Everyone seems nearly as confused in the aftermath of Jane Friedman's departure from atop HarperCollins as they were in the frantic hours before the official confirmation. But it looks increasingly like the CEO was elbowed aside. Friedman's deputy and successor, Brian Murray, has disclosed he was summoned to a meeting with Rupert Murdoch Wednesday and unexpectedly offered her job. But Friedman didn't discuss her departure with Murdoch until two days later, on Wednesday, according to a Times source "familiar with her situation." If true, that would signal Murdoch wanted her out. Perhaps the HarperCollins pipeline looked weak; Leon Neyfakh at the Observer raised the possibility of "a terrible fourth quarter." Still, there are all sorts of conflicting signals.

Looking for a decent excuse to advance his long-simmering feud with Rupert Murdoch and to do a weird Australian/pirate accent, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann seized upon the words of a former News Corp. insider, who claimed in one of our posts this morning that Murdoch fired Jane Friedman from HarperCollins because she canned powerhouse publisher Judith Regan in late 2006, and also because she squashed Regan's OJ Simpson book project. The source also claimed, tangentially and outlandishly, that Fox News chief Roger Ailes will soon be fired as well for his own role in the Simpson book fiasco. Predictably, this amused Olbermann to no end. For the crime of going to bat for the OJ book, Olbermann named Murdoch today's "worst person in the world," an honor previously bestowed to Fox News screamer Bill O'Reilly. He then did a killer Murdoch imitation that will surely put to rest those allegations that he's totally crazy. Clip after the jump.

Jane Friedman's departure as HarperCollins CEO, first reported by Gawker, has been officially confirmed by the book publisher. Her replacement by Brian Murray, 21 years her junior, comes less than a month after a similar generational shift at Bertelsmann AG's Random House, where unsentimental German engineer Markus Dohle, 39, replaced book-loving lawyer Peter Olson, 58. The young book executives hope to fix slowing growth and to better exploit the explosion in online digital media. But it's not clear whether broad technology trends had much to do with the departure of Friedman, who got her start as a Knopf dictaphone typist four decades ago, went on to become a pioneer in audio books and online marketing and who led a unique and ambitious push to digitize HaperCollins' collection. As a surprised fellow executives groped for answers about the change last night, some speculated it might even have its roots in late 2006, when Friedman, with the backing of Roger Ailes, squelched the a high-profile book overseen by HarperCollins executive Judith Regan by alleged killer OJ Simpson, then pushed Regan out of the company in the wake of Regan's remarks about Jews. As one former News Corp. insider put it:

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We're hearing a wild rumor that Jane Friedman was just fired from her perch atop News Corp.'s HarperCollins. If true, this would sure lend a hefty dose of irony to the publishing executive's quote in the Observer today, gleaned from an industry party on the Twentieth Century Fox lot Saturday: "I love being CEO of HarperCollins!" Anyone hearing anything? UPDATE: The Observer quotes a source confirming Friedman's departure, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting the exit as fact. Two strange things about these reports:

New York writer and editor Rachel Kramer Bussel was at Book Expo America, that publishing industry clusterfuck, and snapped two pics of upcoming celeb tomes: Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen's Influence and "laptop samurai/Queen of All Media" Perez Hilton's Red Carpet Suicides. Click to enlarge the covers.

Didn't get enough gay hip hop blind items in the new Terrance Dean tell-all book Hiding In Hip Hop? It's your lucky day, because there's a follow-up documentary on the way! The entertainment industry vet and former down-low brother Dean tells us the entire film—catchily named "X'pos'D" —will be going up on YouTube soon, and that the LOGO network has "expressed interest" in it. It will explore "why the black community is afraid to address the taboo of homosexuality." Maybe because they'll be X'pos'D! The trailer, featuring a veritable library of gay slurs, is below.

GQ editor Mickey Rapkin has written a book called Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory. If that wasn't funny enough, it turns out that practically half the world has a shameful a capella singing-group past! And he names names—including Osama Bin Laden.

Traditional gender roles are for capitalists! Journalist and novelist Jan Morris married her wife for the second time last week. The first time they got married—almost sixty years ago—she was a man. Morris is 81 years old and was the reporter with the original scoop on the climbing of Mount Everest in 1953. (And yes, Morris wrote not one but two books about the sex-change adventure.) Click to enlarge the before-and-after pics! [Daily Mail]

Ben Karlin, the funnyman former Daily Show producer who is, unfortunately, kind of a dick, is currently suing some company over a book about Spain. Mario Batali is involved, too. What in the world is Ben Karlin doing working on a book about Spain, which does not appear to be a comedy project? We don't know, but it sure sounds like the guy is (wisely) just signing up for any old book that'll cut him a check:

The distinguishing characteristic of a meme—even the fragile idea that there's an Alabama school of writers such as Howell Raines, Warren St John and Elizabeth Spiers—is that it's self-perpetuating. Which is the only explanation for the precocious literary ambition of 17-year-old Alex Niedenthal from Birmingham.

Cantankerous Trinidadian novelist V.S. Naipaul, who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker, lets us know that we've "quite simply" used up our allotment of awesome writers: "Publishing has gone down in quality so much in recent years and the problem is that there is no literary life any more because there are quite simply no more great writers." To further undermine his point, he called the attendees of a book fair "incredibly ugly."

Rob Walker, who writes the "Consumed" column in the New York Times Magazine every weekend (a sweet "job"), has a new book out in which he draws the sad—but unavoidable—conclusion that we are all a bunch of sheep blindly obeying a world of marketing messages. You think you're able to use your education, morality, and philosophical beliefs to rise above advertising? Ha! That's what all the sheep think. Walker's not a gung-ho Corporate America kind of guy, which makes his thesis that much more depressing. But it's hard to argue with him. Go drown your sorrows in PBR like the hipster that you are. Your chosen brands make up your very soul:

Like an old, scorned lover, Scott McClellan can't quite fully betray and repudiate the man who made him do awful things, George W. Bush. The former Bush press secretary has written a fairly extensive and blunt tell-all book about his time with the president, but he's still splitting hairs about what happened. So when McClellan found himself on the Daily Show, discussing the administration's hushing of the economic cost of the war in Iraq, he couldn't help but insist the cover-up was not "willful deception" but was the common practice of selective disclosure. Host Jon Stewart wasn't having any of it: "Somebody made a willful decision, 'don't talk about the price [of the war]...'" McClellan: "I don't think it was like that."

The PR industry loves to get riled up any time someone takes what might be construed as an unjustified shot at its awful reputation. This is because there are already so many perfectly justified criticisms of PR that any argument not directly linked to a huge public scandal gives the industry a rare chance to get on its high horse. That's precisely what's going on today, after CBS analyst Andrew Cohen went on air yesterday with a scathing but overbroad rant calling the entire PR industry dirty liars, in the wake of lying former Bush flack Scottie McClellan's book. How dare CBS be so mean! The Public Relations Society of America fired back with a mealy-mouthed letter declaring "truth and accuracy are the bread and butter of the public relations profession." This is the same PRSA that didn't feel the need to say anything about McClellan's admitted lies themselves. So we have an ill-considered commentary, and a hypocritical response. A perfect embodiment of PR! Video of Cohen's rant, after the jump.

You might have already known that Jews love Chinese food, especially on Christmas. But did you know that "Jews as a group buy 23 percent of all hardcover books printed"? That's according to according to Stuart M. Matlins, EIC and publisher at Jewish Lights and Skylight Paths books. Jennifer 8. Lee, NYT reporter and author of Chinese food book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, subjected herself to an "audition" to have her book included in the Jewish Book Network. In fact, she changed the number of chapters in her book from 19 to 18 (a significant number meaning "life") simply to appeal to the chosen tribe! So a Chinese-American author walks into a room of 200 Jews at the Book Expo...

Laura Albert was successfully sued for fraud for pretending to be a drug-addicted teen in books she wrote under the assumed name and gender of JT Leroy, so of course she's in an excellent position to lecture her co-conspirator Savannah Knoop for daring to write a tell-all account of the deception. Knoop, you see, was the woman who pretended to be JT Leroy in public appearances, while Albert was the one who did the hard work of, uh, making shit up. Now Knoop is publishing Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT Leroy, and Albert thinks that is "sad and sleazy" because she, Albert, was the real defrauder in the JT Leroy saga. "Just because you play a writer doesn't mean you are a writer," Albert told Page Six. True, and just because you slap the label "non-fiction" on your otherwise mediocre "art" to build buzz doesn't mean you have to refrain from calling anyone else a sell-out. But people have been known to grow and mature! [Page Six]

Remember Felix Dennis, the kooky billionaire British magazine publisher who gave us Maxim? He recently admitted (while admittedly drunk) to having "killed a man" in an interview. (He later took it back, post-interview and post-sobering up.) For an new interview in Business Week, Jon Fine asks the tough questions in an attempt to clear up the murder thing: "I'll just be blunt. Have you murdered anybody?"

Fabricating memoirist James Frey earned a $1.5 million advance for his novel Bright Shiny Morning, and sales are strong. Now Frey is paying forward his riches from the book, and the money seems to be making a circle back toward the people who staged his comeback in the first place. Frey, the Post reported today, hired his wife's friend Davidson Goldin, former editorial director at MSNBC, to help with publicity on Bright Shiny Morning. Now flush, it would seem, with surplus cash, Goldin is starting a "media-strategy and branding consulting firm." And who did Frey steer to Goldin as a partner in this endeavor? Joe Dolce, the former Star magazine editor-in-chief famous for his poor management and communication skills. But there's a very relevant detail about Dolce and his relationship to Frey the Post omitted: