Leon Neyfakh

In the paper today we talked to some publishing people about why more reporters out on the campaign trail aren't working on books about the election—and why the handful who are doing it think it's a good idea. One campaign book that has already bitten the dust is right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt's How Sarah Palin Won the Election ... and Saved America, which the literary agent Curtis Yates sent to publishers in New York last week.

When Media Mob reached Mr. Yates by phone on Monday, he'd already given up on trying to sell the book.  read more »

Are the editors and agents who said it would be impossible to write or publish a worthwhile postgame recap of the 2008 election having second thoughts now that the race has turned out to be so much fun?

Michael Takiff, an oral historian preparing to go out with a proposal for precisely that kind of book, hopes they are.

His literary agent, young up-and-comer Jason Ashlock of the Marianne Strong Agency, describes Mr. Takiff’s book as a spiritual heir to the late Theodore White’s classic, The Making of the President, a novelistic ticktock that gave readers an inside look at the presidential race of 1960 and offered a level of detail that daily reporters didn’t have room for in their copy.  read more »

The New York Times this morning has the second in reporter Motoko Rich's series on the future of reading, focusing this time on video games and whether they are making kids more or less likely to enjoy reading books.  read more »

Earlier this week it was reported in the New York Post that Tina Fey had received an offer of $6 million to write a book.

Late this afternoon, according to a source with firsthand knowledge of the deal, she finalized an agreement with Little, Brown & Co. The book—which was reportedly pitched as a book of humorous essays in the style of Nora Ephron—will be edited by executive editor Reagan Arthur.  read more »

Due to prohibitive financial circumstances, the independent publishing house Atlas & Co. will not be able to publish the books scheduled for its spring 2009 list as planned, and will aim instead to release them the following fall.

Founded just last year by veteran New York editor James Atlas, the house has inspired affection and respect among members of the city's literary community and has published a number of critically acclaimed titles—among them Louis Begley's study of Franz Kafka, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, and Wojciech Tochman's Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia, which earned a rave review in this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review.  read more »

A few weeks ago we noted that a lot of publishers have been quick to find a silver lining in the financial crisis, fluidly moving to either redirect their publicity strategies for banking/money-related titles they've already published, or to refashion ones that they're still working on to better tap into recent developments.

Now we can add to that list Charles Morris's The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, which was published by PublicAffairs back in March. According to Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs, Mr. Morris's book will hilariously be reissued once the dust settles under the title The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown. Double down!  read more »

Good googly moogly! Keith Kelly reports in The New York Post this morning that literary agent Richard Abate has publishers going nuts at the prospect of a book by Tina Fey.

We heard earlier this week that Mr. Abate was boldly asking for $5 million, but apparently someone has since offered him six. All that without Ms. Fey writing any sort of proposal or taking any meetings, according to Mr. Kelly, which really brings that whole "book publishing is like gambling" meme you read about recently in New York Magazine to a new level.

Then again, maybe the seemingly astronomical price tag is not so strange, considering recent books by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have both sold extremely well.

Mercifullly, according to the Post, Ms. Fey is not interested in writing a memoir, but rather a humor book.

From the outside, it looked like a colossal failure of management: a case of crossed wires, perhaps, or the result of overpowering pressures combining with such force that the people in charge had no option but to do what they did.

What else could explain Susan Peterson Kennedy’s decision last week to allow three of the biggest imprints under her jurisdiction at Penguin Group USA to sign up books on the same exact topic in the span of just 48 hours?

That topic, of course, was the crisis on Wall Street—a crisis that apparently did not discourage Ms. Kennedy, Penguin’s president, from green-lighting an extraordinary shopping spree that left many in the industry scratching their heads and that is estimated to have cost the company more than $2 million.  read more »

From Janet Maslin's review of Alice Schroeder's new Warren Buffett biography The Snowball:

Ms. Schroeder is as insightful about her subject’s precise anticipation of current financial crises as she is about his quirky personal story. And she is a clear explicator of fiscal issues. This sprawling, colorful biography will mesmerize anyone interested in who Mr. Buffett is or how he got that way.

A photo of Mr. Buffett at age 2 shows him grinning cryptically while clutching a toy tightly to his chest. It goes without saying that he was an unusual child.

Here's the photo she's referring to, which appears to show a toddler with a toy. Cryptic, indeed.

Any Penguin editors out there still need a book about the Wall Street crisis? Because Media Mob has learned of another one going on the market soon, this time from CNBC's David Faber. The book will be published before the end of the year, according to someone with firsthand knowledge of the project, a feat possible only because Mr. Faber has been working on a documentary for CNBC about the origins of the credit crisis and thus has all of his reporting—something like a hundred hours of interviews total, we're told—already in the can.

Literary agent Scott Waxman will shop Mr. Faber's book to publishers.  read more »

After initially turning down his offer and sending their book proposal out to other publishers in hopes of getting a higher advance, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean—of The New York Times and Vanity Fair, respectively—have agreed to write their account of the crisis on Wall Street for Adrian Zackheim at Portfolio, the business imprint of Penguin Group USA.

Theirs is the third book on the crisis that Penguin Group USA has signed in approximately 48 hours. The first was Roger Lowenstein's Six Days That Shook the World, which Ann Godoff at Penguin Press acquired Wednesday; the second was Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail, which Viking won at auction yesterday afternoon for what several sources said was a sum in the high six figures.  read more »

Last weekend The Guardian published an interview with Philip Roth in which he suggested that Marcus Messner, the narrator from his new novel, Indignation, is not dead while he's telling his story—as pretty much every critic thought—but rather hallucinating as a result of a morphine high. In a radio interview set to air tomorrow at noon on WNYC, Philip Roth tells Leonard Lopate the same thing in no uncertain terms.

Here's the transcript:

LL: There is a critic who suggested that Marcus is not really dead but speaking from an altered morphine-induced state of consciousness.

PR: Well that's what I think.

LL: Oh, that's what you think?

PR: Yeah.

 read more »

On Monday we heard that, like every other financial reporter in the city, The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin was mulling the possibility of writing a book about the crisis on Wall Street. On Tuesday we heard his agent had sent a proposal out to some editors, and by the end of the workday yesterday, an auction was under way.

Now we know, thanks to two people with firsthand knowledge of the proceedings, that Mr. Sorkin is inches away from a book deal with Viking. The acquiring editor is Rick Kot.

Mr. Sorkin's book is just one of many spawned by the ongoing economic turmoil.  read more »

Richard Abate, the Endeavor Talent Agency's man in New York, has sold a trilogy about vampires by film director Guillermo Del Toro and thriller author Chuck Hogan to the William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins. You can be sure this was a multi-million dollar deal, with an advance somewhere in the neighborhood of the $3 million dollars Mr. Abate got from Crown last spring for the Tim Kring/Dale Peck trilogy.

According to an announcement from HarperCollins, the first novel in Mr. Del Toro's series will launch next summer, and will center on "the invasion of New York City by a vampiric virus."

Brooke Geahan, the 20-something founder of the Accompanied Literary Society, has made a career of throwing scruffy readers and writers together with scenesters and socialites, and using the dim light of glamorous venues to make them look significantly more attractive than they might elsewhere. She was up to her old tricks on Wednesday, Sept. 25, when the Accompanied Literary Society threw a party in conjunction with Diesel, in the penthouse of a new luxury condominium in Tribeca called One York, at the intersection of Canal and Sixth Avenue.

The gathering was in honor of "Flash Fiction," a public art project of sorts in which 10 short stories—commissioned from authors such as Jonathan Ames, Colum McCann, Sloane Crosley, Jonathan Lethem, and Jay McInerney—were screened on the side of the building.  read more »

At the end of Pub Crawl this morning we offered a short (and incomplete) list of books that financial reporters were either working on or done with that are likely to be affected by what happened on Wall Street last week. Among them was The Sellout, by CNBC scoop artist Charles Gasparino, which is described by its publisher, Collins Business, as a chronicle of "how the leaders of numerous major U.S. banks—including Bear Stearns' Jimmy Cayne—caused their firms to lose billions of dollars" by dealing recklessly with subprime mortgages."

Collins announced Mr. Gasparino's book through a posting on the Publishers Lunch deal wire just over a week after the collapse of Bear Stearns.  read more »

Lorenzo Benet, who penned People Magazine's cover story on Sarah Palin a few weeks back, has signed on to do a full-length biography of the vice presidential candidate for Threshold Editions, the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster that employs former Bush advisor Mary Matalin and which recently published Jerome Corsi's bestselling anti-Obama book, The Obama Nation.

According to Mr. Benet's agent, Jarred Weisfeld of Objective Entertainment, the book will be out sometime in February, which means at least three months will have passed since the election.  read more »

This morning's Pub Crawl closed out with a short list of books that were signed up well before last week's banking crisis took over the country's collective imagination. Some of these were conceived after the fall of Bear Stearns, and are now being expanded to cover more recent developments; others, like Charles Ellis’ history of Goldman Sachs, which was signed up about two years and comes out early next month, are staying the course and hoping to tap into the feverish interest in banking/finance that the recent gloom has inspired in so many.

The point is we left some books out. Namely:  read more »

• Harry S.

In this morning's paper, we said Roger Lowenstein is "considering" writing a book about the banking crisis that tore through Wall Street last week. Turns out he had his mind made up! According to the Publishers Marketplace dealwire, Six Days That Shook the World, "a look at last week on Wall Street and in Washington, illuminating the origins of the crisis," has been sold to Ann Godoff at The Penguin Press.

The announcement doesn't say when the book will come out. If it weren't Penguin Press, the tentative subtitle—which limits its wingspan to just the past week—might indicate that the book was going to get the "crash" treatment, meaning Mr.  read more »

Is it time yet to start pulling together books about last week’s catastrophe on Wall Street? Publishers are uneasy about making plans too soon, but the city’s finest financial journalists—and their literary agents—are eager to get moving.

“There are probably two dozen writers in search of a book, but if you don’t have an idea, you have to wait and watch and see how it unfolds,” said Tim Duggan, VP and executive editor at Harper who specializes in nonfiction. “Maybe there will be a story there in a couple months’ time, when the picture is clearer, but right now the financial climate has been changing dramatically every 24 hours, if not more, so what it will look like in three months’ time could be very, very different.  read more »

An interview with Philip Roth in this past weekend's Guardian suggests that the narrator of Roth's new novel, Indignation, might not be telling his story from the grave as so many reviewers have understood, but rather that he's in some sort of pre-death morphine haze. In the book, the big reveal is plain enough: the character basically says "I am [dead] and have been for I don't know how long." Robert McCrum of The Guardian though, writes, "it is ambiguous how much his memories are actually posthumous or feverishly imagined on the point of death."

Then the kicker:

In American literature, the 'posthumous novel' is a rare device, exploited most recently in Alice Sebold's bestseller The Lovely Bones.  read more »

Jocelyn Zuckerman's original idea was to send David Foster Wallace to the Oxford Food Symposium, an academic conference for wonky food historians. Mr. Wallace couldn't go because the thing was being held in September and thus interfered with his teaching schedule at Pomona College. Determined to get him into the pages of Gourmet, Ms. Zuckerman came back with another pitch-the Scotch Whiskey Festival—only to find out that Mr. Wallace didn't drink. So she suggested the Maine Lobster Festival.

Mr. Wallace took the assignment.

The first thing he did, Ms. Zuckerman said this afternoon from a hotel room in Berlin, was ask for an assistant to send him everything that Gourmet had ever published on the subject of lobsters.  read more »

The last book David Foster Wallace published before his suicide last Friday was McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express, a souped-up edition of the classic piece on the 2000 election originally published in Rolling Stone and later anthologized in Consider the Lobster along with a thorough, at points severe foreword about how the piece almost didn't happen because the editors at Rolling Stone couldn't make up their mind about whether they wanted it or not:

At first I was supposed to follow McCain around in New Hampshire as he campaigned for 1 February's big primary there. Then, around Christmastime, Rolling Stone decided that they wanted to abort the assignment because Governor Bush was way ahead in the polls and outspending McCain ten to one and they thought McCain was going to get flattened in New Hampshire and that his campaign would be over by the time anything could come out in Rolling Stone and that they'd look stupid.  read more »

Earlier this week Media Mob spoke to Gerry Howard, who acquired David Foster Wallace’s first novel and published it as a trade paperback original as part of Penguin’s Contemporary American Fiction line. Wallace stayed with Mr. Howard for his second book, a collection of short stories called Girl With Curious Hair, but when it came time to do something with his second novel, Infinite Jest, his agent Bonnie Nadell—an interview with her can be found here—decided the responsible thing to do was to submit the manuscript to several editors and see how much it could draw. Thus David Foster Wallace came to Little, Brown & Company, where he remained until his death last Friday night.  read more »

The David Lynch piece that David Foster Wallace wrote for Premiere, about life on the set of Lost Highway, was commissioned well before the world met Infinite Jest. This was in late 1995, and it was Susan Lyne, Premiere's founding editor, who made the prescient assignment. Not long after Wallace turned in his first draft, however, Ms. Lyne left the magazine for a job at Disney, and the piece fell to her successor, Chris Connelly, who gave it to an editor named Kristin von Ogtrop. Ms. von Ogtrop -- now the editor-in-chief of homemaking magazine Real Simple -- went to town on the thing, cutting huge chunks out of it for space and thus inspiring Wallace to nickname her "The Blunt Machette" in the acknowledgments page at the end of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, in which the piece was anthologized.  read more »

A short item on Portfolio.com by Lauren Lipton argues that super-producer Scott Rudin was unwise to acquire the rights to Philip Roth's brand new novel Indignation "given Roth's Hollywood track record."

Supporting evidence: "Of his many tomes, only a few have made it to the big screen to date."

Few here means five. Those five are, in order of release:  read more »

• The 1969 adaptation of his "breakout novel"—actually just a long short story—Goodbye, Columbus, which we learn here was "well-reviewed."
• 1972's Portnoy's Complaint, which was "panned by critics."
• 2003's The Human Stain, which cost $30 million to make but earned only $25 million at the box office.

One thing we're going to try to do here this week at Media Mob is talk to some of the people who got the chance to edit David Foster Wallace over the course of his career.

Who knows how many of them we'll actually track down—there are lots, because DFW wrote pieces for so many different magazines—but we begin today with Doubleday editor-at-large Gerry Howard, who acquired and edited Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System when he was at Penguin in the mid-1980s, and his first collection of short stories, Girl With Curious Hair, a few years later at Norton.  read more »

In Pub Crawl today we have an item about the book David Foster Wallace was working on at the time of his death. Bonnie Nadell, the literary agent who discovered Mr. Wallace in the slush pile when she was a 25-year-old rookie and who continued representing him until the end of his life, told us what little she knew about this unfinished work, but explained that Wallace never really showed anyone anything until he was done with it.

She told us a lot of other things too, and because we couldn't fit it all into the paper, we thought we'd share it here.  read more »

There’s an episode of Sex and the City, about halfway through the first season, in which Carrie learns that Mr. Big used to be married. His ex is a publisher, and Carrie decides to check her out by scheduling an appointment with her under the pretense that she has a book to pitch. When she gets to this lady’s office, Carrie realizes that she only does children’s books, and finds herself having to improvise. After stammering for a second, she makes a half-hearted pitch for a book about a girl who has magic cigarettes that let her “go anywhere in the whole wide world, like Arabia or New Jersey.  read more »

“People are asking us, ‘Is there anything unpublished? Is there anything sitting in a drawer?’ But David was very fortunate, in that everything he wrote got published and published well.” Bonnie Nadell, the literary agent who found David Foster Wallace’s first novel in a slush pile 23 years ago, was speaking from her office in San Francisco. It was within the first few months of her job as a junior agent at a firm there that she came across the first chapter of The Broom of the System, the novel Wallace wrote while an M.F.A. student at the University of Arizona. Before long she sold it to Gerry Howard at Penguin; she remained Wallace’s agent until his death last Friday.  read more »

When he left Iraq in August 2006, Dexter Filkins didn’t expect to return anytime soon. He’d been there, reporting for The New York Times, since the U.S. invaded three years earlier. Before that he was in Afghanistan, covering a different war. He’d filled 561 notebooks over the course of his years in the Middle East, and that felt like enough: As he put it last week in an interview with The Observer, he was pretty wiped out.

He said this over the phone, speaking from The Times’ Baghdad bureau. He’d been there a month. The city was calmer than it was when he’d left it two years before, he said, and it felt good to be back.  read more »

Blogger Ed Champion posts a tall pile of tributes to the late David Foster Wallace today from literary figures of all stripes. At the top of the pile, the critic James Wood, who is not known as DFW's biggest fan, who had this to say:

I was terribly saddened to hear this news. Whatever one felt about his work, it was hard to imagine any serious reader of fiction not being intensely interested in what he was going to do next. I had been looking forward to witnessing his literary journey, and to adjusting my own opinions and prejudices — or rather, being forced by the quality of the work to do so.

 read more »

This week's issue of New York contains the big "state of publishing" piece that the magazine's book man, Boris Kachka, has been working on for the past few months. Mr. Kachka leads with a charming scene in the HarperStudio office, where publisher Bob Miller and his staff are watching a video of unused books getting mulched in a shredder. Mr. Miller calls it "depressing"; marketing director Sarah Burningham says it it reminds her of Wall-E. Kachka goes on to suggests that it's only shops like HarperStudio—bold enough to try untested business models, eager to do a lot with a little, etc.—that can keep the publishing industry alive as technology continues to push paper further and further into the margins.  read more »

Suzanne Gluck of the William Morris Agency did not wait around very long after Serena Williams won the US Open last week to go out with the proposal for the tennis star's memoir.

Offers were due Tuesday, according to sources directly involved in the proceedings, and publishers submitted them knowing that per Ms. Gluck's terms, only the three highest bidders would be allowed to compete for the book. A report in Crain's late yesterday afternoon said the price stands at almost $1 million, and that Ms. Gluck and Ms. Williams are planning on meeting with top bidders next week.

Bob Miller has unveiled the 23 titles that will make up his first list at HarperStudio, the imprint he started last spring at HarperCollins with the goal of finding a model for book publishing that doesn't rely on paying authors outsize advances or allowing retailers to return unsold stock. Mr. Miller's announcement, which he made this morning on HarperStudio's new blog, brings to an end several months of industry-wide speculation about just what kinds of projects he'd be able to sign up.

The most eye-catching title on the list is probably the collection of short, unpublished humor pieces by Mark Twain, which will be out in April.  read more »

As many of you have surely heard by now, 22-year-old Lauren Conrad from MTV's reality show The Hills got a book contract today from Lisa Sharkey at HarperCollins. Is it a tell-all she's going to write? No! Try three novels for teens, the first of which, L.A. Candy, "tells the behind-the scenes story of a young girl who moves to L.A. and unexpectedly becomes the star of a reality television show." It's kind of like when Dan Humphrey from Gossip Girl wrote a short story for The New Yorker, except, like, the other way around!

Actually, "behind-the-scenes" is pretty funny, all things considered. And besides, it's not like Ms. Conrad is the first fictional character to write a real-life book. Most famous among them is probably JT Leroy. Also the lady from All My Children, Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, and the cartoon baby from Family Guy.

In today's paper, we discuss the conundrum faced by publishers eager to jump on the Sarah Palin bandwagon but who are unable to do so because there's not enough time before the election to get a book written, printed, and distributed. The only house with a Palin bio on the market at the moment is Epicenter Press, a tiny operation run out of Washington State that specializes in books about Alaska. They put out Kaylene Johnson's Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska’s Political Establishment Upside Down in the spring, and had to print about quite a few extra copies of it when McCain named Palin as his VP two Fridays ago.  read more »

Rachel Sussman knew there was a book to be written about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as soon as John McCain announced two Fridays ago that she would be his running mate on the Republican ticket. It was soon discovered that one already existed, and that the tiny house that had published it—Epicenter Press in Kenmore, Wash., whose publisher is its only full-time employee and which specializes in books about dog-sled racing—was about to make a killing.

   read more »

Sam Tanenhaus, head honcho at The New York Times Book Review, announced today in a memo that Gregory Cowles, a fellow who has been helping out around the NYTBR in various ways since he joined the copy desk in 2004, has been promoted to preview editor. For some reason this is what they call the people responsible for choosing the books, finding reviewers, and editing their stuff; Mr. Cowles, according to the memo, will focus his energies on "new and emerging fiction voices."

The announcement comes a few days after the Review lost Rachel Donadio, who edited and wrote essays for the back of the book, to the NYT's Rome bureau.

Full memo below:  read more »

Bookish hunk James Franco, who spent his free time during the filming of his latest movie reading the collected works of Thomas Pynchon, has signed on to star in the Gus Van Sant-produced Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl. The movie, written and directed by documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, will also feature David Strathairn, Alan Alda, Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker and Paul Rudd. According to Hollywood Reporter, the film will focus on the obscenity trial surrounding the 1957 American publication of Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl."

Hopefully Mr. Franco will not go overboard in his attempts to mimic Ginsberg: if he goes too far he might end up getting kicked out of Columbia, where he enrolled in an MFA program this fall.  read more »

“It was something that kept persisting, and eventually I just stepped out of the way and let it happen,” said Bill Clegg, the prominent literary agent from William Morris. “It was somethin