imprint at Hyperion.

By the time of the switch, Ms. Dorman had established herself at Viking as an editor with a rare intuition for spotting debut novels of a certain character that could sell millions of copies. Bridget Jones’s Diary was hers. Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, too. Also Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and Jacquelyn Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean.  read more »

So, hands please: Who assumed Pitchfork had already put out, like, a million books? It’s basically the oldest Web site on the Internet. Considering how little it takes these days, you’d think they’d have seized on the branding opportunities much sooner. But, no: Turns out Pitchfork—for the uninitiated, a hugely influential music site that has been spiritedly covering indie music and shaping hipster consciousness since it appeared in 1995—is just now getting ready to publish its first professional book.

According to Pitchfork editor in chief Scott Plagenhoef, the book will be a paperback guide to the 500 best songs released since 1977.  read more »

The boy from Alabama who recently threw a punch at the New York literary world in an intense, widely read letter to The New York Times Book Review came through town this past weekend. Alec Niedenthal, 17, had been to the city once before, but not since his vaguely threatening manifesto made him a micro-celebrity among literary types here and brought him to the attention of literary agents and editors.

In his letter, Alec warned that “the next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, [Foster] Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes” but rather “from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam.  read more »

The Columbia Publishing Course, that postgraduate rite of passage for so many of the book industry’s worker bees, was the scene of a dust-up last Monday when an afternoon panel discussion took an unexpected turn. At stake was nothing less than the honor of fearsome literary agent Andrew Wylie and his firm. If the youngsters in the audience had known better, they might have shielded their eyes.

Earlier that day, one of those youngsters had asked Lindy Hess, the head of the program, why Mr. Wylie seemed to have such a dark reputation. (Can-of-worms alert! This is what happens when people who have never worked in publishing suddenly find themselves immersed in and disoriented by the set of myths and unfamiliar traditions that, taken together, form the consciousness and the heartbeat of this industry.  read more »

These days, calling Andrew Wylie “the Jackal” is about as lame as calling Bruce Springsteen “the Boss” or Richard Nixon “Tricky Dick.” It’s an ancient fossil of a nickname masquerading as a mischievous inside joke, about as amusing as a Big Johnson t-shirt.

Sometimes, though even tired nicknames are apt. Mr. Wylie certainly lived up to that kitschy little epithet last week when he poached three huge writers—Chinua Achebe, Roberto Bolaño and Vladimir Nabokov—from other literary agents and added them quietly to the client list that is posted triumphantly on his Web site.

Of these three giants, only Mr.  read more »

Here’s a fairytale: A 28-year-old Columbia M.F.A. student named Reif Larsen wrote a novel about a whimsical child from Montana who likes maps, and suddenly all kinds of famous editors in New York were calling his agent, Denise Shannon, and telling her they really wanted to publish it.

Norton offered to preempt with an advance in the neighborhood of $400,000 if Ms. Shannon took the book off the market and sold it to the publisher right then and there. The editorial director of Dial Press, an imprint of Random House’s Bantam Dell Doubleday group, offered to pay half a million for the same privilege.  read more »

There was a reading last Tuesday night at a performance space in Chelsea attended by a lot of young publishing types. Some of them had jobs at places like Farrar, Straus & Giroux, The New York Review of Books and the Wylie Agency; some worked at Harper’s magazine and others were in creative writing programs. A lot of these people carried bags full of notepads and things. But one man, seated in the front row, did not. He had only a book, which he held tenderly in his hands.

The book was Philip Roth’s Indignation, and it was a beauty! The cover bifurcated diagonally, half orange and half green; the title written in bold, black Franklin Gothic along the middle split; the author’s name, in pale yellow lettering, in the upper-right-hand corner.  read more »

At 11 a.m. last Wednesday morning, Jane Friedman presided over a meeting with her publishers and some marketing people on the 15th floor of the HarperCollins building in midtown. The meeting was about digital outreach, and offered an occasion to discuss ideas for how the News Corp.-owned publishing house could use computers to sell more books. This meeting, a regular thing, was held once every two or three weeks as part of an initiative called Publishing+ that Ms. Friedman started a few years ago. Last Wednesday’s meeting was devoted to discussing a podcast for BlogTalkRadio.com, as well as an original video that the publicity department had managed to place on a bunch of blogs to promote a recently published memoir about life in a polygamist cult.  read more »