Boy, has New York columnist Kurt Andersen got a challenge for you! The multitalented author's epic 2007 novel Heyday contained a factual error or two, he says on his blog. Nothing to be alarmed about, don't fret! They've been corrected in December's paperback version. But Kurt is an audience participation kind of guy, so if, dear reader, you're clever enough to track down the slip-ups, you win a prize! Sadly, it's only another copy of the book you had to buy to take part in the Kurt Andersen Challenge '08 in the first place. But it'll be autographed! Yes, by Kurt Andersen. The lucky winner also gets the unabridged 22-disc audio version, poor thing. But hurry, because Andersen's only giving you until April to play. To be fair, we have absolutely no intention of poring over Heyday's 600-odd pages looking for a mis-typed date, so if you happen across the errors, let us know instead. We will reward you by never giving you the unabridged 22-disc audio version of anything, ever.

You'd think the tale of Bonnie Brown, the woman who made millions swapping massages for Google stock, would make for interesting reading. In a Huffington Post blog entry, Brown manages to spend 451 words telling us that she dislikes being famous and didn't know what the word "gumption" meant until she encountered it in a movie starring Kate Winslet. Brown has a book out called "Giigle." Are you thinking it sounds skippable? Consider yourself lucky already.

Tracy Morgan, comedian and occasional wild-man-about-town, is writing his autobiography for Spiegel & Grau, a division of Doubleday/Random House. Hopefully this won't end like the time his 30 Rock character thought his autobiography was due the next day and made the staff finish it, only to realize that nobody ever asked him to write an autobiography in the first place? [Observer]

"There needs to be a [late, influential New Yorker film critic] Pauline Kael of the Internet. People need to write critically about this thing," says New Republic editor Lee Siegel. (As you might remember, he was once suspended for a little stunt where he commented anonymously on his own essays, via the Internet). He's basically unimpressed by the entire Web and wrote a book, Against the Machine, on this topic. "What the Internet's doing is professionalizing everyone's amateuristic impulses. Everybody wants to jump into the big time and be recognized ... they're not taking the time to just have fun." Is this true? Discuss! Also, if anybody would like to apply for the new position of "Pauline Kael of the Internet," please send your resume our way! [NY Mag]

The Boston Globe uses the highly unusual story of a self-published novel going to auction for $2 mil to announce that "publishing norms have changed." The Lace Reader author Brunonia Barry and her husband spent over $50,000 of their own money "generating buzz," which eventually caught the attention of mainstream publishers. Authors getting nice deals after self-publishing! Except publishing norms really haven't changed, and nobody in the biz takes it seriously. Listen, it's way easier to just find an agent instead of thrashing around in the hell of Xlibris, finding a distributor, and harassing independent bookstores one by one. [Boston Globe]

Anyone have a review manuscript of Jennifer 8 Lee's book on Chinese food? Apparently, the self-promoting New York Times writer has included no fewer than four pages of name-dropping acknowledgments. They deserve to disseminated more widely.

Tina Brown, retired from magazine editing, is to write a follow-up to her biography of Lady Diana. The Clinton Chronicles is to be published in 2010.

Self-styled creepysexycool pickup artist, The Game author, and sometimes Rolling Stone-writer Neil Strauss was working his magic for a rapt crowd of mostly men at Barnes and Noble last night. Radar reports that he handed out advice on how to get the kind of girls you want (sluts mostly), and how girls with emotional needs are bad for your game. No word yet on the obvious homoeroticism of the PUA community. (Semen stains, and methods for their removal, were also discussed). [Radar]

There are many economic factors that might have possibly driven the housing boom, all of which are bo-ring. House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes, a new book by Newsweek reporter Daniel McGinn, reveals the truth: it was actually driven by idiots with a herdlike, pathological need to fixate on every aspect of their home, much like Freud's analysis of anal-retentive children examining their own feces. Actual quote: "My house is really pretty, with plenty of room, but it just doesn't do it for me... my artistic imagination isn't lit up by it—it's too much 'practical,' and not enough 'dreamy.'" Here's to the idiot in all of us—now, I'm off to look at Floor Plan Porn on Curbed!

Sarah Lacy's long-awaited book on Web 2.0 is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The title: Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0. It's due for release on May 15, which means we'll probably see copies circulating in late April. Future reviewers, let us save you the work of coming up with a kicker: Yes, the title practically begs for Lacy to announce a followup oeuvre to prove she, too, is more than just lucky.

Have you heard? Some authors are totally tatted up! But it's hard to know who, 'cause you obviously can't see tats in headshots. Well, except for Darcy Steinke, who shows 'em off in her publicity photo. But who else is all inked up?

Jonathan Lethem and the other authors behind the newest Brooklyn book of wonder, Brooklyn Was Mine, have banded together in a valiant, selfless pledge. They will donate the book's proceeds to Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, the group opposing Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards Project. Huh! Anyway, the book is brought to you by Vogue authors Valerie Steiker and Chris Knutsen, and contributers include Jonathan Lethem, Darcey Steinke, and Jennifer Egan. They've all written for no pay in the hopes that big changes will be made. Clearly they are anticipating big sales if the royalties on a marginal literary anthology are going to make a dent on a $4 billion project!

Aleksey Vayner is so back. Did you hear? And just to ensure that we would continue writing about him, he made this thing—the cover of Millionaires' Blueprint to Success: Discover the Secrets of Wealthy elite, his "upcoming" "book"—look just like that thing—the cover of some other dude's book. He also shortened the banner line from the cumbersome "Think Rich to Get Rich" to the snappier "Think and Grow Rich." It really is brilliant insight into the secrets of Wealthy elite! Steal and dumb down! [IvyGate]

Life, and finding happiness, is like a bowl of cherries! Or a box of... damn, why is it so hard to come up with any other ideas? That's what publishers are wondering, as they appear to be having problems coming up with designs (other than cherries) for new books on happiness. Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert, came out in March of 2007. It was a best-seller! The topic was optimistic, and the simple, pretty cover featured a nice font and an overturned bowl of cherries. Now, we won't beat up on the latest two authors to write books on happiness, Alexanda Stoddard and Sonja Lyobomirsky. But did their publishers' design departments have to choose the same imagery (cherries!), font, and soothing color scheme? Take a look for yourselves!

Kindle is Amazon's new digital reading device that costs $400. But author Daniel Oran has thankfully found a (very) slightly more interesting use for the thing: readers can download the almost-final draft of his novel, Believe, for 99 cents. It's like a novel beta-test! He hopes his friends, at least, will download. Perhaps coincidentally, the novel is "a story about ripples: how the actions of one person can affect so many others." Like if one person buys a book and tells a friend and tells another friend who happens to know a producer on Oprah...

Rick Moody's Black Veil is a pretty standard nonfiction novel memoir travel book literary critical recovery tome. (Yes, that's his description. More interesting than the Ice Storm author's struggle with alcohol: what he didn't publish). A description of a trip to a tranny bar didn't make it past the publishers. Don't worry: Moody, the envy of his peers after two books were made into movies, has posted the deleted account to the Five Chapters website. The author's preamble: "I asked a writer friend who is an expert on the subject if he would take me to a tranny bar in New York City, and off we went," he says. (Yes, that's what they all say!) "I really liked this passage, still do, but I think my publishers were genuinely uncomfortable about it, as if it suggested a genuine inner disturbance of some kind." The girls, and their residuary knobs, after the jump.

If anybody still believes the book publishing industry remains a cultural haven in this numbers-obsessed era, this should shatter their illusions. In Motoko Rich's article on Tom Wolfe's new book deal, there's a hugely compromising nugget of data. I am Charlotte Simmons, the dapper author's most recent blockbuster, had a print run of 1,500,000. Or so the publisher's publicists claimed, in an effort to build excitement for the 2004 novel. A self-fulfiling prophecy? Nope. The publishers actually shipped more like 800,000 copies, and the book eventually sold only 293,000, a respectable number in these illiterate times, but only about a fifth of the notional print run. (The disappearing book sales are represented graphically to the left.) Book publishers are no different from their counterparts in the magazine and newspaper industries: as print declines, so the claims, whether of print runs or circulation figures, become ever more inflated and ever more desperate. (Thanks, John, for the idea.)

Tom Wolfe's next book, "Back to Blood," will be published by Little, Brown in 2009. (Not Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the firm he's been with for 40 years!) The book covers Wolfe's usual bases: "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first," says the press release. (Dear Tom: you wanted to set the stage for the future in a super-stratified city of dizzying wealth, grinding poverty, and a vast illegal underclass, and you picked MIAMI?)

You might have heard about artificial intelligence expert David Levy's new book, "Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships," in which he explains that the robots of the future will be so realistic, with artificial intelligence and lifelike vinyl skin and other very lifelike "things," that we (read: guys probably!) won't be able to stop themselves from sleeping with and having "relationships" with them. I predict that the sexbots of the future will be big with the Wall Street set! Yeah, dude, like you sitting across from a robot, getting increasingly snazzed off of red wine (robots are cheap dates), going on and on about your latest merger. (Something tells me they ain't gonna be programming these babies to talk about Proust). This should be happening sometime around 2050.

Times critics Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin and William Grimes announce their favorite books of 2007 today—"the ones we mention to friends ... the ones worth taking on vacation." These are meant to be lists "that leave off the broccoli." But most of the books on the lists are nonfiction tomes about Nixon, Nazis, Stalin, the CIA and Einstein. It turns out we get a lot of our book advice from people who eat broccoli for dessert. [NYT]