A while back, I was the one responsible for publishing a rumor about David Sedaris—one of my favorite dropouts/essayists—picking up dudes on his book tours. Now poor Sedaris, a noted Luddite, is being asked about it, and it's just not true! "The Internet is so new to me. I didn't realize you could just go on and lie about people." Oh, David, you totally can. If he's paying special attention to anyone, it's teenage girls, he says!

Pixar, the computer animation company and digital film studio, was undervalued by everyone in Hollywood, from George Lucas who formed the original team at Skywalker Ranch to Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney. Steve Jobs, however, understood the potential for the company — and how to milk it for every penny. After buying the company for a mere $5 million, after Katzenberg balked on a $15 million price tag, Jobs hovered over the company like an "ominous cloud," according to Michael Hirschorn's review of David Price's new book detailing the company's history. At one point, Jobs squeezed more stock out the company so that the company could stay afloat — shortly before production on breakout hit Toy Story started production. "I’m sitting around here trying to make Steve Jobs richer in ways he doesn’t even appreciate," one employee quips. (Photo by AP/Eric Risberg)

Sloane Crosley, super-book publicist and author of the best-selling essay collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake, has sold the TV rights for her book to HBO "for series development." We're interested in how HBO will develop the story about a young Crosley quitting her job as assistant for an evil boss... on 9/11. Also: who will play her?! [NY Observer]

Actor/comedian/VH1 fixture Michael Ian Black is sick to death of memoirist David Sedaris hogging all the best-seller lists for himself, so he's taking the NPR man down. To get the ball rolling on his would-be literary feud-and to promote his own book, My Custom Van: And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face-Black offers suggestions on ways to belittle Sedaris in casual conversation. "Say, for example, you are at league bowling night and your buddy finds himself facing an easy pick-up for a spare. Just before he bowls say something like, 'Don't miss, Bob, or you might hear David Sedaris telling a long and humorous story about what a boob you are on 'This American Life.'"

On Tuesday, we explained Arianna Huffington's decade-spanning feud with Tim Russert. On Wednesday, we explored the orginal article that sparked it. Today, for the hell of it, another passage from the book that reported the blog mistress's alleged hiring of a private investigator to tail Tim Russert's wife. The book is Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms by Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who ran the Senate campaign of then-Huffington husband Michael. Click through to read the thrilling tale of Dianne Feinstein's Magical Illegal Nanny!

In her memoir Audition, news anchor Barbara Walters reveals her affair with a married senator, as well as hooking up with Alan Greenspan. In the book's new audio version, however, the sex bits are left out! As Time says the audio version is "read with breathless earnestness," perhaps that's for the best. [Time]

As we told you Monday, one sad editrix of celebrity gossip sheet thinks her profession is living on borrowed time. It's one big void out there, the canvas is blank, there is no news. And it's not just low culture. The zeitgeist at large seems to be suffering from tired blood (maybe too much vital energy spent looking at mobile porn?). Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke was the most noteworthy book to be published so far this year, and it argued that World War II wasn't worth fighting. World War II. That's not even counterintuitive in a fun Slate-y kind of way. As for the election, we're in a massive lull until at least Labor Day, barring Israel's surgical strike on Natanz, which happened yesterday while you were updating your Tumblr page. The arts? The worst film of the year, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, is (tellingly) about about an epidemic that causes inanition followed by suicide. The Jewish Museum's exhibiting action painting at a time of supreme lassitude. Elsewhere the herd of independent minds has taken a collective nap: the red siren that blares in Matt Drudge's head has been as silent as the one in James Wolcott's. So what's going on?

"James Frey might be a surprising choice, but I liked A Million Little Pieces." [Post]

Toby Young became famous long, long ago, when he was fired from Vanity Fair and then wrote a book about being fired from Vanity Fair. The book was also about how VF editor Graydon Carter is a bit of a tool. No one liked the book that much [Update! Besides Nick Denton and most of the UK!] but it was kind of funny and the media stuff was fun back in the early days of Gawker. But now! Thanks to The Devil Wears Prada we're finally getting the film of the book about getting fired from Vanity Fair. Toby Young's publicity campaign begins with an interview with Young Manhattanite, in which he says this: "[Gawker] has turned New York into what the philosopher Jeremy Bentham called a Panopticon — a type of prison in which all the prisoners are capable of being observed 24/7." And then he says this: "Who's Nick Denton?" Hah. [YM]

Taking 25% of the vote, Matthew Hilliard beat out nine other fabulous contestant to become Gawker's newest Hottest Man in Book Publishing! He's a Binghamton '06 grad and works in trade sales at Penguin. Update: Ladies, we hear he's single! Now, we've heard from a few sources that some of the gentleman in the contest were a little embarrassed, given that we're objectifying them and all. An addendum: they are also all quite smart. After the jump: Matthew's endearingly self-deprecating acknowledgment of the honor:

So the last month's rumormonger that editor Leigh Haber was out at Rodale is true! "She will be 'working from home' till the end of her contract and is to have no contact with anyone at Rodale... she was *not* happy about having Karen Rinaldi as her new boss (rather than her pal Steve Murphy) and refused to do much of anything when Karen signed on," said the tipster. She's also *not* been happy about her coverage on this website, based on her last encounter with our publisher at the Waverly Inn. (Someone thinks we're irresponsible!) Famous for burning bridges across town, Haber put out Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth while at Rodale. [NY Observer]

Novelist Keith Gessen, having been ridiculed here and elsewhere on the Web over the past week, is still trying to take back the internet from mean people. But he just had a sudden, happy epiphany, in which he realized that these vicious critics are not really being mean to him but toward their own caricature of him. They're just "bored at work" and are trying to have fun, so they imagine Gessen to be the juicy target they crave and lash out. "So, it's cool," the very important intellectual wrote. (He later rephrased this as, "You know, whatever.") Gessen is so relieved that the internet meanies don't hate him (just the distant, imagined "him") that he's invited us all to his place, or at least his workplace, for a big Friday night bash! Our nice, in-person selves will "take back the internet" from our anonymous-behind-a-keyboard selves! Bring your kittens and so forth!! Time/place, along with a longer explanation of why Gessen is so totally over you, after the jump.

Think of how easy it might have been to understand Arianna Huffington's bloggy animus toward Tim Russert if there were a book out chronicling all the sordid details of their decade-and-a-half-long secret feud. (There is.) Every gossip-mongering gadabout should know the full backstory on every spat, falling out, and long-running mutual antagonism in media. Below are the volumes no shelf should be without.

Like all single guys on the subway, men in the publishing industry like to devise, or at least imagine they've devised, strategies for attracting cute women, and for maybe even making these lady strangers do the hard, traditionally-male work of striking up a conversation. Unlike other men, publishing types have access to advance galleys of hot books, and they hope this will give them an edge with New York's many literary babes. The Observer's bookish young Leon Neyfakh made an ernest — eager, even — attempt to prove this hypothesis true, in a story with the hopefully-worded subhead, "Carrying Bolano's 2666 Is Like Driving an Open-Top Porsche." And he found plenty of literary men to agree with that thesis. But the women? Different story.

Why not. YouTube will determine the next president and whether we bomb Iran, it might as well shrink James Wood's column inches in the New Yorker. I'm already experiencing the anxiety of a certain kind of influence in watching this ebullient young critic analyze Tom Rob Smith's Child 44. Future belletrists, take note. Edmund Wilson had to go to Princeton, edit F. Scott Fitzgerald, lose his cherry to Edna St. Vincent Millay, and learn half a dozen languages to be taken seriously. That's what happens when you've got a face made for text messaging.

We're still taking votes for our Hottest Man in Book Publishing poll. The winner will get to pose for a classy-not-trashy glamorshot (if he consents.) The two top vote-getters at the moment? Here they are, girls: Matt, on the left, is a trade sales coordinator at Penguin. Nathan in the orange shirt is a San Francisco literary agent. But there are eight other eligible contestants! The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy, or whatever. [Vote here!]

Barnes & Noble got in a snit last week about the truthiness of essayist David Sedaris's stories, and listed his latest collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames as fiction. (Sedaris has called his stories "97% true, and the missing 3% must have put them over the edge.) But now they're back to calling it nonfiction. It was all just a big misunderstanding, they say—a B&N spokeswoman told the Observer's Leon Neyfakh that the "fiction" listing was just a mistake made by Nielsen Bookscan, not them! Really! [NY Observer]

Yesterday, Daily News columnists Rush & Molloy speculated that maybe, just maybe, the novel from the wife of comedian Denis Leary (above, right) is autobiographical, since it's about a wife whose famous husband is good friends with a hot Australian movie star, sort of like how Leary is friends with hot English actress Elizabeth Hurley (above, left). In the novel, the actor's wife is upset by his "schoolboy crush" on the friend. We wrote that Ann Leary had "sadly channeled her frustrations into a thinly-veiled 'novel.'" But she replies that Gawker is "crazy," and told Choire Sicha of the LA Times that we're just clawing for cheap attention. Well, that last part is true. But at least we can admit it!

Back this summer by popular demand, we've got ten straight book-publishing gentlemen lined up for you to vote on! The winner will receive the "Gawker Hottest Straight Guy of Book Publishing 2008" title for an entire year. (Last year's winner? Luke Janklow!) If the winner consents, we'll take a classy glamorshot of him for his winning post. After the jump, we've got little bios for our book publishing boys. Vote!

The exit of HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman continues to baffle everyone, including New York magazine, which tried to figure out why Friedman was let go but could only figure out two non-reasons. Some people thought she was maybe ousted because, at the London Book Fair in April, she decided Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany was too anti-Israel and so moved his cocktail party away from the official HarperCollins booth. But "a source close to Friedman" said she just doesn't ever like having book parties in the booth. This source also shot down the idea, floated by at least one former News Corp. insider, that Friedman was fired because in 2006 she pushed out profitable publisher Judith Regan after she was charged with making anti-semitic statements, a charge News Corp. called false when settling a Regan lawsuit. If rumormongering, journalism, guessing and scapegoating didn't revel the truth about Jane Friedman's departure, what on heaven's Earth will? Someone award this woman a tell-all book contract or something before everyone dies of suspense (or, more likely, stops caring). [New York]