Oh, sure, cranky old dead writer Norman Mailer was weird about sex, as the Harvard Crimson reported last week. But how weird? Aren't you just dying to know on a Monday morning? Well, Page Six is aching to tell you: "fantasy role playing" weird, with a Hollywood fetish. The literary giant and sometime avant-guard filmmaker liked to be told certain stories:

Vladimir Nabokov's son, Dmitri, caused a big ol' sensation when he decided to publish his father's unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura, rather than burn the manuscript, like his dad had asked him to on his deathbed. But Dmitri now says that Nabokov's dying wish was mostly just a lot of huffing and puffing from a sick old man.

"It's not on Amazon.com as we speak, but there's an unusual-sounding book by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Cathleen Falsani arriving in the spring of '09 called The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers. It will look at the 'serious existential and theological questions using the dark, intelligent humor and epic storytelling that have been their trademarks in more than a dozen films during the past 25 years.'"

In the new book, If I'd Only Known Then: Women in Their 20s and 30s Write Letters to Their Younger Selves, former Seventeen editor and current Alpha Kitty Atoosa Rubenstein writes, "I know you don't believe me, just like you don't believe Mom when she tells you that you are beautiful. But I'll say it anyway: One day you will lead a very fancy life. Yes! A girl like you whose parents work multiple jobs and barely make ends meet can grow up to live in a beautiful corner apartment in Manhattan overlooking the water, have weekend houses in the Hamptons and Miami, attend fashion shows in Europe and be photographed for magazines." (No, the 'Toos was not being sarcastic.) We are trying to find out if one of these letter-writers encourages their younger selves to slut it up while they have the chance, 'cause gravity will be on your side for only so long, honey. [via the Observer]

The Strand, the humongous New York bookstore by Union Square that is like one of the biggest used book stores ever of all time, has always attracted lots of young workers who take the low pay in exchange for the cool factor of working at the place, and the chance to be around books all day. One negative: the store is run by a despised woman named Nancy Bass Wyden (trivia: she's married to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden). I've known several people who worked at The Strand, and they universally agree on her tyranny. Now, the New York Press has actually done some investigative work on the claims, and it's found evidence for allegations of racial discrimination, callous disregard for pregnant women, and—most terrifyingly—"fungus from rats."

Michael Bloomberg is the greatest manager ever which is why pundits always want him to run for president. He's sooo great that he left an abusive tyrant in charge of his financial news company, and also that company gets sued every so often for being a hostile work environment for women. Last September, four women were suing Bloomberg LP for wrongful discrimination. Now, it's 58! It seems that whenever a lady employee became pregnant at Bloomberg, they were denied promotions and then received pay cuts. Mayor Mike always claims to have nothing to do at all with his company anymore, but the women filing the suit say he still calls the shots and "contributes to a culture of sexual discrimination." As there have been almost 500 women who've taken maternity leave from Bloomberg since 2002, the number of plaintiffs is expected to grow. And Mike himself is now writing a book about how to be as great a manager as he is. Like his last book, it will probably be ghost-written by his asshole-in-chief Winkler. [NYP]

The Pulitzer-winning book critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, has been in the news this week: she was called "the stupidest person in New York City," by author Jonathan Franzen, presumably because of her negative review of his memoir. (Norman Mailer called her a "one-woman kamikaze" who "disdains white male authors," but he was afraid of intimacy.) The Guardian's book blog offers a field guide to this "reclusive," mysterious critic:

Carole Mallory, a former actress-model who was late pugilistic writer Norman Mailer's mistress, has granted an interview to... Harvard University's student paper, The Crimson. "Three weeks ago, Harvard received Mallory's collection of materials documenting her nine-year relationship with Mailer." She spills the shocking (yet totally expected) details: Mailer taught her how to write, was weird about sex, and threatened to haunt her in the afterlife.

Michael Roberts, the Vanity Fair fashion and style director who attributed the uproar over the sexy Miley Cyrus photos to unsophisticated Americans who don't handle "chic pictures" as well as his fellow Europeans, is not just dispensing cultural criticism through the media: he has a book coming out! And in a fun coincidence, the 112-page tome is going to be called Fashion Victims: The Catty Catalogue of Stylish Casualties, from A to Z. Perhaps he'll add a section addressing the fact that "The whole kiddie porn prurient angle seems to be worryingly sour grapes from other magazines that didn't get a picture like this." After all, at Vanity Fair "We don't do cheesy teen pictures. We do chic pictures and pictures that are beautiful portraits." Alrighty then. Just for kicks, another now-ironic quote from last October's Telegraph profile of Roberts:

Hucksters are calling bookstores, pretending to be authors, and then hitting them up for money, reports the LA Times. For example, someone might impersonate an author that will be reading at the store in a few days, asking for cash to get his car out of the impound lot. Big-hearted bookstore employees have fallen for the scams a few times, but no more: "They draw you in, and later you just feel so foolish."

Norwegian black metal rockers aren't like their shifty white-trash American counterparts. While you were drinking Coors and listening to Slayer in your dad's van, dudes in Norway were burning churches and thinking about Satan. Photographer Peter Beste spent seven years following and documenting the subculture and just published a photo book, True Norwegian Black Metal.

Disgraced fabricating memoirist James Frey is planning to redeem himself in two weeks with a new book, Bright Shiny Morning, clearly labeled as fiction. But there's some spadework to be done first, in terms of publicity and whatnot, and it seems Frey hasn't been too careful about, you know, "the truth" or whatever, in the run-up to his literary rebirth. He granted Vanity Fair an "exclusive" interview and got in return a "softball profile... which paints Mr. Frey as a wounded victim of market forces," in the words of the Observer's Leon Neyfakh. But it turns out Frey also talked to a UK trade publication called The Bookseller, which posted its interview to the Web just a few hours after Vanity Fair. Then there's Frey's worn claim that he first submitted his memoir A Million Little Pieces as a novel but was convinced to relabel it as a memoir. Pieces publisher Nan Talese was not pleased, to say the least, to hear that Frey has resumed saying this:

Hip-hop journalist Harry Allen has unearthed a 10-minute video of disgraced memoirist Margaret Seltzer — remember her? two months ago? — back when she was still pretending to be an ex-gangbanger and drug-runner. The video was likely made to promote Seltzer's fake autobiography, Love And Consequences, and "may be the only existing footage of Seltzer in her full-on 'hood' persona," Allen writes. Seltzer dishes some fun-to-watch lies in the video, like when she talks about the violent death of a fabricated nephew (Allen notes Seltzer calls the supposed dead boy "it" and "thing"), and sometimes Seltzer abruptly halts or chokes up, as though her guilt or fear of exposure about lying has tripped her up. Some of the better moments, including Seltzer talking about "homies" on death row toasting her graduation, are excerpted in a two-minute summary video after the jump.

Oh noes! Someone at the Spectator, Columbia University's student paper, wrote a negative review of literary mag n+1 editor Keith Gessen's novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men. Now another Columbia kid, Mark Krotov, is coming to the rescue! Wait for the disclosure: "I have done a little work for Gessen and his magazine, which has a very low circulation rate." NEG! Is it just us, or is Keith's entire world very incest-y?

The Observer's Doree Shafrir and Jezebel's Jessica Grose landed a book deal for "Postcards From Yo Momma," their beloved tumblr blog that reprints emails from readers' mothers, because we are all terrible children. Doree and Jessica "are said to have received a comfortable... sum," according to Balk, though not as much a the creators of Stuff White People Like. Of course the Stuff White People Like guys actually have to, like, write their book. Themselves! [Radar] Update: Doree says, "they actually want quite a bit of original content." Of course she'll probably make her mom write it.

James Frey is doing just one interview for his new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, and it's with Vanity Fair. Writer Evgenia Peretz tries to get to the bottom of what exactly happened with that whole fake-memoir scandal of his last book, which caused him to be ritually flensed on Oprah. "During the publishing process, Frey, it seems, still had some misgivings about putting the book out there as a memoir." Is there usually so much sturm und drang about putting out a memoir? If it's true it's a memoir and if not it's fiction, right? We're sort of tired of debating the mechanics of it at this point, but apparently it's just not that simple.

"College students today enter a low hook-up culture when they leave the classroom," warns Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield in his WSJ review of the newest overwrought book about college kids fucking. "In case you don't know, a hook-up is a brief sexual encounter between two partners who don't necessarily know each other before and who don't necessarily want to know each other after." Sounds costly. "And it's free." Well, that's a bonus! "The sort of transient sex that once was available to men only for money can now be had, without paying, from college women - as long as the man is a fellow student and minimally artful about his approach." Good lord, is that new? I don't remember that. "If he is thwarted in one overture, he may try another with a reasonable prospect of success." That, sadly, is just the intro paragraph.

Why, it's Michiko Kakutani, fiction critic at the New York Times, of course! As a general rule, authors do tend to think the "stupidest people in the city" are the ones who reviewed their books negatively. (It's just one of those things.) In Franzen's case, it was her review of his memoir The Discomfort Zone that really set him off: "In the case of this book the author's self-involvement not only makes for an incredibly annoying portrait, but also funnels the narrative into a dismayingly narrow channel." Regardless of quality, it hurts more than usual when someone criticizes your memoir. It's not like saying, "I don't like your characters." It's more like, "I don't like your life." (That said, there are just some things that should not be published.) [NY Observer]

If just buying James Frey's new novel isn't enough for you, you can purchase the "companion volume" called Wives, Wheels, and Weapons for just $150, hardcover. But it has a bunch of Terry Richardson photos of MILFs, gangsters, and rad cars. The three things that symbolize L.A.! I don't really understand the market for any of this. Particularly for Frey's heavy metal/ Hell's Angels book promotional tour, which gets a prize for Most Apparent Conscious Contrivance Of Coolness: