Jenna Bush made an appearance at the Javits Center BookExpo yesterday, pressing the flesh and fleshing the press in advance of her debut book, "Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope." According the Daily News, "Ana's Story" will be a work of non-fiction based on Jenna's experiences working for UNICEF, and the main storyline will follow a young Panamian girl with AIDS. The Post notes that the book will be written "in novel style." Dave Eggers, meanwhile, author of "What Is the What," appears in the "Summer Reading" rec-fest in this week's New York Times Book Review, spiritedly telling everyone to read John Prendergast and Don Cheadle's "Not on Our Watch," "a guide to effecting change—in East Africa or anywhere—through grass-roots vigor and vigilance." We're not saying, we're just saying. And having just said that, we sadly draw the curtains, temporarily or even permanently, on the great misguided and totally awesome Gawker Weekend experiment. It's because we got real jobs! Thank you for reading, everyone; go outside this summer!

I-banking blogger turned debut novelist Dana Vachon's roman a clef Mergers and Acquisitions was published, to much hullabaloo here and even a little bit of hullabaloo elsewhere, on April 5. Today, we looked up its sales using Nielsen Bookscan (which only tracks approximately 70% of retail outlets). We predicted it would have sold around 8000 copies—in keeping with Ben Kunkel's Indecision about two months in. But not quite. According to Bookscan, it has sold 6425 copies.

Dr. Andrew Trees, the author of a roman a clef about posh Riverdale prep school Horace Mann, remains fired from that institution. But his friends and former colleagues have rallied together on his behalf! Over 60 academics signed a letter to the editor of the Horace Mann Record—which was then prevented from publishing the letter by head of school Tom Kelly. Even new Record editor Elyssa Spitzer (yes, that's Eliot's daughter!) could not sway the discourse in the direction of free speech. The unprinted letter is after the jump.

Yesterday, the august literary journal called the New York Daily News dubbed Lori Culwell's self-published novel Hollywood Car Wash one of its "Sizzling Summer Reads." "It's hot because it's said to be written by a former friend of Katie Holmes who got dropped after she met Tom Cruise. It's cool for the same reason," they write. But even the author herself admits that this might not be, technically, the truth: "Hey, I can't control what they say, can I?" she winks on her MySpace blog. How did the Daily News get such a wacky idea? Maybe it's because many blogs received, and posted verbatim, an email that claimed Katie Holmes had read the book and was incensed.

Tough news for Al Gore from popular blogger Matt Drudge: "'THE REAGAN DIARIES' OUTSOLD AL GORE'S 'ASSAULT ON REASON' IN OPENING WEEK ACTION, BOOKSCAN WILL REPORT. REAGAN WON THE RACE BY SELLING JUST 5 MORE BOOKS THAN GORE!"

Denver Post writer Doug Brown's stunt book JUST DO IT: How One Couple Screwed Their Life and Love Back Together, about having sex with his wife every day for 101 days, has actually sold, to Allison McCabe at Crown. (UPDATE from a publishing insider: "Crown tried to pre-empt the book for $100k, Dan [Lazar] turned them down, and then when every other publisher in the land backed the hell away from the project, Dan had to go back to Crown and beg them to reinstate the offer. Which, for some stupid reason, they did.")

Is the absorption of imprints Carroll & Graf and Thunder's Mouth Press into Perseus bad news for books with a quirky left-of-mainstream sensibility, or good news for the economic sustainability of independent publishing? Josh Getlin sez: Both?! [LAT]

"It's the ultimate reality series, the ultimate game show and the ultimate half-hour of intriguing storylines." How ultimate! We're intrigued! And then, suddenly— "The Ultimate Author is an awesome television program packed with entertaining, engaging and interesting events"—we're not. Seriously, can "Whose Paint Will Dry Fastest?" be far behind? The pitch is interesting, though, because of how poorly this wannabe-producer (a self-published author, natch) understands what it takes to be The Ultimate Author.

We just received a copy of the anthology Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: True Tales of Love, Lust, and Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men, which is pretty much what you'd expect. We were thumbing through the contents, wondering about what its contributors might have to offer (Does Ayelet Waldman love her fag more than her kids?) when we noticed an essay by Gawker founding editor and current layabout Elizabeth Spiers! Who was the gay who showed her the way? It's someone we all know and fear here at the office.

Sunday's Times featured an op-ed by author Mark Helprin arguing that authors (and their descendents) deserved copyrights in perpetuity for their work. While Helprin has written what is by far our favorite novel of all time, we are extremely wary of his political views, which can be found frequently on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, if that gives you any idea. Still, something about his argument seemed plausible, which deeply disturbed us. Knowing very little about the law, we turned to Maud Newton, who possesses the three most important qualities we look for in an expert on the subject: she is a writer, she is a former tax attorney, and she answers our e-mails. The discussion follows.

Now that crazed theorist Kenneth Eng is behind bars for hammer-swinging and kill-talking, we've come across the hatingest Asian you know's resume and book proposal. (You'll recall the riveting pitch letter.) Why not enjoy them both right now? Keep your eyes peeled for the part where he gets discriminated against on the set of Spider-Man 3.

From Jason Gordon, the Williamsburg-based online marketing specialist who Eric Schaeffer has retained to help promote his book, comes this email:

Vernon Winfrey claims that Things Unspoken, the book proposal with his name on it that we have a copy of, doesn't exist. Wow, that's a big departure from how he characterizes himself, uh, in the book: "Now, I've never been one to mince words. Way I see it, if the good Lord wanted me to bite my tongue He'd have given me soft teeth," he wrote. But now! "There is no book," he told TV Guide.com, adding, "We might think about it later on." Does "we," in this context, refer to Vernon, Oprah Winfrey, and an army of very stern lawyers? Vernon says that's not the case: "So did she talk to him about possibly not doing the book? 'No,' Vernon insists. 'It's just on hold right now, OK?'" For some reason, we're having a hard time believing him.

Travesty of publishing alert: Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham's book of beauty tips was only published in the UK, not in our country! We can't imagine why no one thinks her Britland-specific shopping recommendations and idiosyncratic locutions ("Jeans are the obvious place to start. They have become not just the backbone but the spinal cord, ribcage, and for some of us, the whole skeleton of a woman's wardrobe") won't make the book a bestseller here, too. Anyway, we've gotten her advice about how to look less lardy if you've the misfortune to find yourself up the stick.

If a website with pictures of hot ladies and fug dudes in shiny shirts isn't enough to sate your appetite for that stuff, well, good news!

For most of his reading at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble last night, I Can't Believe I'm Still Single author Eric Schaeffer was in his charming first-date mode, all bashful grins and 'aw-shucks, little old screenwriter me? Did I mention I dated Molly Ringwald once?' But occasionally, Eric would get to the clause in one of his run-on sentences that contained a zinger. He'd narrow his eyes and shoot a barbed insult at a pathetic divorced fattie whose life had been brightened when he'd viewed her Nerve profile, or he'd diss a dirty whore who'd had the gall to waste Eric's dating time by not being upfront about her oral herpes, and it would hit you: This guy really hates women. It's not a joke. This is a sociopath who preys on the dating desperation of aging New York ladies and then writes delusional screeds about them in order to feel better about himself. This guy is a Peter Braunstein who hasn't snapped... yet. The audience for Eric's reading was full of women. After all, who hates women more than women do?

Confirmed: Oprah Winfrey doesn't read Gawker. She had to hear from the Daily News that her dad Vernon Winfrey is writing a book about her, and she didn't even believe it at first. "I called him and it turned out he is writing a book. The worst part of it was him saying, 'I meant to tell you I've been working on it,'" she tells Rush & Molloy. She's "shocked," and we would be too if our dad was telling the world how ornery we were as a pregnant teenager, as in this excerpt of his proposal!

Fresh off the non-success of their affiliation with the Sobol Awards, the pay-to-play literary contest that got scuttled after it turned out to be more of a lighting rod for bad press than an exciting episode of "Who Wants To Be America's Next Top Author," Simon and Schuster imprint Touchstone is at it again. They've teamed with MediaPredict.com to create "Project Publish," a stunt whereby they'll publish one of the stock-market style site's submissions, with the caveat that they don't have to go through with it if none of the submissions are of "publishable quality." "According to Mark Gompertz, publisher of Touchstone Books,"—Jared Paul Stern's publisher!—"Media Predict could do for book publishing what focus groups do for soap and soda and what screening audiences do for movies," says the Times. Hey, maybe this is the kind of net-savvy move that will turn this dinosaur of an industry around! Except, maybe there's a tiny flaw or two in the plan.

It's not like Norman Mailer doesn't know that some of his books are way too long and overblown. It's just that he doesn't know that all of them are way too long and overblown! That's just one of the revelations we gleaned from yesterday's roundup of books that famous authors would trim the fat from if they could. We also learned that Ann Patchett thinks that George Orwell's best-known works are, respectively, "awful" and "beyond awful," that Stephen King has a cheesy, punny-science-teacher type sense of humor (duh), and that ubiquitous literary wunderdad Neal Pollack found The Satanic Verses too long by 40%. But the clear understatement o' the year award winner is Joyce Carol Oates, whose voluminous oeuvre includes approx. 400 jillion crappy books and like half of a good one (Foxfire!): "I'm sure I could think of many other titles that would benefit from being cut, including some of my own."

Writers Take Out Their Knives [NYT]

Writers House agent Dan Lazar takes issue with the characterization of his client Douglas Brown, pictured here explaining porn to readers of the Denver Post, as the author of a "stunt book." Dan told Publishers Marketplace that Doug's 'I had sex with my wife for 100 consecutive days' memoir has been misjudged based on "the two salacious paragraphs of a 60 page proposal that the editors already know is really about marriage and falling madly in love with your spouse again, even after years together." Aww. But! Why did Dan only go out with 60 pages when a full manuscript exists? In fact, we hear we hear that another agent signed Doug a couple years ago based on the concept. And then he finished the manuscript and she let him go. Heh.