So Victoria Beckham is more than just a high(school)ly educated lit snob who wants to read the classics with Katie Holmes and J. Lo: she's also an author. In fact, in her native Britland, she's a megabestselling author, with two tomes under her teensy belt. The latest, a girl-tips guide called That Extra Half An Inch (hello), has sold 100,000 copies, which is extra impressive considering that the entire country is the size of Florida.

Yesterday marked the publication of the sophomore College Humor-branded literary effort, a guide to faking one's way through adulthood. To celebrate, the boys threw a party at the bar of Hotel QT, which has a great gimmick: the glass-walled room adjacent to the bar contains a little swimming pool. (It's a venue we know all too well.) There's no requirement that swimmers wear actual bathing suits—in fact, diving in in your underwear is encouraged. And you can bring your drink in the pool, because the bar is stocked with plastic cups—the classy thick kind of plastic, not the kind you'd see at a keg party or something. Hotel QT is cheesy, sure, but also so wild and crazy and sort of decadent. All that Sex and The City watching paid off for the College Humor boys.

So, just how satanic are Salman Rushdie's agent's verses? Ira Silverberg, who owns the 1972 chapbook of Wylie's stylings that was mentioned here yesterday, was kind enough to share some of them, but first he wanted to make one thing very clear: "I'm a huge fan of Andrew ... Nobody gets that he's one of the least pretentious people in the biz." Well, these poems are certainly unpretentious. They barely pretend to be poems! A selection, including the possibly prophetic "I've (#1)," is after the jump.

British lit agent Andrew Wylie is a very august person, with some very respectable clients: Philip Roth! Salman Rushdie! Nigella Lawson! But we were all young and not-august sometime, and when Wylie was younger, he fancied himself a poet. Another high-powered agent, Ira Silverberg, happens to own a copy of a chapbook that Wylie published in 1972, which he generously shared with Bookforum. "There's a rumor that he has tried to buy up all of the copies," Silverberg told them. But why? "One can only imagine what a Wylie client like, say, Benazir Bhutto would make of such poems as "Hands up Your Skirt," "Warm, Wet Pants," and the determinedly unlyric "I Fuck Your Ass, You Suck My Cock." Oh! Well now. Being fans of dirtiness, we'd love to know more about these poems. Do any of them contain the words "light" or "water?"

"I saw the thing on Gawker today about Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, and I think they deserve every bit of snark you guys heap on them," said Josh Ferris. His raved-about debut novel's release was being celebrated last night with the kind of loving, emotional enthusiasm usually reserved for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. When told that the word "snark" was over and off-limits, Ferris's puppy-dog eyes narrowed momentarily. "Well, okay, but what should I say instead? They deserve all the shit you guys heap on them?" When this revision met with approval, Ferris cracked a big, sincere grin. The grin faded, though, when Ferris was pressed about whether, should film rights to And Then We Came To The End sell, he and his wife might be tempted to buy a $7 million brownstone in Park Slope. "My brownstone would be in Sunset Park," he declared, after a moment of serious deliberation. It's hard not to like Josh Ferris.

Melissa Dumas may live, but for the moment at least, it appears that she won't be allowed to tell. The former nanny's memoir Live To Tell, about Madge's "home life," which had been announced earlier this week as having sold to Lindsey Moore at Crown Publishing with plans for a crash publication in September, will not go forward. Crown doesn't give a reason for their release of the rights, but an English tabloid speculates that Madonna's lawyers maybe, possibly have something to do with it. Ostensibly, Dumas will be moved to find another buyer for the secrets she has learned, and until then, they will burn inside of her.

Steven Tyler's daughter is writing her memoirs! No, sorry, not Liv. That other one. The plus size one who was on The Simple Life The Surreal Life! She's writing a book called Creating Myself for S&S's ladylit imprint Atria, and there is a press release about it that's not so much breathless as it is oxygen-deprived. The book will be a "deeply coming of age personal memoir!" But that's not all. It will also recount Mia's troubled past. "On the surface, Mia Tyler would seem to have been born into a fantasy life as the daughter of a rock star and a glamour girl. But Mia spent nearly 20 years as a trouble-filled youth." How Jerri Blank! We can't wait to read it.

Our preferred Brooklyn Jonathan author chatted live with the ladies of the Jane magazine messageboards yesterday to promote his forthcoming book, You Don't Love Me Yet. His answers to their questions revealed a lot—about how dumb the questioners are. But it's okay! According to Jonathan, you don't have to go to college to be smart!

So Heyday, the new historical yarn from Kurt Andersen (the craggy-faced Tom Edison of satire!) took a bit of a pasting from the Times' Janet Maslin. It fared considerably better in that paper's ass-kissy Book Review. But how's it playing elsewhere? After the jump, an abundant yet random selection of recent reviews.

Maybe it started with Annie Hall, in which Woody Allen said that the only cultural advantage to living in Los Angeles instead of New York was that you can turn right on red. Or maybe it was when n+1 said all those things about McSweeney's. Or maybe—this one's unlikely—it started with that mean song by Death Cab For Cutie: You can't swim in a town this shallow / You will most assuredly drown tomorrow. Point is, the West Coast set is tired of everyone thinking that New York is the only American city where people read. Are they kidding?

A middle-aged—"Ok, somewhat old"—Williamsburg author is looking for an assistant who will give him or her "access to the lives of the type of local residents who look like Karen O. or Conor Oberst and who do cool things that will be subject matter for the kind of work today's publishers demand." We suspect that someone—maybe Craig himself!—is just fucking with us at this point.

Does the name Karen Cohen Yampolsky ring a bell? Congratulations, old-skool Jane reader! She was Jane Pratt's assistant, and she's done the expected thing and written a roman a clef. But there's a twist! The heroine of the novel isn't a Yampolsky stand-in—she's a Jane Pratt stand-in, named Jill White. ("White" used to edit a teen mag called "Cheeky!" For real.) Jill is a valiant soul who wants to keep Jill true to its idealistic roots, even after it gets bought by Nestrom (read: Fairchild) and Jill is forced to work with a publisher installed by evil Nestrom CEO Ellen Cutter (read: Fairchild CEO Mary Berner). Juicy stuff! Unfortunately, the book is still incredibly, incredibly bad. Wouldn't you like to read some?

Former boybander Lance Bass, who not-shocked the world with an announcement of his gayitude this past summer, has just sold a memoir to classy S&S imprint Simon Spotlight Entertainment. It's called Out Of Sync, and it's "a 'candid' book about his life, his music, and his life as a gay man." We like the concept, but frankly, we think the title needs some work! Here are a few of our suggestions. We implore you to leave yours in the comments.

We so wanted to dislike debut novelist Katherine Taylor. Rules For Saying Goodbye was hyped as "invoking the spirit of Melissa Bank and Curtis Sittenfeld" in the announcement that it had sold to FSG, and it's rumored to be Starbucks' next pick. Oh, and: "It's hard, when you're blond and attractive and you live in Los Angeles and you've written a book about young women in New York, not to be called 'chick lit,'" she told the Observer's Spencer Morgan. Oooh, bitch! But wait... do we hate her? Maybe she's just being honest. Regardless, she does at least seem to understand the genre's conventions: "'Indecision [by Benjamin Kunkel] was ridiculously simple, I thought,' she said. 'And had it been a girl who'd written it, it would have had the pinkest cover in the world. It would have been the pinkest of all-time pink covers.'" Did we say we hated her? We might just have to buy a few hundred copies.

Hidden amongst the Armani and the Carolina Herrera on the Bergdorf Goodman website is a section called, simply, Volume: CDs and Books. Aha, we thought, clicking on the link. What books could Bergdorf's be recommending to its well-heeled clientele? Highbrow literature? Classic New York tales? Sumptuous coffee table books of famed artistes? Well, not exactly, though they do promise "must reads for the literary afficionado [sic]."

At the Times, a bit of the editorial judgment is rendered in advance of a book review based on which critic does the actual reviewing. If Michiko Kakutani takes on your novel, it's a clear signal that it's an Important Literary Effort, worthy of deep analysis and significant enough to merit a serious limning. And sometimes reviews are assigned to Janet Maslin. This was the case for Spy founder and New York mag columnist Kurt Andersen for Heyday, his new historical romp (Stevedores! Daguerreotypists! Fishmongers!). On the plus side, she grades on a much looser curve than Kakutani. So, how'd it do?

The first—and until last night, only—list of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists came out in 1996, and anointed such under-35 literary stars as Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore, Mona Simpson, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie, and Jeffrey Eugenides, while also selecting a few who slunk into obscurity, and neglecting to select several—including one, A.M. Homes, who was a judge for this year's selection—who have gone on to critical and, sometimes, commercial acclaim. So this year's list, being a once-in-10-years event, was a closely guarded secret until the celebration last evening at Housing Works, the nonprofit Crosby Street bookstore-caf .

Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama, an "instant-book" slapped together by a freelance writer in two weeks, will be published this week by Black Dog & Leventhal. According to the WSJ, this is an instance of a burgeoning trend: "with book sales declining, publishers increasingly are looking for quick-turnaround opportunities, hoping to tap public interest in a subject when it is hot." Oh, those desperate publishers, always looking for new ways to compensate for their tragically declining sales!

Writer, former chunky and journo-everyman Greg Lindsay has sold a book! Evil agent David Kuhn has sold his "Aerotropolis" for six figures to fancy yet 18th-century-living house FSG, notes oddly-named local blog Fishbowlny after a careful reading of Publisher's Marketplace. News of this sort can only mean one thing: It's time to update the Greg Lindsay Career Trajectory!

• Maer Roshan, the "battle-scarred veteran" of the "buzz-intensive media hothouses" that are New York and L.A. is back, and this time "the buzz seems to be moving back in his favor." That picture can't hurt. [WSJ]