" I stand by every word of the analysis... I have had to apologize for the stupid, silly subtitle." [Times]

Barack Obama and his "good bride" Michelle are set to meet the First Family at the White House Monday. This will be unavoidably awkward, what with Obama having spent the last two years talking about how terrible the Bush Administration has been and all. It certainly doesn't take the edge off things that Bush seemed deathly afraid to touch That One at their first meeting four years ago. Fox News tracked down the relevant passage in Obama's second memoir, the Audacity of Hope:

Remember how the novel Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones's book about the child bride of Muhammad, was going to set off a wave of Muslim outrage and violence? In the exhaustively-chronicled journey to publication for Jewel of Medina? Random House pussed out on publishing it due to some wingnut remarks by academic Denise Spellerg when they asked her for a blurb, so then other people decided rush in and publish it, including a British publisher who was rewarded with a firebomb in his mail slot. So then he decided not to publish it, and Jones quickly became a poster child for hysterical pre-emptory censorship. Well, now the book is out and Jones is doing her book tour. The "widespread violence" Spellberg warned Random House of isn't happening, and as the Seattle Times reported, Jones' visit in their town was sparsely attended and sold exactly three copies of the book. Just like every other bookstore reading!

A new book is coming out called Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. Whoa, did Kafka experience the uncertainty of layoffs, and that annoying co-worker who keeps popping his head over the cubicle partition? As Bookninja put it, "Kafkaesque bureaucratic bewilderment existed pre-Kafka." The dark insect-loving Metamorphosis author used to be a lawyer, and this will be a collection of "Kafka's most interesting professional writings" of that time, including exciting legalese such as "Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines (1910)". This on the heels of his recently-discovered porn stash... the mind reels."His office work leeched on his time and energy as a writer, and yet his writing sucked blood and guts out of office life," it's noted on Zoilus. "It is like we get to see Franz Kafka playing Don Draper (cf. Mad Men)." As a commenter on that blog aptly put it,

Writer John Leonard has died, according to Vulture. He was 69. Leonard, an out-and-proud liberal, was the longtime TV critic for New York magazine and wrote a book column for Harper's. He has also been the editor of the New York Times Book Review, a book critic for The Nation, wrote for the New York Review of Books, and was a commenter on CBS's Sunday Morning. His most recent book is titled When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm-Suckers, Satanic Therapists, and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post Toasties New World Hip-Hop. He was also the father of Salon's tech editor, Andrew.

You know what's next for any lame duck president: the inevitable post-presidency memoir. Only problem, other than the fact that he struggles with basic grammar and syntax: Bush is a hugely unpopular outgoing president, and most of the country hates him. Publishers are wondering what the market for a potential Bush memoir would be, and the consensus is: um, awkward! No publisher is clamoring to give him $15 million like they did Clinton; certainly "the foreign rights interest will be considerably less," says the SF Chronicle. How have other unpopular presidents handled their memoirs?The current wait-time from moving out of the White House to publishing a book appears to be about two years. Taking into consideration the time it takes to write (or ghostwrite) a book and put it through the slow publishing process suggests that most presidents have gotten their book deals right after leaving office. Here's what past unpopular presidents did with their memoirs:

The lovingly jumbled piles of books at Shakespeare & Co., the famous Paris bookstore, must madden Googlers. All that information, unorganized! In the wake of its $125 million settlement of a lawsuit filed by book publishers, Google is now thinking about turning its money-burning Book Search product into an online store. This will end badly.Remember the Google Video Marketplace? Exactly. Launched months before Google bought YouTube, the video store required cumbersome copyright protections and was a nonstarter with consumers. Google closed the store last year, enraging the dozen or so people who'd actually bothered to buy videos. And Google's Book Search operations are a disaster, overseen by Ramsey Allington, an unqualified IPO lottery winner who joined Google at the right time to get valuable stock options and social connections. He has made a mess of his department, driving out qualified female employees by being a sexist boor. Publishers would do well to steer clear of Google until he's gone. Even if Google Book Search is placed under competent management, I doubt it will succeed. Google lacks a merchant's sensibility, trusting algorithms over salesmanship. But most people do not walk into a bookstore knowing what they are looking for. They seek serendipity — a quality that Googlers, with their overplanned vision of the world, hope to eliminate. There is beauty in an untidy stack of books. But a Stanford MBA's spreadsheets will never capture that. (Photo via Paris Parfait)

Vanity Fair has a new excerpt from professional media beef-starter Michael Wolff's upcoming biography of News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch already said publicly that the book is flawed, but his problems with it seemed to center on how some of his business relationships are portrayed. The excerpt today, disappointingly, focuses on Murdoch's family life, and some of it is predictable. Friction between the new wife and the old wife and the kids from the old wife! Drama about succession! The only real interesting parts come when Wolff starts riffing on Murdoch's greedy ambitious kids and their Oedipal tendencies: Prue, Murdoch's eldest daughter, is a weirdo, says Wolff. But at least she didn't want to marry her mom, yuck!:

The publishing landscape is so bloodied right now that it's hard to keep track of all the corpses. This month has seen the end of Radar, Men's Vogue, CosmoGirl, 02138, Culture + Travel plus cuts at Time Inc., Portfolio, Niche Media, and Doubleday. Wow. Two casualties have gone largely unnoticed. A tipster informs us that Town And Country Travel closed a few weeks ago to little fanfare. Meanwhile, the New York offices of London-based travel book series Rough Guides are said to have closed, presumably doomed by declining travel, a declining pound — and perhaps a Gotham too depressing to visit. (Publishers, we know things are rough, but do allow us to give all your titles proper burials.)

Tatiana Boncompagni Hoover is a socialite married to a vacuum-cleaner heir, and likes to play up her tenuous ties to Italian royalty. She just wrote a thinly-veiled novel about life in the upper strata of Manhattan called Gilding Lily. Her sister, Natasha Boncompagni, has chick-lit aspirations as well. FIGHT! As Page Six reported yesterday, the sisters are in court—Natasha told us that Tatiana installed a "remote keylogging device" on her computer, which she says Tatiana used to steal the manuscript and copyright herself as the co-author of the upcoming Hedge Fund Wives. Tatiana says that Natasha stole it from her computer and that she's the sole author. Who's sort-of winning?Tatiana, so far: "A federal judge yesterday issued a temporary restraining order against former Wall Street gal Natasha Boncompagni, forbidding her from staking claim to the soon-to-be-published Hedge Fund Wives," Page Six reported. But: "Given my sister's motto 'No publicity is Bad Publicity,' I wouldn't be surprised if she isn't pleased with all the attention," Natasha told us, later pointing to Patrick McMullan photos of Tatiana at the Dylan's Candy Bar party last night, "basking in the attention." Ladies, ladies. You can both wear high heels! Let's not let a feud deprive readers of this sure-to-be remarkable work of post-colonial fiction.

[Mogul Mary Kate Olsen at a Barnes & Nobles promoting her and her sister's new book, the unfortunately titled 'Influence'; image via Splash]

You can use Craigslist to find a sex partner in half an hour or less—or, once you've exhausted those options, to find a (lady) writer to help you tell your story of sex addiction—enabled in part by that very website! "I have basically been a sex addict enabled completely by the internet world for the last 13 plus years. I have met and been with dozens of women, men, couples and chatted with 100's more online..."

You're the leader of a global jihad and spend all your time fleeing from cave to cave and plotting only the vilest of terror attacks (gotta stay focused!). But extremist Middle Eastern editors are burning up your satellite phone with urgent demands for a book on how one "dispenses money, logistical support and training to radical groups in over 50 countries." Decentralized management is so hot right now! What's a would-be martyr to do? If you're Osama bin Laden, the answer of course is to hire a ghostwriter. Per Pakistan's Geo TV (via Times of India):

Yesterday, as Web 2.0's bubble burst in slow motion at 30,000 feet over downtown San Francisco, I received a preview copy of Reality Check, by Guy Kawasaki. Someone had stuck a Post-it on the cover: "See inside for foreword by The Fake Steve Jobs!" Awesome. I'm never going to read Kawasaki's book, even though he's way more successful than I'll ever be. I skipped to Dan Lyons's foreword, written in his Fake Steve persona. Here's the best parts:

Hahaha. Some New Jersey girls are pissed because they were caught on camera with douchebag Jersey guys! Three "Hot Chicks" are suing the author and publisher of the fine educational volume Hot Chicks With Douchebags, because they were pictured therein. It's destroyed their reputations, down there in Jersey! Because they were depicted as "females who date dubious men." Outrageous! Here are the actual plaintiffs in question:

Oh professional media beef-starter Michael Wolff, is there any power to which you will not speak the truth, or at least some tough-sounding simulacrum thereof? No, there is not. News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch preemptively slammed Vanity Fair writer Wolff's upcoming biography of him, in a tone of indeterminate sincerity. Now Wolff has responded, telling the Observer that Rupert's just "a little embarrassed" about what he let slip, and what he calls are errors are really just "an internal political thing." That's much nicer than what he had to say about former New Yorker editor Tina Brown's new Daily Beast:

If it wasn't inevitable from the get-go that Rupert Murdoch would, via tentacles that touch every distribution channel and medium, obtain an advance copy of Michael Wolff's biography of him, it certainly became so when the book landed in the hands of the News Corporation chairman's son-in-law Matthew Freud. Freud got it from a London newspaper negotiating serialization rights, Murdoch got it from Freud, and Wolff soon heard from Murdoch, the Times reported this morning: "[The book] contains some extremely damaging misstatements of fact," he emailed, thus playing into Wolff's hands, as he seems to have done from the beginning.

Musicians writing novels! Alterna-MILF Liz Phair is writing one, Ryan Adams is publishing a novel plus a book of poetry, and the Observer reports that Bad Seed Nick Cave has just sold his second, titled The Death of Bunny Munro. Cave's first novel, published in 1989, was called And the Ass Saw the Angel. It was really good, according to Galleycat. They also add, "Cave once chewed us out on a nationally syndicated radio show when we called in to say how much his novel reminded us of Flannery O'Connor!" Geez, what an insult. An excerpt of his first book follows.You'll notice two things here: first, all I did was search inside the book for the word "sex," naturally. Secondly, Cave shows a fondness of writing in regional dialect, like Irvine Welsh and Eugene O'Neill.

Famously cranky Golden Notebook author Doris Lessing is 89 and frankly doesn't give a rat's that she won last year's Nobel Prize for Literature. She likes to talk about how she's burned out on writing and loves to complain—and is therefore our favorite Old. This Sunday, Lessing wrote an essay about her typical day for the Times of London: "When I’m not talking, I read." And everyone, irritatingly, thinks she knows the meaning of life:

The highlight of Sarah Palin's career? It's not her guest spot on SNL, or her scary stump speeches in front of screaming crazy racists. It's this cover for the upcoming Tales From the Crypt comic. Sporting a hockey stick—and heaving breasts reminiscent of the comic's golden days—she asks the fleeing ghouls, "Didn't we get rid of you guts in the 50's?" It's a reference to Palin's book-banning ways, as well as to the wave of censorship that forced Crypt's original publisher to shut it down in 1955.