Honestly? We'd rather read a book-length history of the Hillary Clinton campaign written by Josh Green than read another word about McCain and Obama. But let's take a look at the people currently working on their own novelistic takes on the waking nightmare that has been 2008 thus far! The Observer reports on the contenders: Michael Takiff, on oral historian. He's writing a Bill Clinton biography (though maybe it's been shelved). He's a Nation-contributing lefty, who once also tried to write a book about George McGovern. You might be able to guess how his book would read. Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Balz, the consummate Washington Post political correspondent, has been following both campaigns around and probably has the sources to get some good material for a quickie book. It's up to Haynes Johnson, the former civil rights reporter who now writes big grand sweeping statement books about how it's "the age of" something or other, to give it a cohesive narrative. That narrative will probably be pretty middle-of-the-road. And Johnson is probably too old to get THE INTERNET. But maybe it'll be good? Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Halperin writes The Page for Time. Before that, he wrote The Note for ABC. He became the King of the Washington Press Corps in the '90s when he underminded Clinton and the liberals all the time and sucked Drudge's cock incessantly. He's so far outside reality now that his last book was on how the next president would have to heed the words of Karl Rove and worship at the altar of Drudge. His blog is unreadable and he was dead wrong on the Biden pick, even though he erased the entry and tried to pretend he had it too. Heilmann, though, is the very very good New York Magazine political writer. John, find a different co-author and we're right there with you!

Tina Fey—nerd-girl hero, Saturday Night Live alum, 30 Rock writer/actor—just signed a book deal. It was "reportedly pitched as a book of humorous essays in the style of Nora Ephron," said the Observer. (Hopefully it'll be funnier than that.) Successful SNL alums doing a humor book or half-baked movie spin-off is unremarkable. But a multi-million dollar advance and the defining pop culture moment of her a-little-too-accurate Sarah Palin impression is further evidence of her gathering stardom. Also: her Google trends are suddenly off the hook.This graph can be interpreted as a.) her Google trends, or b.) all of America getting it up for Tina.

It took years and years and the attention of a new movie, but someone finally uncovered a smidge of plagiarism in the fired Vanity Fair Brit's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Daily Intel found near-identical passages from the book and a New York Times article by John Tierney. Young was unruffled, saying it wasn't plagiarism but loose English journalistic standards at work:

30 Rock's Tina Fey's book sold to Little, Brown. [Observer]

A young literary agency lass is having trouble making, like, a flowchart of all the publishers! She's taken to the Craigslist personals section for the cure: "I think there's a handful of major conglomerates who own all the main publishers... Does a chart like this exist? I'm a cute girl, and if you help me out I'll send you some free galleys :)" Hey, Ms. Cutie? We just busted you. Consider it your first lesson in tough love, and please take to heart the advice Toby Young just gave me: "Don't get too comfortable. You could be fired in the next 48 hours." In this climate, we're all lucky just to have a job. So do yours.

Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones's novel about the prophet Muhammad's child bride that's totally controversial for about 12 people, will be rushed to print in the U.S.—mainly so that people will just stop yapping about a book they haven't read. (Random House, the first American publisher, dropped the book; its British publisher got a firebomb dropped into his letter-slot.) [AP]

"Want to go see Choke this weekend and have your name in Chuck's next book?" Um, as what? A snuff film victim? A gangbang participant? This is super-graphic Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk we're talking about. He's taking the grassroots (read: hopeless) approach to finding viewers for his new movie: "all you have to do is get as many people as you possibly can to go see Choke this weekend" and get your name in a future book. Why? Because a bunch of big movies are coming out at once, and they're desperate.

You don't get into writing for the money, but a few people do manage to get rich from it. Forbes made a list of the ten wealthiest authors of the last year. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling won, of course, making over $300 mil. Whut-ev-ah. James Patterson and Tom Clancy came in second and third, and Ken Follett made the list thanks to Oprah choosing Pillars of the Earth for her holy book club.. [Forbes]

That was fast. Four of the business writers said last week to be hunting for Wall Street crisis book deals have found publishers — the same publisher. Penguin Group swears it wasn't bumbling when it hired the authors in rapid succession, at a cost of more than $2 million, to basically compete with one other. What does Penguin look like, some kind of investment bank? "I would rather be publishing all three of the best books on the economic crisis than to be competing against any one of them," Penguin's president told the Observer. OK, but who's going to buy these tomes?

As if creating 30 Rock and archly hosting Weekend Update all those years didn't make Tina Fey enough of a nerdy "it" girl, along came Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin to really put the former Saturday Night Live head writer's celebrity over the top. Fey's star is now burning so bright that bidding on her vague, unwritten proposal for a book of "nonfiction humor" started at $5 million and is now close to $6 million. And that's without Fey doing any meetings — her agent's been handling it — because she just doesn't have time for such trivialities. Reports Keith Kelly at the Post:

Nobel Prize secretary Horace Engdahl told the AP that Europe still rules when it comes to great literature: the U.S. is "too isolated, too insular." We also don't "participate in the big dialogue of literature." (He did not elaborate as to what those important big dialogues were.) Meanwhile, will reclusive Catcher In the Rye author J.D. Salinger receive the Nobel Prize for Lit? Writes a tipster, "I work for PEN in Britain, and there is a rumour here that [the above comments are] an attempt to cover up J.D. Salinger's being on the shortlist for this year's Nobel." [AP via Breitbart]

Remember how we tore into Random House relentlessly, calling them pussies for being too scared to publish Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones's historical novel about Aisha, the child bride of Muhammad? Perhaps it's just self-fulfilling prophecy, but it looks like they may have been kinda-sorta right about that whole "it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical [Islamic] segment" thing: last weekend, four men were arrested after throwing a firebomb into the house of the book's British publisher, Martin Rynja. So who is this guy, anyway? Rynja has a colorful publishing history with controversial books:

The creation of fake West Virginian teen hustler and author-savant JT Leroy took three people. One can see the deception as a selfish hoax or a grand experiment in fame—the idea of JT exposed a yearning for a certain type of authenticity. The post-scandal interview by Leroy's spiritual imposter and key manipulator Laura Albert has already been done—by Rolling Stone, which had her broke and borrowing $500 from her manager and mourning the loss of her creation. (Geoff Knoop, Albert's former partner in love and JT, follows her press assiduously, judging from the e-mail he sent us after doing an Albert item last fall.) Now, Savannah Knoop, Albert's sister-in-law who actually played the physical role of LeRoy—wig, glasses and all—has resurfaced with a new memoir (Girl Boy Girl) to shill. How'd she become JT Leroy, anyway?From Radar:

Aspiring writer and NYU student Jessica Roy got her blogosphere start by throwing a lit-bomb at a surely insufferable party attended by various media scenesters. You might be thinking, "Who cares?" but the most hilarious part of her essay was not its contents, which were equally mocked and praised. It was the fact that grown men such as n+1 editor/novelist Keith Gessen (and others; you know who you are) actually tried to get New York's Daily Intel blog to stop it from being published. Talking about being trapped in a media goldfish bowl! (You're going to call in your one favor with a New York editor for something that petty? Does anyone have any balls?) Young Jess didn't like the New York scene, and moved to Paris (but not because of the silly party). However, now she doesn't like Paris—France suffers from a "startling lack of tofu."Now, it must be said that we met Roy at a party before she escaped New York, and found her perfectly pleasant. But HuffPosts like this aren't helping your cause, Jess! If New York City is not a "place for serious people," as previously alleged, then Paris is a hellhole where you can't get a decent vegetarian meal:

Your shrink might tell you that your enemies will dig their own graves and are best left alone, but poet Clive James knows the sweetest type of literary revenge: seeing your rival's work on a bargain table for $4.99. In fact, he wrote a delightfully bitchy poem about it in his new book:An excerpt, from the NYT Book Review:

Last week the Observer, Tom Wolfe said the truly rich would be protected from the Wall Street meltdown because all the smart guys had long since decamped for hedge funds, leaving investment banks staffed by "real second-raters." This weekend in the Times, the author of Bonfire of the Vanities clarified that statement by adding that elite hedge funders may still be ruined, just not until September 30, that is to say tomorrow. In other words, these strapping Masters of the Universe are so ingenious they staved off the sad fate of i-bankers for all of maybe 14 extra days:

Last night at a poetry reading marking the release of the 2008 Best American Poetry anthology the distinguished poet and Finding Forrester star Charles Bernstein delivered a stirring plea for swift intervention to stave off the subprime poetry crisis. "As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers," he said. "Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify." (Read the whole thing; it is awesome.) But it made me anxious! At the risk of pronouncing a subprime trend post by adding this news to that of the subprime mortgage crisis and the subprime celebrity crisis I personally underwrote, I am going to leap a few logical conclusions ahead and ponder whether this liquidity crunch has begotten too many issuances of new metaphors.No one has done more to glut this market than I. Back in March I whined that all men in New York treated women like "complex illiquid financial instruments that are difficult to value" and then in April I was back comparing the stock market's overreactions to conflicting economic indicators to an unhealthy relationship with a horny teenage boy. Then yesterday an ex-paramour with whom I was G-chatting compared our relationship to "capitalism in its late stages." Meanwhile on Wall Street the bankers have been actively trading in a reverse play on all those market metaphors. Yesterday it appeared that Goldman Sachs had lobbied the New York Times to run a clarification of a story it had run characterizing the venerable bank as "ailing"; "embattled," both parties agreed, was a more appropriate term. Since when did bankers give a shit about language, right? I mean, since when did they really even read? But suddenly, betrayed by the illiquid market in jargon, acronyms and euphemisms they once believed to be so safe, they've been drawn back in to the world of blue chip words, challenged to find their places among the varying shades of snide and "Pollyannish," dismissive and philosophical, populist and fatalist, conveyed when one chooses to broker seriously in enough palpable words like "crisis" and "panic," "meteoric" and "deterioration," "besieged" and "implosion" that they can more honestly reevaluate the fundamentals of the old pink-sheet pejoratives of "bailout," "protection" and "socialism." So who knows, maybe everyone is properly hedged. Maybe a skyrocketing Gross National Metaphor index could even shore up civil society and strengthen our frayed national fabric! Like the internet, but also the opposite of the internet.

Bill O'Reilly got a $5 million dollar advance for his new book, A Bold Fresh Naughty Piece of Humanity Learns to Say 'No' To Drugs. But who's looking out for you? (Hint: Nobody, loser.) [NYP]

(Disclaimer: Spoilers related to the Philip Roth novel Indignation ahead.) Oct. 2, Philip Roth will jump readers to the end of his new novel Indignation. On WNYC, the writer will explain how, if you read to the end of his book, you find that the narrator Marcus Messner is not, in fact, dead, but merely in the midst of a morphine hallucination of his own death. This contradicts both reviews of the book in the Times, one by Michiko Kakutani, the other in the Sunday Book Review. In so doing, it begs the question: Did those reviewers bother to read the book all the way to the end?

"Anyone out there who would like to talk about a book contract, I think I have some compelling material, given the right deal," trolls Owen Byrne, who left Digg for the presumably more stable workplace at TravelPod, a travel-blogging site launched in 1997 and now part of the Expedia network of sites. Book agents, Byrne's full pitch after the jump. No fighting!