In case you're wondering what kind of gems comes out of the world of self-published childrens' books, this kid-book blog brought to light the story of LATAWNYA, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say “NO” to Drugs. This vanity press tome warns of the dangers of what can happen when a group of horses decides to play "a smoking game and a drinking game." The best part?
So Tina Brown's job as creative consultant to troubled HBO—"If I collide with some interesting material, I’ll call or e-mail them"—has finally paid off. The former New Yorker editor is to produce a movie version of Tom Wolfe's college novel I am Charlotte Simmons. It's not as much as a stretch as one might think. The magazine veteran and the Bonfire of the Vanities author are both still on the Upper East Side scene; many editors, including Clay Felker of New York and Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair have been flattered by Hollywood into the movie business; Tina Brown's father George was himself a moderately successful producer in the UK. But it's still a perplexing role.
Halfway through a cranky discussion with the Observer on New York real estate development, Tom Wolfe turned with relish to the topic of the ongoing financial panic. The enthusiasm was understandable from an author who wrote an epic novel, Bonfire Of The Vanities, psychologically centered on Wall Street. First thing to understand, according to Wolfe: Investment banks like Lehman Brothers hire losers, "real second-raters" from "the bottom of the barrel" who couldn't get on at hedge funds. Of course they set your money on fire! Second thing to understand: Even these incompetents might have made do if it weren't for the evils of information technology:
For all the bloodletting on Wall Street, the financial services meltdown will probably mean handsome profits for at least some finance hacks. The troubles have to actually end before anyone has a shot at writing a popular book about them, but smart writers and publishers are already hunting. Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Times and Roger Lowenstein of the Wall Street Journal are "considering" writing books, according to the Observer, while Newsweek's Daniel Gross is raring to go with a quickie electronic title he's ready to finish in two months flat. The most leveraged proposal (if you will) comes from Bethany "Enron" McLean of Fortune and Times columnist Joe Nocera, who basically drank until they worked up the nerve to demand a million bucks for their definitive insights:
That Elizabeth Wurtzel had some thing with David Foster Wallace in the nineties is the type of news flash I'd like to have failed detecting this week. Namely because to blog about Elizabeth Wurtzel is to tempt oneself to unwind the various tranches of disquietude summoned when someone like me conducts a Wurtzel Google Image Search. There's the first tranche of familiarity; I've conducted this search before; the second: I remember quickly that I will invariably, though tempted by the grainy topless shots from Bitch, like Radar before me quickly settle on the hottest color photo available, the one she used for the cover of her 2001 addiction memoir More, Now, Again, even though Wurtzel has graciously offered us photographic evidence that she has, in the intervening (ohgod) seven and a half years, aged. For this is not a new asset, this story; the underlying episode dates back to the nineties, when Wurtzel was still dressing up her faculties and skills with too much blue eyeliner and too many mood-altering substances in lieu of the appropriate degree of risk management and/or clothes.So let's examine that tranche for a second: here we have Wurtzel, drawn to David and his big, serious, ambitious, meaty, unfrivolous gold standard of a book; David, drawn to Wurtzel by her fucking leotard and perhaps her nebulous promise to impart upon his serious asset some sort of value-unlocking sense of "buzz"…signing onto one of those confusing, fuzzy subprime relationships that were all the rage, still are. The fine print is almost amusing to us now: the hazy fundamentals and wild histrionics and bombastic promises dependent on "trajectories" neither has any clue how — neither is socialized to have any clue how — to redirect toward a soft landing. Yes, you have done that sort of fucking. From a 1996 account of his reading at the KGB Bar:
Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell's new novel, about the denizens of classy apartment building One Fifth, contains an editor at fictional website Snarker (snarf!) named Thayer Core. He lives in the East Village and has the audacity to sit online all day, throwing e-bricks at people! (Who can afford the East Village anymore?) Yet! There's something hilarious and ironic about a former editor for this website reviewing One Fifth Avenue for the Observer. Take it away, Doree:
Natalie McLennan is the self-proclaimed high-end hooker whose statements in a 2005 New York magazine cover story helped get her convicted on prostitution-related charges last year. Now that she's done her time, McLennan is free to tell all in a new book. And, what do you know, just like her onetime pimp Jason Itzler, McLennan just happens to have unearthed from her memory some sexy new stories to tell about Ashley Dupre, famed hooker to former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and a former working girl alongside McLennan. The tales were excerpted in the Post Sunday, alongside a racy picture (left). They involve cocaine and the rapper Nas:
Emma Gilbey Keller's new book "The Comeback" is, in part, about emerging from under the shadow of her husband, Times editor Bill Keller. Good luck with that. In the insular world of publishing, the Times Book Review still reigns supreme, and the positive Sunday notice on Emma Keller's title has already arched some eyebrows. Sure, the Keller family connection is disclosed. But people are already wondering about self-dealing at the Times after recent gushing praise for a book by a New York Times Co. executive and four separate plugs for a book by the husband of a company director — whose book-writing son also got notice in the paper. Then there's the efficient praise the Times had for Emma's last book. Newspaper gossips will remember it from the author.
It stands to reason that a show about frazzled females in New York media might include a cameo by Emily Gould, the former Gawker editor now working on her six-figure "book of autobiographical stories" about being a frazzled female in new New York media. Via certain Observer staff Gould is just a degree or two of separation away from Lipstick Jungle creator Candace Bushnell. But after an email tip and way too much (20 minutes!) research, we've determined that those tattoos on the Lipstick extra's arms (above) just don't match up with Gould's own body art. So you (and we) should probably move on to thinking about more important things, like the implosion of Western capitalism. Or, you know, scrutinize this Gould-aping extra some more in the clip after the jump.
Home-schooling? So over. Try city-schooling your kids at the Met and trendy bars. That's what The Professors' Wives' Club author Joanne Rendell is doing. How does an un-schooled Manhattan five-year-old spend his days? It has its advantages: "Un-kindergarten for us means Benny can sleep late so I can write. It means we don't have to worry about bedtimes and can go out on the town with friends any night of the week. We can go to Europe and visit my family when the flights are cheap..."Heh. It's like she's trying to provoke criticism from the blogs.
Hey, did you know? Before Brokeback Mountain was a moviefilm about gay cowboys, it was a novella by Annie Proulx. Like, in an actual book. Now that her story has reached a mass audience, Proulx is on the receiving end of certain fans re-writing her story as slash fiction—a.k.a. gay porn—and sending it to her. (Redundant?) Their amateurish attempts annoy the hell out of her. We looked up some of this slash fiction to see exactly how people are molesting this Pulitzer-winning author's story:Proulx told the Wall Street Journal via Independent:
Tatiana Boncompagni is a total socialite. How do we know? Because she's related to an Italian princess, her husband is the Hoover vacuum-cleaner heir, she's friends with uber-socialites Tinsley Mortimer and Fabiola Beracasa, and because she just wrote a socialite novel and works at a magazine. (Magazine jobs were lost ago lost to the rich. As such, Boncompagni pens a column for Conde Nast's Cookie, the magazine about children.) The Daily Intel interviewed her recently. Example: does she give money to panhandlers? "Double strollers don't push themselves. So no, not usually." You're probably excited about the book, Gilding Lily. So we excerpted it by doing a search for the required keywords: Jimmy Choo, Louboutin, Bergdorf and Birkin—all the ingredients for a chick-lit society tome!
Oh, great: The children's division at HarperCollins is planning a novel based on the teenaged years of Sex And The City character Carrie Bradshaw. Sex inspiration Candance Bushnell will write the thing and HarperCollins will target it at both teenagers and older fans, making the novel perfect for parents who'd like to give it as a "gift" to their children before awkwardly reclaiming it once it's been read. And what sorts of sex scenes might whole families be enjoying once this book is published two years from now? The Observer's Leon Neyfakh used this question as an excuse to re-watch his entire collection of SATC videos:
A couple months ago, we LOL'd at the book proposal for the upcoming LOLcats book, I Can Has Cheezburger? Then, in a blog-to-book roundup, we declared "do not want" on the LOLcat book, explaining, "The LOLcats experience is fleeting; the site stuffed with content, and copycat sites abound." We were right about some of these blog-to-books: the rushed-to-print Stuff White People Like, for instance, sucked and did not merit a review. But! We have the LOLcats books in our hands right now, and we'd like to overturn our previous verdict of DO NOT WANT.The new book is little and cute and we want! It may not be necessary for the Internet savvy among us (like everyone reading), but it makes a cute gift for someone like your grandma who doesn't understand the Internet but probably would understand funny captioned cat-photos. In the proposal, the authors assured they wouldn't be "just slapping some lolcats on a page and calling it a book." But that's exactly what they ended up doing! It doesn't matter, though. Because today we LOL'd, and we really needed to. And that is the power of the LOLcats. Update: On the book's Amazon.com page, we noticed something very weird:
The Joy of Sex, originally published in the seventies with illustrations of bearded men, will be joyfully updated. So much about sex has changed in the last thirty-odd years: the book's new author tells the Sydney Morning Herald that "back in '72 they didn't know about hormones, about pheromones, they didn't know about certain body parts and their importance, which we now know." Is that a polite way of recognizing the G-spot? C'mon, just say it.
Harper's has made available online eleven essays by David Foster Wallace following the postmodern writer's suicide last week. Bloggers have rounded up other DFW work available online, including his Times profile of Roger Federer and 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain. There are also videos, including the writer's appearances on Charlie Rose (other) and these moments collected by the LA Times. All told, the world is left with a reasonably extensive sampling of the writer's work available at the click of a mouse — at least enough to draw in new readers and perhaps even convince them to attempt his daunting masterpiece, Infinite Jest. [via Daring Fireball, Wonkette, LA Times]
