Pub Crawl

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?

Sure, the advance she got from Riverhead was a mere good-not-great sum in the five figures, but the book has sold a staggering 20,000 copies and has easily earned out its advance. Shouldn’t Ms. Crosley be out pitching her next book, striking while she’s hot, shooting for the big bucks? Isn’t she sleeping on piles of cash?

Not just yet. “I don’t really have an eye towards quitting anytime soon,” Ms. Crosley said last week. “Even if for some reason I was suddenly rolling in it, which I’m not, I wouldn’t know about it for months and months and months.”

But the question has come up, right? “People have been saying congratulations a lot. They haven’t said, ‘Congratulations, when can I have your office?’”

Russell Perrault, Ms. Crosley’s boss in the Vintage publicity department, thinks Ms. Crosley is very happy working for him—though he admitted to Pub Crawl that the thought of her leaving has certainly occurred to him.

“Sure, of course, I’ve considered the possibility,” he said. “Do I think it’s going to happen? I certainly hope not! If we were getting in the way of her writing, I would say that she should leave, but I don’t think that’s the case right now.”

Riverhead publisher Geoff Kloske, meanwhile, is unconcerned: “I confess when we set out to make Sloane’s book a success, Random House’s welfare was not part of my calculation.”

What of Ms. Crosley’s poor authors, though, the ones whose books she works so tirelessly to promote?

Who will blurb her next book, if not them?

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. Frey’s comeback novel, and conventional wisdom among a number of high-level publishing folk was that the 47-year-old Englishman had wagered his career on a dangerous bet.

Although he turned out one bestseller after another while working at Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Books from 1999 to 2005, Mr. Burnham was said to be suffering a spell of bad luck at Harper. Anderson Cooper’s book had done well, as did Madeleine Albright’s, but almost every one of Mr. Burnham’s other major undertakings—such as the 992-page novel by Vikram Chandra, for which he’d paid something like $1 million—seemed incapable of catching fire. HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, meanwhile, appeared to be sending big sums of acquisition and hiring money to Steve Ross and his revamped Collins division, Harper’s toughest intramural rival for politics, history and narrative nonfiction titles.

People in publishing wondered: Would Bright Shiny Morning be Mr. Burnham’s last chance?

If the thought had occurred to Mr. Burnham, it had left his head by the end of last month, at which point, according to a source in the HarperCollins building, he began a confident, if not exactly drastic, expansion of his office on the seventh floor. The procedure, now complete, involved the removal of a wall dividing Mr. Burnham’s existing lair from the small one next door that had stood vacant for at least six months.

As one rival publisher put it, noting Harper’s recent “slack” sales figures, “I doubt Jane would have let him expand his office if she was going to can him.”

Mr. Burnham declined in an e-mail to discuss the expansion of his office, saying only that it was a modest enlargement done so he could hold small meetings there instead of in the conference room.

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. And now, “Singin’ Scientist” Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroanatomist who suffered a massive stroke in 1996 and has spent the 12 years since “rebuilding her brain from the inside out,” has sold the rights to her self-published recovery memoir My Stroke of Insight to Viking president Clare Ferraro for an eye-popping seven-figure sum.

Among the publishers who lost out to Viking at auction: none other than Bob Miller, who left Hyperion last month to start an experimental new publishing studio at HarperCollins. As part of the project, Mr. Miller and his new boss, HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, vowed to flout industry convention by keeping advances low and instead offering writers a 50-50 share of sales profits.

But according to a trusted source, Mr. Miller may have already reverted to his old ways, apparently wanting so badly to win Stroke that he was willing to put all his idealistic ambitions aside, and bid no less energetically than his competitors when Ms. Taylor’s lawyer put the book up for sale at the end of April.

UPDATE: After initially declining to comment, Mr. Miller said today that the offer he made for Jill Bolte Taylor's book included a $100,000 dollar advance and a 50/50 profit-share. Contrary to the notion advanced above by way of our trusted source-- a well-placed person at Viking's parent company, Penguin Group USA-- this offer is consistent with the vision Mr. Miller has been describing to literary agents, which allows for a profit share model supplemented by an advance up to and including $100,000. 

In an e-mail today, the lawyer who oversaw the auction, Ellen Stiefler, declined to comment on the details of Mr. Miller's offer, but noted that "no one at Penguin would have known the detail of Bob's bid, so I will say that your source may be mistaken." She added: "Jill and I both liked Bob Miller very much and are confident in his ability to create a successful new venture at HarperCollins. Jill finds a kindred spirit in Bob as another independent and brave individual."

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. Frey had told a Vanity Fair reporter who was profiling him. Second, she suggested that Mr. Frey’s novel contained a description of a fictional celebrity blogger that had been “based on a cobbling of Perez Hilton’s Wikipedia page, and a Rolling Stone piece.” And third, she said that Mr. Frey had also lied to the Vanity Fair reporter about showing a friend a prepublication copy of the Smoking Gun report that ultimately brought him down. (The editor of the Smoking Gun told Ms. Hazlett on the record that he had never sent Mr. Frey or anyone else an advance copy of the article.)

If her hunches had been right, Ms. Hazlett would have had a huge story—especially because the Vanity Fair piece, which offered an unequivocally positive take on Mr. Frey, had come out just a few days earlier. Readers still angry with Mr. Frey wanted some justice, and Ms. Hazlett was apparently eager to provide them with some ammunition.

But the story about the Smoking Gun documents, while in fact inaccurate, had come not from Mr. Frey at all, but from his friend who has since said that he gave the VF reporter bad information by accident. And the supposedly “troubling similarities” between Mr. Frey’s work and the “previously published” materials on Perez Hilton were … not actually troubling or meaningful. As for Mr. Frey’s conversations with Mailer, the only reason Ms. Hazlett seems to have had for suggesting they never happened was that Mailer had died a month before the VF interview took place, thus precluding the magazine’s fact-checkers from confirming the story with him directly.

For Mr. Frey’s supporters, the MSNBC item represented precisely the kind of sensational knee-jerk skepticism they had feared would dog the author’s comeback attempt. Mr. Frey’s agent, Eric Simonoff, wrote in an e-mail: “The irony is pretty thick: A writer is raked over the coals for lying, and forever after journalists can feel free to print whatever lies about him they choose to with utter impunity.”

The other people who have been managing Mr. Frey’s media image—namely, Tina Andreadis, his publicist at Harper, and Davidson Goldin, his media strategist—must have been just as furious as Mr. Simonoff.

“I was very upset, I’ll be honest with you,” Ms. Andreadis said. “The piece was riddled with inaccuracies. We did call them, and we were obviously not happy with it.”

At first, Ms. Andreadis succeeded only in getting the headline changed. But then, after several phone calls to Seattle-based entertainment editor Denise Hazlick and MSNBC.com’s president, Charlie Tillinghast, the piece disappeared without a trace. A vague note of “clarification” appeared on the Web site the next day.

Did Mr. Goldin’s affiliation with MSNBC, where he was editorial director before Mr. Frey hired him as a consultant earlier this year, help to get the article flushed from the site? Reached by phone Monday, he declined to say whether he had any hand in the conversations with MSNBC, or to explain his role on the Frey rehabilitation squad.

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. Nabokov—has rather famously spent the last decade and a half trying to figure out what to do with The Original of Laura and how to reconcile its obvious scholarly importance with his father’s explicit instructions to destroy the 138 index cards-- about 150 words on each, according to Nabokov experts-- upon which the manuscript is written.

The agent Mr. Nabokov has been working with would not say which houses have expressed interest in The Original of Laura, though you can be sure that Knopf, which publishes a large chunk of the Nabokov backlist, is getting a look. Several publishers have already made blind offers.

Other previously unpublished Nabokov materials that will be published in the near future, according to Nabokov scholar, friend and biographer Brian Boyd: a collection of Russian verse he translated into English, out from Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt next fall; a collection of letters he wrote to his wife “which are marvelously lyrical and full of acute observation”; a couple of his plays; a collection of interview transcripts and book reviews he wrote early in his career for New York papers like The Sun and magazines like The New Republic. The poetry collection will be the third and final book in a three-book deal the Nabokov estate signed with Harcourt, which means all that other new stuff will be up for grabs.

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.

The model mirrors that of Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, who recently worked together on a book and an accompanying documentary film about Abu Ghraib, both titled Standard Operating Procedure and set for simultaneous release this spring.

Portfolio also published Mr. Elkind’s last book, The Smartest Guys in the Room, but the author was no longer under contract there when it came time to shop his new one.

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. The author of the piece, Evgenia Peretz, declares near the top of the piece that “the story of what really happened with A Million Little Pieces has not been told in its full complexity,” and later concludes that the publishing industry was “complicit in the scandal.”

Throughout the piece, Ms. Peretz quotes from an interview she conducted with Mr. Frey in December-- at the time Mr. Frey believed and/or said that that it would be the first and last one he would give for Bright Shiny Morning-- but warns at the outset that her subject told her he was not allowed to comment on the scandal because of the terms of his settlement with Million Little Pieces publisher Random House.

Ms. Peretz goes on to quote Mr. Frey at length on issues related to the scandal. She has him reaffirming that he initially submitted A Million Little Pieces as a novel rather than a memoir. This was an assertion Mr. Frey first made in a 2003 interview with this newspaper before A Million Little Pieces was published, and again, during the scandal, on Larry King Live. Now, in VF, he reiterates: “I sent the book to [my agent] as a novel. I was pretty clear. It’s a novel. I didn’t tell her it was a memoir. I told her it was a novel. I’m not sure what else I needed to say.”

Ms. Talese, who published A Million Little Pieces at Random House through her Doubleday imprint and has never wavered in her belief that the embellishments contained therein were irrelevant, was beside herself when informed on Monday that Mr. Frey had told Vanity Fair that he initially submitted the book as a novel.

“He said this again?” she said, her voice rising in indignation. “I can’t believe he said that! You’d better check that because it’s simply not true.”

It’s not clear we can do that. Does Mr. Frey’s nondisclosure agreement with Random House allow Mr. Frey to defend the contention he made to Ms. Peretz? Or does it allow him to make the claim, but bar him from defending it afterward?

Ms. Peretz said in an e-mail that the confidentiality agreement Mr. Frey cited during their interview barred him from talking "about what went on at Random House," but left him plenty of wiggle room when it came to the actual "writing of Million Little Pieces, his dealings with his agent, and the aftermath of the scandal."

David Drake, publicity director for Doubleday/Random House, confirmed that the arrangement Mr. Frey described to Ms. Peretz is actually real-- that the house does in fact have an agreement with Mr. Frey that includes a confidentiality clause. Mr. Drake declined to say whether Mr. Frey had violated the agreement by saying what he did to Vanity Fair.

Meanwhile, you have to think Mr. Frey's handlers at HarperCollins are celebrating right now: sources tell Pub Crawl that the team was approached by several other publications-- the New York Times Magazine among them-- all of whom were hoping for an exclusive interview with Mr. Frey. It's clear now that giving Mr. Frey to Vanity Fair was a smart move. (Though one does get the sense that VF's publicity folks were a bit stunned and put off when they heard yesterday that The Bookseller, a UK trade publication, had conducted their very own interview with Mr. Frey and posted a story about it on their Web site just a few hours after VF posted theirs.)

The magazine piece was not the Harper publicity team's first triumph-- they had already proven themselves to be quite shrewd when they gave Publishers Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson-a somewhat influential industry observer who has publicly defended Mr. Frey on numerous occasions and referred to him as a social acquaintance-- the privilege of being the first critic in the world to review the new novel. Other critics got a copy of the book too, but according to Ms. Andreadis they had to promise not to write about it until after the pub date. Ms. Nelson's featured review appeared on April 14th; she called the book a " train wreck," but an "un-put-downable" "pageturner" at that.

Perhaps to Ms. Nelson's credit, some of those who read her review thought it was a devastating put-down while others thought it was a warm endorsement. Mr. Frey linked to the review on his blog under the heading "My train wreck." "Thanks Sara," Mr. Frey wote.

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. 11 … he hoped that the American response ‘should also mirror the original attack in that it should have the capacity to astonish,’ as if retaliation were an aesthetic statement. When … he describes the second plane on its way to the south tower as ‘sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty,’ the ingenuity of the image is … an invitation to behold the prose and not the plane.” Also: “Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer. What we have here is a hormonal unbeliever.”

We asked those of Mr. Wieseltier’s fellow semi-public intellectuals who care about liberalism, Islam, etc., to evaluate the piece. Columbia professor Mark Lilla, who has indirectly clashed with Mr. Wieseltier on key issues regarding Islam and democracy, said, “Enfin!” and added, “Someone finally did the piece that needed to be done.”

Tony Judt, who in a 2006 article in The London Review of Books listed Mr. Wieseltier as one of Bush’s primary “Useful Idiots,” said the Amis review was “one of Leon’s best essays in a long time—and aimed at a contemptible and deserving target.”

Ian Buruma, however, another critic of Mr. Wieseltier, was uncharmed by the piece.

“I read it, have no deep thoughts to contribute beyond the observation that this seems like an exercise in the pot accusing the kettle. Wieseltier is as preening and as obsessed with style as Amis,” he said.

O.K., but did he agree with Mr. Wieseltier’s “aestheticization” argument? “No, I don’t,” Mr. Buruma said. “I think the attack was ad hominem and not substantial.”

Mr. Wieseltier responded: “I am a little amused by Buruma’s sudden sympathy for Amis, since it flies in the face of his own views on Islamism and terrorism and multiculturalism and Western policy.

“But if Buruma believes that one should write stylishly about important things, then he should begin to do so.”

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.

Over the course of this period—during which Mailer remained married to his sixth wife, Norris Church—Ms. Mallory accumulated a healthy collection of Mailer-related paraphernalia, much of which she recently sold as a collection to Harvard University for an undisclosed sum.

“Mailer’s papers themselves went to the University of Texas,” said Leslie Morris, the Harvard curator who made the acquisition, “but Mailer is a Harvard graduate, and I felt it was important to have him represented in some way in the collections here.”

According to Ms. Morris, Ms. Mallory’s collection contains some correspondence from Mailer, as well as photographs, transcripts of interviews Ms. Mallory conducted with him and an unpublished roman à clef she wrote about their relationship (featuring a 50-page sex scene!) that Mailer marked up with notes and edits. The collection also contains scraps that Ms. Mallory saved from writing lessons that Mailer gave her on a regular basis throughout their relationship.

“He taught me to write,” Ms. Mallory said. “He gave me a hit list once—a dos and don’ts for writers. It was very funny. There were 10 of them and they were very, very good.” Among them, she recalled, were “Stamp out minutia; they are cockroaches”; “Avoid mother knows best; don’t lecture your readers”; and an admonition against adverbs, which Mailer hated.

According to Ms. Mallory, she and Mailer carried on their affair until 1991, at which point they broke up because she wouldn’t let him edit a landmark joint interview she had conducted with him and his lifelong enemy Gore Vidal. The interview, which Ms. Mallory conducted at the Plaza Hotel, appeared in May 1991 issue of Esquire, accompanied by a cartoon of Mailer and Mr. Vidal kissing.

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. Gallagher to part ways with super-agent Binky Urban of ICM.

Some in Carver’s inner circle—namely Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon, who was Carver’s editor at the time of his death—were not on board with the idea. Consequently, Knopf turned it down when Ms. Gallagher first brought them the pitch in early 2007, and about six months later, a Knopf attorney sent a letter to Ms. Gallagher’s attorney stating that any attempt to publish the original drafts with another house would be treated as a copyright infringement.

Mr. Wylie is apparently trying to work things out. Still, the fact that the collection is back on the table at Knopf at all is surprising. According to Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity for Knopf, the negotiations could remain in a deadlock for some time. Mr. Mehta, it seems, has not made up his mind about how he wants to deal with Ms. Gallagher’s vision. “I think there are a number of sensitivities involved here, not the least of which was Gary’s initial reaction,” Mr. Bogaards said. “It could go on as the longest negotiation in book publishing history.”

He added: “Who knows what the ultimate version of this deal might look like, or if it’s something that even comes to pass?”

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. Gibson, a bunch of writers (including Salman Rushdie) will bring homemade baked goods to the club and autograph books, which will all be sold in a silent auction. Then, at the end of the night, Mr. Moody and Mr. Peck will take the stage, and Mr. Moody will throw a pie in Mr. Peck’s face. Mr. Gibson called it “a fun opportunity to reduce their literary spat to its most base form.” Asked how he managed to convince the two writers to participate, Mr. Gibson said it was not so hard at all. “They both signed on relatively quickly. I talked to them individually,” he said. “They’ve been in touch, and they’ve kissed and made up. I received e-mails from both of them saying, ‘Thank you very much, we’re very happy.’” Mr. Peck declined to comment on his motivations for participating, but Mr. Moody said he is doing it because he believes in Mr. Gibson’s cause. “If I can help that cause and at the same time mock the dread seriousness of the literary world a little bit, then it’s a home run, as far as I’m concerned.”

New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who published Mr. Peck’s takedown of Mr. Moody, said, “It’s nice to know that peace is breaking out somewhere.”

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. (Authors typically earn far less than that, about 10 percent on average between hardcovers and paperbacks.) Initial reaction from the publishing world was essentially “good luck with that!”, as industry folks grumbled that no agents would go for Mr. Miller’s plan since advances are where they make most of their money. And so Mr. Miller is visiting ICM tomorrow to deliver a group presentation in which he will try to sell the agents there on his plan and extinguish their skepticism. Mr. Miller declined to say whether he is making similar stops at the other big agencies in town. “I don’t really want to make my schedule public. …” he wrote in an e-mail on Monday. “I will tell you that I had matzoh brei at Rosen’s for breakfast this morning, however. …”

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. He is perhaps the only former hip-hop recording artist who is also a member of New York’s delicate and droopy intelligentsia-in-training, and taken together, he amounts to a most bewildering weirdo. A lot of nights he wears high heels and nail polish, and though he used to rock a skirt almost every day, he now pretty much always dresses in a small tank top and improbably tight pants. Friends say they seldom see him out of this uniform, and consequently, he has become one of the most recognizable and iconic unknowns on the city’s literary circuit.

Though he has never had anything published, Mr. Goulian has, naturally, long been at work on a book about his life, tentatively titled The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt: A Memoir of Androgyny. Last Thursday afternoon, just a few days after Mr. Goulian’s agent at the Wylie Agency went out with a proposal for the book, Kate Medina, the executive editorial director of Random House, offered to pay him a staggering $750,000 for the privilege of publishing it. Mr. Goulian accepted this offer.

Sadly, Mr. Goulian declined to comment on his book or his contract with Random House, explaining that he wants to finish writing the manuscript before he starts talking about it.

His old boss Mr. Silvers, though, was more than happy to say a few words, calling his former assistant “one of the most brilliant people who ever worked” at The New York Review, and expressing great interest in reading his book.

“Jon-Jon grew up knowing a very wide range of political people and intellectuals,” he said, noting that Mr. Goulian’s grandfather was the pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook. “And then in some part of his life that I know nothing about, he obviously had his own adventures. I would look forward to reading about them.”

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. The trilogy, which will be published by the Crown imprint of Random House, is called The Flag of Orpheus. Mr. Peck will write the actual prose and Mr. Kring will dream up the characters, the story line and, most important, the marketing campaign.

And that’s what Crown is paying for. Mr. Kring has in mind an elaborate, interactive blitz using the Internet, TV, video games and possibly even movies. He tested this formula with Heroes to great success. To date, the show has spun off into a novel, a weekly comic book and an alternate reality game called Heroes 360 in which participants immerse themselves in the show’s fictional universe and solve mysteries together by sharing clues and secret URLs.

Publishers were swept off their feet when Mr. Kring told them he wanted to try doing all that with a book. After years of boneheaded attempts by publishing people to harness new technology—Video trailers on YouTube! Author blogs! “A mixed reality” book party on Second Life!—here, finally, was someone coming up with an idea that didn’t sound totally lame.

“Truth be told, when Tim got into the room and talked about what he had done with Heroes, what he had planned to do and how he had conceived of this book as a transmedia project, it was lightning in a bottle,” said Richard Abate, head of the New York-based literary division of the Hollywood talent agency Endeavor, who conducted the auction between Crown and four other publishers. “People were like, ‘Wow. This is where we want to be with all of our books 10 years from now.”

While the amount of money Crown paid for the book was bewildering—messiahs are expensive—more bewildering still was the fact that Mr. Peck was involved. Because, wait, Dale Peck? The notorious literary critic? The really aggressive one who despised all his contemporaries and denounced them as charlatans in the pages of various esteemed publications? How strange that this writer, who had all but disappeared from the public eye when he retired from literary criticism five years ago amidst overpowering hostility from the literary world, was suddenly working on a project that publishers thought could save their business from the 21st century.

Mr. Kring, whom Mr. Abate had approached about doing an experimental book project a few months before the writers’ strike, didn’t know any of this when Mr. Peck’s name was floated as a possible collaborator.

“I went online immediately and got very educated on who he was, and was very intrigued by some of his, you know, some of the controversy that surrounded him,” Mr. Kring said in an interview. “It was actually sort of hard for me to see where it came from because he’s got a real very sweet quality to him.”

MR. PECK WAS not always a pariah. His first novel, a formally experimental book of vignettes called Martin and John, about a gay man whose lover has died of AIDS, was published to great fanfare by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 1993. It transcended the gay-lit niche genre to which it might have been relegated, instead entering into mainstream literary culture and even getting assigned in college classes.

“I was the right person at the right time. I was 25 years old and had a nice clean innocent face and wrote a very earnest book,” Mr. Peck said. “That was the heyday of contemporary gay literature.”

Mr. Peck’s second and third novels, also published by FSG, did not do nearly as well as Martin and John, and by the time he was writing his fourth in 1998—The Garden of Lost and Found—he decided to leave FSG and sold the book at auction instead to Rob Weisbach, who at the time was running his own, aggressively commercial imprint at William Morrow.

The move raised eyebrows among people in the industry. “Rob Weisbach is a great promoter,” one editor who pursued Mr. Peck’s fourth novel at auction told The Observer at the time. “But … John [Glusman, at FSG] is a brilliant editor. If I’d been Dale, I would have stayed with him.” FSG was a very prestigious house, after all. For a serious writer like Mr. Peck to give up his membership there in favor of an imprint known for publishing Ellen DeGeneres seemed irrational.

By this point, Mr. Peck had left his original literary agent and signed on with the Andrew Wylie Agency. He was also gaining notoriety as a critic. Next Page >

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 » Next Page >

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 » Next Page >

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. As ambitious as he was affable, Steve Ross, 49, had been made president and publisher of Collins, one of HarperCollins’ adult trade divisions, and had been given a mandate to turn what had been a quiet, humble operation known mainly for reference, business and self-help books into one of New York City’s most powerful publishers of narrative nonfiction.

Since last July, Mr. Ross has been feverishly laying the infrastructure for the new Collins, acquiring books and hiring editors faster than any other publisher has in recent memory. These hires, announced one by one over the past few months, came with some fanfare, and have stunned not only literary agents and Mr. Ross’ competitors at other publishing houses, but also colleagues within HarperCollins. Some editors at the Harper unit, which has long been HarperCollins’ flagship imprint, are said to be bracing themselves for intense and frequent competition with Collins for big nonfiction books.

Just a year ago, Collins was a name most people in the publishing industry associated with practical titles like The Portable Pediatrician and How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway. In other words, Collins hadn’t exactly jumped to mind for literary agents sending out big nonfiction proposals. At HarperCollins, agents would call an editor at William Morrow, Ecco or Harper, all of which were established in the business of publishing big-ticket nonfiction, with known editorial tendencies and years of experience.

Ms. Friedman and her colleagues atop HarperCollins figured that another imprint in the game would mean more big books, and more big books would mean growth for HarperCollins Inc. The company’s first attempt to build a better Collins roughly four years ago had not worked out as well as its architects hoped. Although the division, which united a handful of business and self-help imprints, had become profitable, thanks largely to the massive blockbusters The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls, for the brand to be as big as it needed to be, Collins would have to become a destination for politics, history, current affairs and big ideas.

And so HarperCollins turned to Mr. Ross, a famously assertive and competitive book hunter who at his previous job as head of Random House’s Crown group acquired titles like Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope and Valerie Plame’s Fair Game. He eagerly agreed to lead the way.

Mr. Ross’ first task was to assemble a team of editors that would attract interest from top literary agents and send a message to competitors that the Collins nonfiction list was going to be a formidable one. To this end, he called up an editor named Bruce Nichols, who had shown a singular talent for politics and history during his 15 years at Simon & Schuster’s Free Press imprint, and asked him to head up the team.

“Steve had called me before when he was at Crown and tried to lure me there,” Mr. Nichols said last week. “And I had never been interested, because I loved the job I was doing. This time he called and said, ‘Look, now I have a job you can’t refuse. This is a $100 million division, we’re [going after big books], and we’re hiring a bunch of new editors.”

Mr. Nichols said he agreed almost immediately, and was soon interviewing prospective editors. He eventually lassoed four full-timers—Gillian Blake from Bloomsbury, Nancy Miller from Ballantine, Serena Jones from Simon & Schuster and Adam Bellow from Doubleday. He also hired Bill Strachan, who was most recently at Hyperion, as editor at large.

“My basic philosophy has been to hire the very best editors I can find with strengths in unique areas, and to let them go after whatever they want to go after,” Mr. Nichols said.

So what happens when those editors go after books that editors at Harper also want? It’s inevitable that will happen, since, according to agents who know their tastes, Collins’ editors are interested in many of the same kinds of books as Harper editors.

“When Bruce was at the Free Press, his list and [Harper executive editor] Tim [Duggan]’s overlapped pretty profoundly,” said one agent who has submitted proposals to both of them. “Tim publishes fiction and Bruce doesn’t, but I think you could say that the heart of each editor’s list is a certain sort of serious nonfiction: history, politics, current events, issues, ideas.”

Mr. Duggan, for his part, said he’s not worried. “As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing wrong with a little healthy competition,” he said in an e-mail. “No one has a monopoly on good books, and if Collins is taking a new tack for their nonfiction program, I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves.” Next Page >