Leon Neyfakh

Earlier this week the literary agent (and former magazine editor) David Kuhn pulled a funny trick, and submitted a novel to publishers across town without telling them who wrote it. The only clue the agent gave was the novel itself, which, according to people who have read it, is told from the perspective of a young boy growing up in the 1980s.

Mr. Kuhn told publishers the identity of the author would be revealed to anyone who expressed an interest in the book.

If it was buzz Mr. Kuhn was after, he got it. Rumors about who the author might be flew immediately among scouts, editors, and other agents.  read more »

Twenty authors attended Wednesday night's National Book Awards ceremony as finalists, each of them selected by a committee of readers made up of poets, novelists, historians, and critics of all stripes. The judges on each of the four committees spent three and a half months reading over a hundred books (the non-fiction judges read 530) before settling on their short-lists last month.

The New York Times reported on the finalists here in a 400-word item that ran in the Arts section. In the case of several of the authors, it was the first time in years that their names had appeared there.  read more »

As far as most publishers were concerned, the battle for polling expert Nate Silver's books came to a close last Friday when Penguin Group USA beat out a number of other houses in an intense best-bid auction that reached a sum in the neighborhood of $700,000.

For several publishers within Penguin, however—that is, all of the ones whose interest in Mr. Silver's books was subsumed under the "house bid" Penguin submitted last week to his literary agent Sydelle Kramer—that was only round one. Round two took place over the course of the past week, as Mr. Silver and his agent considered their options.

There were lots! At least three Penguin imprints were in the mix, among them Geoff Kloske's Riverhead, Paul Slovak's Viking, and Ann Godoff's Penguin Press. Then, as of yesterday, the game was over, and everyone but Ms. Godoff had taken their ball and gone home.

According to Tracy Locke, the publicity director at the Penguin Press, Mr. Silver's two books—one a Freakonomics-style book on polling called Electrometrics and the second a survey of people who predict things for a living—will not be published in the order that the author originally had in mind. The "predictors" one will come out first, though it's unclear exactly when, Ms. Locke said, and the one about polling will come out in time for the 2012 election. Laura Stickney will edit.

At around 1 o'clock Thursday morning, Morgan Entrekin decided it was time to extract himself from the dance floor at Socialista and head home. "I'm having an excellent time!" he said, half empty beer in hand. "I wish I were 20 years younger! I could dance all night."

The reason he couldn't: "I have a 3-year-old! I'm tired, man. I'm old."

Mr. Entrekin used to party. Hasn't in a while. Mostly focused now on running his publishing house, Grove/Atlantic, and hanging with the wife and their little boy.

He seems genuinely fulfilled, a fact he was forced to forget last night when his colleagues in the publishing industry turned to him to reinvigorate the annual dinner known as the National Book Awards and make it fun again.  read more »

"What do you think? Let me know. Meanwhile...see you about a million times this week, I suppose." That's how the Vintage book publicist and essayist Sloane Crosley closed a pitch letter she sent to this reporter on Monday afternoon. Really, what is it with this week? The National Book Awards suddenly make everyone want to go out? Or is it maybe just this whole autumn? That Bolano book launch should have been a red flag: Something, who knows what, is making publishing people want to party their brains out right about now.

Monday night, mere hours after Ms. Crosley sent that email, something like three things started happening practically simultaneously: at the National Arts Club, a  read more »

The UK Independent reports that The Original of Laura, the short novel that Vladimir Nabokov was writing at the time of his death in 1977, is about "an overweight and physically unattractive academic with a brilliant mind who has a 'wildly promiscuous' and unfaithful wife named Flora, whom he married because of her resemblance to a young woman he once loved." Also: "In the novel, which is both playful and dark, Wild toys with the idea of committing suicide."

None of which should be news to anyone who read this Vanity Fair item from last April, in which Nabokov's son Dmitri—whose decision to publish Laura in spite of his father's instructions to burn it—described the book's plot in much greater detail than he's doing now that The Independent has moved him to "finally [break] his silence" about the book's contents.

Speaking of breaking silences, did we mention that Laura will be published by Knopf?  read more »

Most of the people who came to Camilla Morton’s book party at the Diane von Furstenberg showroom last Thursday night appeared to be models or DJs or photographers. Giselle Bündchen arrived in skintight leather pants. A man with a waxed handlebar mustache wandered about wearing glasses. One young lady had on an American Apparel leotard and platform heels that resembled nothing so much as toaster ovens.

Thirty-seven-year-old publisher Carrie Kania, who recently put out the American edition of Ms. Morton’s best-selling style book, A Year in High Heels, looked with excitement at her author’s fashionable friends, but spoke only to her colleagues from Harper Perennial, the small but proud paperback unit of HarperCollins that she has lovingly presided over since the fall of 2005.  read more »

Trident Media Group C.E.O. and literary agent Daniel Strone oversaw two of the season's most high-stakes book auctions last week, fielding eye-popping offers from publishers across the city without giving them so much as a proposal for either project. Sarah Silverman's book, which Mr. Strone sold to HarperCollins on Thursday, went for about $2.5 million dollars. Jerry Seinfeld's, which publishers found out about last Monday, is said to have attracted bids over $7 million.

At this point, Mr. Seinfeld's deal looks like it still hasn't closed, but the sheer number of commas Mr. Strone is juggling has stunned many in the publishing industry.  read more »

Earlier today Media Mob reported that political polling expert Nate Silver, the wunderkind statistician behind the Web site FiveThirtyEight.com, was out with a proposal for two books: one about the art of prediction and the other a Freakonomics-style guide to the mechanics of electoral politics. Mr. Silver's agent, Sydelle Kramer of the Susan Rabiner Agency, told publishers she wanted indications of interest by Tuesday, but evidently the indications came faster than expected (so much for the art of prediction) and Ms. Kramer decided to just hold an auction today.

According to several sources, that auction has ended, and Penguin Group USA has prevailed.  read more »

Thirty-year-old polling wiz Nate Silver, who became a star during the 2008 election with his Web site FiveThirtyEight.com, is looking around for a book deal.

Mr. Silver's statistical skills were ratified when the outcome of the presidential race aligned almost exactly with his final predictions both for the popular vote and the Electoral College breakdown, and thanks to the exposure he received during the past six months on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News (as well as in Newsweek, New York, The New York Times, and numerous other publications), publishers in New York are eager to get him under contract as soon as possible.  read more »

The auction for comedian Sarah Silverman's book has ended, with HarperCollins emerging victorious after submitting a house bid in the neighborhood of $2.5 million dollars. Editors at three of HarperCollins' imprints—David Hirshey at Harper, Gillian Blake at Collins, and Laurie Chittenden at William Morrow—are interested in the book, which means Ms. Silverman and her agent, Trident Media Group CEO Daniel Strone, have some deciding to do.

HarperCollins' number two Michael Morrison, who will oversee the so-called beauty contest between the three imprints, said he was talking to Mr. Strone about the possibility of having Ms. Silverman come in and meet with editors and publishers from all three imprints before making her choice.  read more »

Jodi Sweetin, who played middle daughter Stephanie Tanner on Full House from 1987 until 1995, has signed on to write a book for Simon Spotlight, Simon & Schuster's pop culture imprint, about the years she spent addicted to and recovering from drugs. According to the description that just ran on the Publishers' Marketplace deal-wire, literary agent Kirby Kim at Endeavor sold Ms. Sweetin's book at auction for a sum in the six figures.

If anyone can make Ms. Sweetin's book a hit, it's Simon Spotlight, a team that has come closer than anyone else in town to inheriting the throne of Judith Regan, having racked up several massive best sellers this year, including a memoir by Tori Spelling and Chelsea Handler's Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea.

Sarah Silverman is writing a book, several sources confirm. Publishers have been fighting over it all morning and afternoon, with Trident Media Group founder Daniel Strone overseeing the proceedings and no doubt smiling broadly as the pot climbs past $2.5 million.

One of Mr. Strone's other clients, meanwhile, ex-Microsoft sponsor Jerry Seinfeld, has a book on the market this week that is said to have driven at least two publishers crazy enough to submit bids in the $7 million to $8 million dollar range. Unclear whether that auction is over, or when Mr. Seinfeld will settle on a publisher, but judging by the reaction Media Mob has heard from agents, literary scouts and publishers who aren't pursuing the book, whoever ends up winning is going to have some explaining to do.  read more »

New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza finalized an agreement Monday with Vanessa Mobley of the Penguin Press to write a book about President-elect Barack Obama’s first year in office. Mr. Lizza’s contract, worth a sum in the mid-six-figures, was negotiated by his D.C.-based literary agent, Gail Ross. It is, to date, his second book deal, and everyone involved is hoping it goes better than the first one, which he cancelled during the summer of 2007 to focus on his day job.

The way he tells it, Mr. Lizza had a contract sitting in his drawer waiting to be signed when a phone call from David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, moved him to tear it up.  read more »

Not long ago Media Mob reported that The Washington Post’s David Maraniss is in talks with Simon & Schuster about writing a book on President-elect Barack Obama. Now comes word that Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter is, too.

The two books will be quite different: Where Mr. Maraniss means to write a retrospective biography in the tradition of his Bill Clinton book First in His Class, Mr. Alter is planning to look at President Obama's first year or so in office, starting at his inauguration and ending "at some point midway through 2009."

Speaking from his phone in Chicago, Mr. Alter said he plans to write about the Obama administration the way one might write about an internet start-up company.  read more »

Fans of David Maraniss's classic Bill Clinton biography First in His Class, rejoice! According to his D.C.-based literary agent, Rafe Sagalyn, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post editor is planning to write a biography of President-elect Barack Obama.

"He'll do for Obama what he did for Clinton," Mr. Sagalyn said. "That's the model."

Mr. Sagalyn cautioned that a contract with Mr. Maraniss's publisher, Simon & Schuster, has not yet been finalized, but sounded sure that the ongoing conversations would soon lead to an agreement.

That doesn't mean the book is around the corner, though: According to Mr. Sagalyn, Mr. Maraniss is going to take his time, and not worry about any of the other people working on Obama books.  read more »

Last week, a professor from Pennsylvania named Michael Lennon sold a book to Simon & Schuster about his old friend Norman Mailer. It’s a biography, this book—one that Mailer authorized Mr. Lennon to write before he died last November at the age of 84. Simon & Schuster is reportedly paying Mr. Lennon $800,000 for his efforts, which is evidently a more generous sum than what the flagship imprint of Random House, Mailer’s publisher since the mid-’80s, was willing to part with when Mr. Lennon’s agent, a lawyer who specializes in publishing law, put the biography before them. The lawyer, Boston-based John “Ike” Williams, took outside bids on the book upon receiving Random House’s initial offer, and ultimately went with the house that could pay his client the most money.  read more »

NBC Political Director and on-air analyst Chuck Todd and his colleague, the polling expert Sheldon Gawiser, are rushing to put together How Obama Won, a state-by-state guide to President-elect Barack Obama's victory that will be published as a paperback original through Knopf's Vintage imprint sometime before the inauguration in January.

According to editor Errol McDonald, who approached Mr. Todd with the idea about a month before the election, the book will be divided into four sections: Battleground states, emerging battleground states, receding battleground states, and all the rest.  read more »

Above, Friday night in the East Village outside Plan B, where Farrar, Straus & Giroux and LitMob.com co-hosted a book party for 2666, the highly anticipated new novel from late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño.

Trouble was, no one at FSG thought to make a guest list, so every little culture worker in New York showed up expecting to get in. And none of them came fashionably late: the party officially started at 8 p.m., and according to several attendees there was a line stretching around the corner by 8:30.

FSG editor Lorin Stein, one of the evening's organizers, started bracing himself for an overcapacity crowd early in the day.  read more »

The New York Times' Noam Cohen interviewed Shelby Steele, a race scholar currently at Stanford who authored last year's A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. Mr. Steele is understandably regretful about that unfortunate subtitle now that Obama is our President-elect, telling The Times that it was "slapped on" at the last second and has had the effect of undermining what he feels is his otherwise sound analysis.

The best part of the story is when The Times reporter calls up Free Press, which published A Bound Man, and asks its editor-in-chief Dominick Anfuso whether there was financially-motivated pressure put on Mr. Steele to use the provocative subtitle.  read more »

More than a year after Collins publisher Steve Ross and his boss at HarperCollins met with representatives from The Wall Street Journal to discuss the possibility of a partnership, the ink is finally dry. The first book The Journal will publish through Collins, The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street As We Know It: What You Need to Know About the Greatest Financial Crisis of Our Time—And How to Survive It by Dave Kansas, will be out early next year.

Last November, about a month before Rupert Murdoch formally took over The Journal, The Observer reported that the News Corp. chairman was preparing (okay, "mulling") to initiate a little synergy between his new paper and his old publishing house. At that point, The Journal was publishing all its books with Random House's Crown division, which Mr. Ross used to run. The contract was about to expire though, and it only made sense that Mr. Murdoch would want to move it over to HarperCollins.  read more »

Politico's Michael Calderone reports that Richard Wolffe, who covered the presidential election for Newsweek, will write a book called Renegade: The Education of Barack Obama for the Crown imprint of Random House.

Sound familiar?

That's because just yesterday the Media Mob reported that Anne Kornblut of The Washington Post had signed with Crown to do a book called Rejection: Why America Isn't Ready for A Woman President.

Ms. Kornblut and Mr. Wolffe, who told The Observer in early October that he had plans for an election book but no contract, will both be edited by Crown's Sean Desmond.

According to Politico, Mr. Wolffe's book is scheduled to come out in June 2009, and will include material from Mr. Wolffe's campaign reporting and interviews with President-elect Obama and members of his inner circle.

The Penguin Press has acquired U.S rights to a memoir by Íngrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian politician who was kidnapped while running for president of Colombia in 2002 and held captive for more than six years. Ms. Betancourt, who enjoys particular celebrity in France because she spent much of her life there before entering Colombian politics, was represented by the Paris-based agent Susanna Lea.

After submitting the project to a select group of editors at the Frankfurt Book Fair last month, Ms. Lea, who also counts among her clients the activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is said to have secured an advance worth $1 million.

Ann Godoff, the publisher of Penguin Press, could not be reached for comment. A publicist for Penguin Press declined to comment or to confirm or deny the advance.

David Rosenthal at Simon & Schuster announced today that he will be publishing a biography of Norman Mailer written by the late author's literary executor and longtime friend Michael Lennon. The book was sold at auction by Boston lawyer Ike Williams, who recently sold the memoirs of Mr. Mailer's widow, Norris Church, to Mr. Mailer's old editor at Random House. There were reportedly seven houses interested, with several offering advances worth more than half a million dollars.

Random House, Mr. Mailer's publisher starting in 1984, was interested in the book but was not willing to pay as much for it as Simon & Schuster.  read more »

An article posted yesterday on UK publishing Web site The Bookseller seemed to suggest that Canongate, Barack Obama's publisher across the pond, was getting ready to put out a new book by the President-elect.

The Bookseller quoted Canongate editorial director for non-fiction Nick Davies as saying, "We're already talking to Barack's US publisher and agent about a book for early 2009."

As it turns out, Mr. Davies was not talking about anything we don't already know about. According to Crown editor Rachel Klayman, who worked with Obama on The Audacity of Hope, the book in question is not a new work but the UK edition of Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise, the policy book that the Obama campaign published earlier this year as an antidote to the opposition's contention that he was all talk and no substance.

An actual new book from Obama is unlikely to see the light of day until after he leaves the White House; Crown, which published both of his memoirs, has him under contract for one more title.  read more »

Anne Kornblut, who covered the presidential election for The Washington Post and will soon be reporting for the paper on the Obama White House, will write a book called Rejection: Why America Isn't Ready for A Woman President for the Crown imprint of Random House.

The book was acquired for a sum in the mid-six figures by editor Sean Desmond in a deal that was brokered by the Endeavor Talent Agency's Richard Abate.

Ms. Kornblut's is the first of what is sure to be many post-election books, a category that is so far known to include titles from Newsweek, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, and Ms. Kornblut's Post colleagues Haynes Johnson and Dan Balz.

Webb Younce lost his job at Houghton Mifflin last February along with fellow editors Anton Mueller and Jane Rosenman. Mr. Mueller was the first to land on his feet, joining Bloomsbury USA as an editor the following month. Ms. Rosenman came in second when she started at Algonquin shortly after Labor Day.

Today, it was announced that Mr. Younce—whose unemployment was the cause of much indignation and distress among the more the literary-minded of the city's young editors—will soon join the team at Henry Holt, the division of Macmillan that only recently emerged from a period of relative dormancy. Mr. Younce, who is known as a talented editor of both fiction and non-fiction, is the first person to join Holt since Marjorie Braman came on board as editor-in-chief in August.  read more »

"You're lucky I don't have a chalkboard," said Steve Ross, receiving nervous laughter from the well-dressed crowd of authors and editors at a celebration Wednesday evening of the first full list published by the Collins Publishing Group, the recently reorganized division of HarperCollins of which Mr. Ross is the president and publisher.

Mr. Ross, who is known to be garrulous when it comes to talking about his work, started the story of Collins at the beginning—which is to say, with the invention of the printing press in 1493. Some time later, he reached the end of the story, and turned his attention to the gravity of our moment. He said something about how the world had reached the dawn of a new day, and made a joke about growth. At one point he brought up The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, the first book William Collins published when he founded the house in 1819, which inspired someone to shout from the back of the room, "Was it a bestseller?"  read more »

Pub Crawl this week incorrectly stated that the Broadway Books unit of Random House's Doubleday Group does not employ any marketing people or publicists of its own. In fact, Broadway does have a dedicated team of each, and the article has been changed online to reflect that.

The assertion was originally offered as a point of reference for the layoffs recently carried out at Doubleday. Specifically, it was to serve as context for the fact that the cuts had required Spiegel & Grau, a division of the group that was launched three years ago, to give up its director of marketing, Megan Walker, and its director of publicity, Gretchen Koss.  read more »

At a party at Overlook Press publisher Peter Mayer's Thompson Street apartment, we learned a few interesting things. Most notably that at one point Mr. Mayer had almost rented his apartment out to Nas, the rapper, and his wife, Kelis. Who knew!

"Everybody's very happy," said Mr. Mayer of his party guests. "I don't think there's one McCain person here. There's Prosecco if we win, Kool-aid if we live...laced with cyanide."

A moment later he turned to some someone else and said, "I am drunk."

London-based literary agent Ed Victor,was at the party too, dressed in a regal, black, pin-striped suit and impressive scarf.  read more »

At Housing Works, in Soho, intellectual types gathered to watch the returns where people usually sit for readings. MSNBC was on the tube.

A tall guy named Matt Stevens, who works as a personal assistant to a business woman and is in his late 20s, wore a Nader '08 shirt. So far, the response was negative.

"I wanted to stir the pot," he said.

Galleycat's Ron Hogan, sitting with a friend named Gretel, was killing some time before heading to the Huffington Post party."I'm waiting til the crowd thins out at 23/6," he said. "I figured it would be packed this early, so.  read more »

Steve Rubin would like everyone in book publishing to know that the 16 people who were laid off from Random House’s Doubleday division last week lost their jobs because he thought it had to be done, not because the new guy in corporate told him so.

Mr. Rubin, who at 66 has been the publisher of Doubleday off and on for the past 18 years, made sure this message rang out as soon as news of the cutbacks began to spread last Tuesday morning. The intended takeaway was that Mr. Rubin’s new boss, Random House CEO Markus Dohle, had had nothing to do with initiating the unpleasantness.  read more »

With the exception of a few small presses, publishers in the United States were caught out cold when this year's Nobel Prize for literature went to the French novelist Jean-Marie Le Clezio. Back in the 1970s a handful of Le Clezio's books were published here by Atheneum, but they didn't stay in print long, and Atheneum—which is now owned by Simon & Schuster—essentially no longer exists, so reissuing them was not a simple matter of re-upping on the rights.

The rights director at Gallimard, which publishes Le Clezio's books in French—charged now with the task of finding an American publisher for her client's books—nevertheless liked the idea of staying with Simon & Schuster, and after a lot of negotiation has closed a deal with its president, David Rosenthal, for the 1965 novel The Interrogation.  read more »

Two weeks after their homegrown debut author Salvatore Scibona was nominated for the National Book Award in fiction, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press, which Ben Westhoff of The Minneapolis City Pages recently praised as "one of the best" presses in America, has sold the paperback rights to his recently published novel, The End, to the Riverhead imprint of Penguin Group USA for less than $50,000.

Why did they do it? Wouldn't they have made a lot more money if they'd published the paperback edition themselves?

According to editorial director Katie Deblinski, it was not an easy decision, but it came down to the fact that Riverhead, a publisher with corporate resources and a proven track record with paperbacks, is better equipped to market the book now that its profile is so much greater than it was before the NBA nomination.  read more »

Salon.com columnist (and Observer alum) Rebecca Traister will write a book about "the unexpected ways the 2008 presidential election brought issues concerning women and power, sexism and feminism to the fore" for Wylie O'Sullivan at the Free Press imprint of Simon & Schuster. Linda Loewenthal from the David Black Agency brokered the deal; Free Press retains world rights.

Martha Levin, the publisher of Free Press, said in an email that Ms. Traister plans to weave her personal experience of "questioning her own feminism while choosing between Clinton and Obama."

Obviously, Ms. Traister has been writing about related topics throughout this campaign. In a column published yesterday, for example, she examined how the election has affected the careers of Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, and Campbell Brown.

Ms. Levin declined to comment on Ms. Traister's advance for the book, but a source at another house said it was at least $300,000.

Tomorrow will be Matt Weiland's last day as an editor at The Paris Review. On November 10th he'll report for duty at the Ecco Press, the distinguished boutique house at HarperCollins that has been enjoying a massive year thanks to the breakout success of David Wroblewski's dog novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Mr. Weiland said the job came about as a result of the book State by State, an anthology of essays he co-edited and published through Ecco this fall.

Mr. Weiland said that while working in magazines was a thrill, it does not hold the same appeal for him as the high-stakes gambling involved in the book trade.  read more »

The Stuff White People Like book that Random House published in July is still on The New York Times best seller list. Granted, it's at number 34, just one spot away from falling off (keep hanging on, The World Without Us), but still—it was less than a year ago that this thing was just a blog that some internet people thought was funny. Then in late March, Random House paid its author, Christian Lander, an advance worth upwards of $300,000 and everything changed!

Which accounts, perhaps, for how it came to pass that Zondervan, the HarperCollins-owned Christian publisher that who recently published a quickie biography of Sarah Palin, has acquired Jon Acuff's Stuff Christians Like, a "send-up of all things evangelical in America" based on a  read more »