Terrance Dean, the gay former record exec and author of the upcoming book "Hiding In Hip Hop" that promises to EXPOSE THE GAY RAPPERS (we hope) has a blog! Well, a little one. At this point it only has three entries. Still, the book itself doesn't come out for two more weeks, and nobody has offered us a bootleg copy yet, so we're going to go through his blog entries carefully for any clues as to it's EXPLOSIVE contents. After the jump, a little detective work and a lot of blind speculation.

In case you missed their guest appearance on Today, Jenna and Laura Bush have collaborated with an illustrator on Read All About It!, the $17.99, 32-page tale of math machine and science whiz Tyrone, a reluctant reader until the books that his teacher read to the class actually came to life. All five-star reviews so far, with the exception of one Zebo Quad, who opines: "This book just proves that celebrities could vomit onto a blank page and publishers would publish it." It also suggests Steve Jobs was onto something when he dissed the Amazon Kindle e-book reader:

Keith Gessen, editor of literary magazine n+1 (the most important literary magazine of our time with a print run of 7,500), and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, was on Leonard Lopate's show on WNYC, talking somewhat naively about how tough it was for his characters, and him, to graduate from college at the end of the 90s, a "very exciting time," only to struggle to find "a life that's going to be true to their ideas... I had no idea how to go about it." Yet he somehow soldiered on. (Lopate chimes in with something about how there are 300 million people in America, and if only ten percent of them are interested in literature, that's still an audience of 30 million!) Meanwhile, the city's moms lament that their daughters aren't dating Gessen:

Book publicist/author Sloane Crosley is so magically delicious that she even brightened the painful Sunday Styles feature on N+1 editor and Emily Gould-dater Keith Gessen in today's Times. "At the football game, he admitted to monitoring his novel's Amazon.com sales obsessively. And he lamented the fact that more visitors to his novel's Amazon page chose to buy Sloane Crosley's essay collection, 'I Was Told There'd Be Cake,' than his book." But to get to that, I had to come face-to-face with one particularly offensive nugget.

How I Met Your Mother nice guy Josh Radnor: "Her head was thrown back, the arms were raised above the body as if in the last moments of her life the girl was desperately defending herself. A deep gash four inches long was in her right cheek. Her neck was cut from the lobe of the left ear to the center of the throat and there was another gaping wound in the right side of the neck."

Chronicler of every single moment of his life Augusten Burroughs is back with yet another memoir, this one titled A Wolf At the Table. Despite his marvelous success as an humorist and essayist, his latest 'oir hinges on the darker tales of his late father John Robison, a popular professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who by all accounts wasn't the kindest patriarch to his wife and children. That Robison is a complicated and troubled man isn't in dispute. What is up for debate in this Times piece are certain episodes of what Burroughs calls "stunning psychological cruelty." For example, the book claims Robison put a cigarette out on Burroughs' forehead. The surviving members of the Robison family also have divergent memories of a scene from A Wolf At the Table in which Burroughs defends himself and his brother John Elder Robison from their father with a BB gun. After the jump, the two sons and their mother relate three different versions of the same sad tale.

It's hard to know where to start with the new book plugged on Larry King Live tonight by authors Jenna Bush and her mom Laura, the first lady. First of all, it's for kids who hate reading. Very meta, but maybe not the best business model for publisher HarperCollins. Also, it's got a character named Tyrone, who is eight or nine. Tyrone is also white, possibly the first white kid to be named Tyrone, ever. Jenna said Tyrone is a "composite," which she explains to mean he is based on one particular student taught by her mom. One would have hoped Jenna learned the meaning of the word "composite" while serving as a co-teacher in a DC charter school, but after drinking her way around the world maybe the first daughter has found her brain doesn't work as well as it used to. Somewhere in America tonight, there's an embarrassed little boy named Tyrone, watching Larry King with his mother, and Googling around for a good intellectual property attorney. Clip of Laura and Jenna after the jump.

Dmitri Nabokov was in an awkward spot over his father's last book, The Original of Laura. On his deathbed, Nabokov asked Dmitri to destroy his final manuscript. (But Nabokov is such a beautiful writer and this was last work!) After much internal conflict, angry emails and a hallucination, Dmitri has decided to publish the book. Which means Dmitri is a bad son AND Vladimir was a terrible father for putting his boy in this position. Russians! If this last book turns out to be awful, Nabokov scholars will dismiss it as something he never wanted printed anyway. We all win. Except Dmitri.

The upstart Dumbo Books of Brooklyn thought of a not-so-ingenious way to get real life teens to blurb their upcoming release of Queens writer Richard Grayson's new book: Craigslist. With only a Blogger website to their name, the small press has turned to blind posting in 'Writing Jobs', looking for "18-25yo hipsters to blurb our cool forthcoming book of sex stories for teens...you must be cool-looking, smart looking." High standards, but when you're desperately seeking random blurbs for the tragically titled, Who Will Kiss The Pig? Sex Stories For Teens, you want the best. Hopefully they'll omit the Miss Piggy-inspired cover from the PDF they promise to send along to chosen hipsters. And if you're under 18, there's still hope: just ask your parents if it's OK to talk about how much you love this book/PDF about teen sex. After the jump, the full Craigslist post in all its glory.

"Who's the gay rapper?" It's been a parlor game in hip hop for years. A short and incomplete list of some of the most common names tossed around: Kanye West, Puffy, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Common, and, of course, lisping, yoga-master rap mogul Russell Simmons. While there are plenty of rumors for each one, most of those guys are suspected, honestly, because of their fashion sense (except Lil Wayne, who kissed a guy). Or because somebody's homeboy's cousin knows this cat who Puffy tried to do a three-way with. Innuendo is king. But now a formerly closeted gay MTV music executive named Terrance Dean is about to release a book—which has been anticipated for more than a year—that he says will out the gay rappers once and for all. Don't be mad, y'all! This could be the chance of a lifetime for one lucky closeted homosexual.

A new book called Chalked Up by ex-gymnast Jennifer Sey appears to confirm what many of us have long suspected: gymnastics is a weird and creepy sport. Not the tumbling and flipping part; that's cool enough. But the entire gymnastics complex that takes little girls and hammers them into world class athletes with eating disorders is a little sickening. And all those middle-aged men coaching—what are they doing there? I choose to sweepingly judge the lot of them as shady characters. Sey's experiences, related in a new interview with Salon, certainly reinforce that impression:

Hannah Montana has a seven-figure book deal and you don't.

Anne Rice is not just an author, she's an Author. In the comments of a post from blogger Dawn Papuga's site about Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's lawsuit over Harry Potter Lexicon creator Stephen Vander Ark's book project, she criticizes the manner of Papuga's assault on Rowling's lawsuit: "The rampant viciousness on the internet is hurtful to to me even when it’s not aimed at me," she writes. Rice joins a cacophony of voices attacking the tone of the Internet, which won't play by the rules of famous and important Authors. With the Internet-fighting team of Julia Allison and Emily Gould joining Rice's crusade to end being virtually criticized forever, we find it shocking that no one has stepped up to support Al Gore's greatest invention. Here's why they're wrong.

As part of the self-promotion for his new novel Bright Shiny Morning, fictive memoirist James Frey has enabled a feature on his Big Jim Industries website that allows fans to leave voicemail messages, and get messages back. One fan passes on the moving tale of her brother reading Frey's book in jail and getting sober; another gives him strength by letting him know that "I'm reading your work on a regular, daily basis, when I eat breakfast, when I brush my teeth, then at night I brush my teeth again and I read the book." This is surely a part of Frey's writing process on Bright Shiny Morning, one that allows him to research the story of "a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American woman who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation." Her boyfriend finds a salacious voicemail from Frey encouraging her to buy his new book, we guess. The description of the book, due in stores on May 13th, also amusingly terms it Frey's "first novel." Still, we'd never doubt Frey's ability to promote himself: As the Post noted this morning, he'll be a featured speaker at the American Library Association convention in June. [Big Jim Industries]

Writing is hard, lonely work. At least that's what all the great writers say, so that's the line to stick to at dinner parties. But when your Great American Novel is complete, there's loads of self-congratulations. And after that, praise from friends and family. But then strangers who went to better colleges than you, the critics, come in to eviscerate you in 600 words. How is a writer to a respond? Violence? Sex? Passive-aggressive letters?

That is what I have been wondering about the hype surrounding founding editor of n+1 (the most important literary journal of our time) and his debut novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men. Last night at McNally Robinson, while waiting for his reading to begin, I gazed over his head and across the street into the PinkyOtto boutique, glaring at their evil shopgirl. A strict-looking, skinny brunette in the crowd made a big show of fanning her face: "He's hot!" she stage-whispered to her girlfriend, cocking her head towards the author. "What?" the friend asked. "He's so hot!" she repeated, louder this time. She looked like she hadn't eaten in days.

"'I never ever once wanted to stop Mr. Vander Ark from doing his own guide - never ever,' she said as she took the stand for the second time in the three-day trial, as the last rebuttal witness. 'Do your book, but please, change it so it does not take as much of my work.'" [Times]

Here's a video clip in which the interviewer had two very simple and specific question for Corrections author Jonathan Franzen, who famously got himself disinvited from the Oprah Book Club for being too ungrateful: Do you regret your run-in with Oprah? And would you be part of the book club if you could do it over again? To these simple questions, Franzen stares at the floor and says things like "What does regret mean?" and then remarks on the magnitude of dividing the world's opinion in two. Maybe this is the nuance necessary to be a literary titan; check out this quote of his at the time of the dispute: "To find myself being in the position of giving offense to someone who's a hero — not a hero of mine per se, but a hero in general — I feel bad in a public-spirited way." No, that's just mealy-mouthed. Yes or no question, Jonathan Franzen. The full clip, after the jump.

"The librarian, Steven Jan Vander Ark, had the mild-mannered demeanor of Ron Weasley, and the intelligence, charm - and haircut - of Harry Potter. Even his name sounds like that of a character in one of the books, if preceded by 'Lord' or 'Master.'" You should talk, Anemona Hartocollis! [Times]

Bad timing waits for no man, and the book industry is particularly vulnerable, due to its long lead time. The idea of a book called Damn It Feels Good to Be a Banker: and Other Baller Things You Only Get to Say if You Work on Wall Street probably seemed great a year ago. Now, it's doomed to come out in the wake of the Bear Stearns debacle. Nevertheless, Hyperion has no choice to but go ahead and publish. As they say in a press release: "Remember: the economy may fall, but bankers never do." But wait: it's a satirical book, based on Amit Chatwani's Leveraged Sell-Out blog.