Alice Hoffman, America's most hypersensitive to criticism novelist, issued a statement this afternoon after publishing Roberta Silman's phone number and calling her names on Twitter after Silman wrote a negative review of Hoffman's new book in the Boston Globe.

Big Ideas Author Malcolm Gladwell, a Manhattanite of the New Yorker, has issued a smackdown review of Free, the book from Big Ideas Author Chris Anderson, a Berkeleyan of San Francisco's Wired. If that's not provocative enough, Gladwell sounds downright grumpy.

This wailing ringtone featuring a horsey Philip Roth sample is still better than anything Moby came up with for New York magazine. Of course, the joke is that there are no "hip literary types." [Guardian]

How did the Virginia Quarterly Review connect Chris Anderson's book to Wikipedia, thus unraveling a plagiarism scandal? A strange use of parentheses.

Ben Mezrich's forthcoming Facebook exposé was sold to film producers before it was even written. The Hollywood influence helps explain why the book answers such pressing questions as, "Who might the co-founders have conceivably boned, and where?"

In 2006, Isobella Jade was just another homeless 5'2 model writing her memoirs at the Apple Store, all day. And now, three years later, that book is actually being released. Crazy dreams of models come true. [Her site, Previously]

Chris Anderson has been caught lifting huge chunks out of Wikipedia for his book Free. The irony speaks for itself. But it's worth noting that the Wired editor's excuses are disconcertingly clichéd.

Joe Mande, the NYC comedian revealed yesterday as the author of the Look At This Fucking Hipster blog and recipient of the latest Tumblr-to-Book deal, has shed some comedic light on his book deal, via email. Here it is:

Potential plagiarist, at least! When author Susan Hassett sent her book Living with Celiac Disease to screechingest View hostess Hasselbeck, perhaps she was seeking some advice or PR. Instead, Hasselbeck published her own similarly-themed book a year later.

Look At This Fucking Hipster, a blog about looking at hipsters, and then making fun of them, has scored a book deal. Plus the formerly anonymous, self-loathing author has been revealed!

The guy who pretended to be the father of Rielle Hunter's child with John Edwards is shopping a book! It might be a picture book. All of the pictures are of John and this mystery baby.

Facebook's creation myth has left the building, or so we hear: Fortune is said to be readying an excerpt of Ben Mezrich's tell-all book and movie about the social network. And another publication is, naturally, trying to ruin the scoop.

"Obsession uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from," Charles McGrath blushed in a story from today's Grey Lady, before going on to enumerate the risqué "activities" in question, including "scenes involving dildos, whips, silken cords and golden nipple clamps, not to mention an ebony, smooth-backed Mason Pearson hairbrush purchased at Harrods." What was the occasion for offending the sensibilities of the most cosmopolitan readership this side of the Atlantic? Gloria Vanderbilt, of course. If a regular author were to write "erotica" involving "mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot... deployed... in ways never envisioned by The Joy of Cooking," the Times might turn up it's nose. But when the 85-year old blue blood who birthed Anderson Cooper decides to write a novel involving "a five-story Brooklyn sex mansion where most of the orgies take place," it's suddenly interested. Fair enough!

Sure, people have made books out of tweet collections and websites about emails and fatty foods, but has anyone parlayed a lone Facebook update into old-media glory? This might actually happen, insanely enough.

Anderson Cooper's mom's sexy erotica book is coming out next week! Gloria Vanderbilt is 85 and not taking any crap from anybody when it comes to, oh, kinky food sex fantasies. The New York Times is scandalized! Details!

Dave Eggers has a new book coming out in October! It's an adaptation(?) of the children's book Where the Wild Things Are called The Wild Things, and the cover is, well, precious!

Blog wars aren't just for the prickly coastals anymore. No, people in the cheese-filled, clotted heart of this nation are turning to the internet to yell at their neighbors too. Like this crazy book-burning lady and her angry liberal enemy.

Ho ho, what do people who buy a copy of "Dillerland," a biography of married media mogul Barry Diller, also buy, according to the Amazon.com robots?

Because everyone gets a piece! George Obama, president Barack's half-brother, has signed a deal with Simon & Schuster to publish Homeland, about his struggles with drugs and his eventual salvation through, gulp, community organizing. Our favorite tidbit about the tome:

"A nursing mother offered me a taste of her pre-pumped breast milk, and I took her up on it," announces David Sedaris, to a reporter. [NYT]