Charles Bukowski: not a fan! After reading the abominable Women—in which our protagonist kills time in his apartment while waiting for dozens of the silly crazy girls who write him letters to get off the plane and fuck him—I gave it to my (ex) boyfriend: "You'll love this." (He did.) Nothing wrong with earnestly-expressed chauvinism in literature. However, his limply pathetic meanderings allow the more discerning readers to assume that even though Bukowski was prolific with his women and his writing, he was—ultimately—a pretty bad lay.If you hate yourself and are in the mood for his sloppy seconds, however, Bukowski's got a new thing of b-sides coming out, called Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook. At least the L.A. Times half-way agrees with our assessment: "When I was young, and new to L.A., and hanging around dissolute poets, I read a lot of Bukowski, and it seemed to me, even then, that there was a lot of dreck to page through before something struck and resonated." It's been real, Charles. Now get out of my apartment.

Diane von Furstenberg is a noted fashion designer, responsible for creating the looks-good-on-every-woman wrap dress. She is also married to IAC's Barry Diller—who is, for his part, a noted homosexual! DVF has created a comic book for DC Comics called The Adventures of Diva, Viva, and Fifa, in which "we find Diane herself (a little younger than she is today), who brings us inside the unique world of Diva, Viva and Fifa..." Check out the comixx after the jump!Here are a couple pages. Not totally sure what's going on in them! But these ladies' problems are clearly of the fabulous kind.

Suze Orman is, essentially, a hustler. It's not that she necessarily gives bad advice—it's that she sells the idea that anyone needs Suze Orman to give them advice in the first place. Here's an example: the strongly-haired CNBC personality wrote a book called Women and Money. You know what women need to know about money? The exact same stuff that men need to know. Stuff which is primarily available for free, on the internet. Like "don't spend money on books full of facts available for free elsewhere." Unfortunately, Americans are more seduced than ever before by Suze Orman's steely gaze. She's not your friend! During the total economic meltdown of our nation's financial system, who do people turn to? Suze freaking Orman. She's now the face of FDIC, for god's sake. She may not be as dangerous as her closest competitor, mad man Jim Cramer, who actually gives specific advice that will cause you to lose your life savings. But she's insidious nonetheless; if people want financial advice, they definitely shouldn't turn to someone who's really an ad pitchwoman.

The book-publishing industry is famously glacial. Who knew, for example, when Amit Chatwani sold his blog-based satirical book about high-livin' finance playboys, Damn It Feels Good to Be a Banker, that it would be released right in the middle of a financial crisismeltdown and looming recession? The book was released in August, and back in April—after the Bear Stearns debacle—Hyperion was already cheerfully promoting it by saying "the economy may fall, but bankers never do." But that was just the beginning."I'm kind of hoping that people will look at it as a sort of historical document, a parody of a world that existed until basically a moment after it came out," he told the New York Times yesterday. Bad timing, sure. Yet, the book sounds extremely useful in erasing any shred of sympathy we might have for bankstas: "Bankers talk about everything in financey terms," Mr. Chatwani said... "The way they talk about girls—a guy will say he's going to short a girl because, you know, ‘There's a lot of overvalue here.'" But now? Oh, ho ho—look who's overvalued now!

Here's author and knight Salman Rushdie—or as our tipster put it, "Padma [Lakshmi's] ex"—on the uptown 6 train, clinging to the pole. What is he thinking about? No one knows. Click for the larger image of the distinguished Satanic Verses author.

Although the business media can't sell any ads during an economic meltdown like the one we're having now, it sure is a great chance for reporters to make names for themselves. Business reporters absolutely live for the periodic destruction of the American economy. This is their Normandy! After the jump, we survey the media landscape and pick out the winners and losers—all your favorites, from Paul Krugman to Jim Cramer, ranked on a merciless 10-point scale! [Ratings are on a 1-10 scale—with 10 being the best—and are based on how much the media person or outlet has benefited from the crisis, how right they've been, and how much influence they've had.] WINNERS

For some reason Denis Leary, who is actually an accomplished TV and movie star and halfway-decent comedian, has joined with reliable moron and talk-radio screamer Michael Savage and misguided trashy-TV host Jenny McCarthy in spreading scientifically-dubious pap about autism. The charitable explanation is that Leary was rushing to meet the deadline for his book, Why We Suck, or, as all-too-many comedians do, filling it with unfiltered, subliterate transcriptions of experimental new stand-up comedy material when he wrote, "there is a huge boom in autism... because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can't compete academically." The Autism Society is obviously thrilled. More, via Page Six:

Fake memoirist and most self-important author of our time James Frey is selling his Manhattan apartment. It was listed for $5 mil originally, but he recently took $500,000 off the asking price. (When times are hard, we all have to make sacrifices.) From a Curbed commenter: "He needs to up his meds and hold his ground on the price." Also: "make sure the square footage is right, he may be lying about that too." As Frey's tattoo says, "Fuck the bullshit, it's time to throw down." [Curbed; art by Karen Caldicott]

Milan Kundera, who wrote such novels as “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The Joke,” turned in a supposed spy amidst the Stalinist terror sweeping Czechoslovakia in 1950, resulting in the man's 14-years imprisonment and hard labor in a uranium mine. Supposedly, Kundera was a fervent communist true believer at the time, 18 years before the anti-authoritarian's work was banned and 35 years before he said "indiscretion is a capital sin... We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it." Now he's implying these accusations will lead to his own death:

A group of 23 universities are planning Hathitrust, a joint effort to preserve digital book images in case Google goes out of business. You know, 100 years or so from now. If the digitized brains of Larry and Sergey are not ruling us from orbit by then. [Bits]

Bookstores are stocking up on finance books after the meltdowncrisis, reports the WSJ. Doing its patriotic duty, Borders has even helpfully "creat[ed] front-of-store displays featuring finance or personal-finance titles in all 522 superstores nationwide." Because they care. Re: those finance books: hey, you know what? It's not us proles that need the personal-finance books.Sure, we don't save enough and put a little too much on credit cards and make semi-retarded mortgage decisions in our ceaselessly hopeful pursuit of the American Dream of ownership. But all of those books tell you to invest in a Roth IRA and the freaking stock market, and we all know what happens after you do that: IT FUCKING CRASHES AND ALL YOUR STUPID MONEY IS GONE. Some authors—like good old billionaire shadow investor George Soros's The New Paradigm for Financial Markets—have predicted this, which we of course ignored, not that we could have stopped it anyway.

When Barack Obama was 10, his grandfather would take him over to ole Frank Davis' house, where the two older men would drink whisky out of jars and play Scrabble. Sometimes Obama would help the men compose dirty limericks, or listen as Davis read poetry. This went on until the Democratic presidential nominee was 17, and during that time Davis acted as a mentor, according to Obama's memoir. It later emerged that Davis pseudonymously wrote a "hard-core pornographic autobiography" detailing his sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. This was all known in August, after a widely-blogged report in Britain's Telegraph, but the National Enquirer is now reporting it as an "Exclusive OBAMA SEX PERV SCANDAL," because Obama should be ashamed of almost being molested, or something:

Can a publisher somewhere please grow a pair and not keep letting fundamentalist assholes who want to see the world revert to the good old days of the 13th Century run their houses? The Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones' historical novel about the little girl wife of Muhammad that Random House dropped because it was afraid of offending crazy people, is now on shaky ground with its British publisher. When that publisher, Gibson Square, was firebombed a couple weeks ago, they said they were going forward with publication anyway. Now, not so much.

The spectacle of a slighted novelist going on a gossip blog and defending themselves in the comments—then starting a nutty Tumblr and throwing a "Take Back the Internet" party—is now referred to as the "Gessen Method" by a Texas publication. They're referring to n+1 editor and first-time novelist Keith Gessen. He has now been branded—much to his chagrin, we're sure—not as the next young literary man but "is an icon—a symbol—a cautionary tale about Internet conflict and the way we deal with it."

You know who's awesome and relevant? Ted Nugent! Which is exactly why we are writing about him, now. Because literally dozens of people care a great deal about what he has to say. Us and Page Six, we know a good story when we see it. The non-embarrassing-relic rocker has a book out soon, you see. And Page Six is excerpting it, because you care about Ted Nugent's new book. It's about what Ted would do if he were president. He'd "take appropriate gas and oil from Mexico and the Middle East as payment for all debts we are owed by them," because he's thought long and hard about complex issues and we should take him seriously. He wrote "Stranglehold"! Did you write "Stranglehold"? No, you didn't. Aren't you glad you learned about this book, from Ted Nugent? [NYP]

My writing teacher says we should all go to the shrink to get "un-blocked." Maybe she's on to something: Joseph O'Neill, hottie Netherland author, has one. Page Six reports that the former London barrister was nervous about his novel-writing dream until his shrink told him to get on with it already and move to the States to write. Result: "One of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read."-the New Yorker. [Page Six]

Last week, Nobel Prize secretary Horace Engdahl sniffed that the prize for literature most certainly would not go to an American, as we are "too isolated" and don't "participate in the big dialogue of literature." He was right: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, an "'author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy," won. He is French obviously. [GalleyCat]

The personal library of Walker Digital founder Jay Walker includes an actual Sputnik I satellite, ruby-bound books, and "a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II." Not that we care or are jealous. [More photos on Wired]

People is coming out with a 96-page "tribute" "book" "honoring" the recently dead Paul Newman. It will sell for $12, and none of the proceeds will go to charity, despite the fact that Newman dedicated the latter part of his life to working for charitable causes. But, to use the line that Jossip unfortunately beat us to this morning, it's "sort of okay, because this year, the print industry basically is a charity." Yep. [Folio]

Hey, do you have a 1,000 page manuscript based on "Wagnerian opera, Lou Reedian post-punk, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Jungian psychology, the life and death of cities, French aestheticism, the magic of memory, gay identity and—most importantly?—cats"? Hah, good luck selling that. But wait... what if a blind query to a big-deal William Morris agent resulted in the book getting sold? That's what happened to editor and commenter Matthew Gallaway, also known as the Gay Recluse.