In a talk at Harvard on Tuesday, Barry Gewen, an editor at the New York Times Book Review since the early 90's, revealed a steaming heap of heretofore unknown and as-of-yet unreported details about the Book Review's inner workings. The reason for his trip, he said, was to correct some misconceptions among the largely academic audience about how the Review is assembled. "We're thought to have agendas, we're thought to be out to get people," he said. "I hope by the end of this talk I'll have persuaded you that none of that is the case."

Getting a book into Oprah Winfrey's hands—and an author onto her couch—has long been the wettest dream of publishers. But now Crown editor (and thriller author) Jason Pinter analyzes the first-week sales of Chris Bohjalian's The Double Bind, a Barnes & Noble pick from an author who'd been anointed the big O's coveted Book Club Pick status in the past and compares them to those of Starbucks selection A Long Way Gone, by former child soldier Ishmael Beah. Beah's book sold more at Starbucks alone than Bohjalian's sold in total. Of course, there are other factors at play here: Oprah didn't pick The Double Bind, and while both authors have been making the publicity rounds, Beah was kind of on the cover of the Times magazine a little bit more than Bohjalian was. Also, maybe people think former child soldiers are more interesting than Mom lit?

In a small (but precious!) corner of the literary landscape, the controversy over those librarians who want to ban a children's book for mentioning dog testes hasn't yet died down. Scrotal expert and dark-arts assistant professor Neil Gaiman even weighed in: "I've decided that librarians who would decline to have a Newbery book in their libraries because they don't like the word scrotum are probably not real librarians (whom I still love unconditionally)." Mom, we're getting that Masters in Library Science after all! Anyway, this awesome cause now has a t-shirt, which you can purchase over at Bookshelves of Doom. They also have other literary shirts. We'd like to recommend that they add 'Ain't No Houellebecq Girl' even though it is sort of last year in many ways.

Prudish librarians are pushing to ban young adult book The Higher Power of Lucky because of a reference to a rattlesnake-bitten dog ballsack on the first page. And yesterday's front-page Times article about the Newbery award-winning book's controversial use of the word 'scrotum' has lit bloggers more keyed up than they've been since J. K. Rowling last uttered a gnomic death-threat to Harry Potter. The author defends her word choice thusly: "The word is just so delicious." Yummy!

Last night, Gawker photographer Nikola Tamindzic and Emily Gould hit Matt and Marisa Brown's luxe Soho loft—that's her on your left—to celebrate the publication of Gawker Book Club pick Because She Can, the roman a clef that's "not" about Judith Regan. After the jump, Emily meets the literary elite people who went to Harvard with Bridie.

Non-fiction: Memoir: John Elder Robison's memoir of growing up with Asperger's Syndrome and emerging as a fully-realized adult, with a foreword by Robison's brother, Augusten Burroughs, to Rachel Klayman at Crown, in a pre-empt, in a major deal, reportedly for $1.1 million (NY Post dollars), by Christopher Schelling at Ralph M. Vicinanza (world).

We hear that near-universally reviled ICM mega-agent Richard Abate is leaving that agency in order to set up his own shop, which we hear will be called Endeavor. (Abate is perhaps best known to Gawker readers as the former mentor — okay, bossman — of agent to the blogsuperstars Kate Lee.) "Endeavor" strikes us as an odd choice of nomenclature, since there's already an Endeavor agency — albeit an LA-based one that doesn't solely represent literary clients. In fact, ICM was recently rumored to be buying that Endeavor, which probably has nothing to do with this. Anyway, weird.

Related (tangentially, maybe): The Agent Dance: ICM Denies Endeavor Rumor [Defamer]

The publishing world is minorly abuzz with the news that Cougar par excellence Sharon Stone is shopping a book. It's not a memoir, our spy tells us, but more of a self-help, how-to kind of thing (?!?!) along the lines of 'Sharon Stone's Purpose-Driven Life.' Apparently, high-ranking editors are being led to a Stony inner sanctum, but before they're allowed access, they're made to jot their high-ranking names down on a sign-in sheet — making it possible for them to see who else is in the running to be Stone's publisher (tacky!!) We also hear that Stone keeps retelling the same anecdote about how working at a women's shelter has enriched her as a human being — something along the lines of 'I realized that it was ok for me to say "I'm not having a good day, even though I'm rich and beautiful."' Oh Sharon! We can't wait to read your career advice.

Now, anybody who's ever tried to get a novel published is sure to look scornfully upon yesterday's strip. A debut novel, submitted without an agent, gets a $25,000 offer just like that? Go on, pull the other one, it's got a bell at the end. But what makes this scenario truly unbelievable is that he only finished the first draft last month, then managed to rescue it from a fire that broke out in his home at that very moment . . .

Pop Quiz: which of these book deals is not a real deal announced recently on Publishers Marketplace?

In a book! What did you think we meant? We hear that Rachel "raisin face" Zoe, stylist and former stylist to a slim cadre of starlets, has sold a collection of her best tips to (we think) Harper. It's entitled Style from A to Zoe: The Guide to All Things Glamour. If anyone wants to hand over the proposal, now would be a good time. We just need to confirm our suspicions about what the 'C' chapter is all about.

Love is all about making sacrifices. We love you, and that's why we subjected ourselves to a brief skim through an advance copy of Eric Schaeffer's magnum opus, I Can't Believe I'm Still Single. Yes, the book. Yes, Eric Schaeffer has a book. DON'T BUY IT. Seriously, don't! You wouldn't buy, like, a coat made from the skins of Guatemalan infants, would you? Well, buying Eric Schaeffer's book would be sort of like that, ethically, only worse. And besides, since we're excerpting some of the ickiest bits after the jump, you totally won't have to.

Sure, semi-spurious libel suits against publishers aren't usually anything to celebrate, but this one is special. Special K, that is. We're delighted to report that Alex Kuczynski has been named as a co-defendant in a lawsuit being brought against her publisher, Doubleday! The plaintiff is a plastic surgeon who claims that Special K. maligned him in Beauty Junkies, her recent non-bestseller. Dr. Arnold W. Klein, who specializes in 'injectables,' is demanding $10 million in damages, claiming that Doubleday knew that the book's claims of his negligence, incompetence, and his conflict of interest with a pharmaceutical company were false. He also — and this is the really sad part — says that the book libels him by reporting that he "lost control of his bladder" when faced with a troubling allegation in another case. His rebuttal? "Klein did not lose control of his bladder for any reason remotely connected to the case or his concern about the supposed 'coup,' referred to above," the complaint states. So why did he pee himself? Rest assured, we're looking into it.

"Self-publishing" — eg, paying a vanity press like iUniverse or Xlibris to print and distribute your Veronica Mars slash — has never been bigger. So it's no surprise that, as Slate recently discovered, another mini-industry has arisen alongside it: "authors" of self-published books are now paying to have (real-ish) authors blurb their books, just like how, in traditional publishing, authors are paid in favors and in kind for providing this service. The Slate article singles out one especially prolific paid reviewer: NYT bestselling (paperback romances in the '80s) author Ellen Tanner Marsh, who's employed by BookSurge. For $399, Marsh will write something along these lines:"We are drawn into this seaboard existence, seeing the stars pronging the sails at night, the flying fish that land on deck, and even the birds that fly, unaware, into the mast" (this re: The Last Voyage of the Cosmic Muffin).

It's been two years since the collapse of Dina McGreevey's "brokeback marriage" to Gay American and then-NJ Governor Jim McGreevey and one year (ish) since the publication of his softcore tell-all, The Confession. In other words: it's payback time! Today, Hyperion books (which used to employ one of us) announced plans to publish Dina's take on things. Her memoir, which will hit a bookstore near you in Spring 07, is entitled Silent Partner.

Dear Atria Publicity Department:
We posted about this book on January 9th. We're not trying to be a bitch or anything, but we kind of thought you might have managed to trouble yourselves to send us a copy of it by now. The ringing endorsement from ANTM contestant Shandi Sullivan ("one word immediately comes to mind: DRAMA!") sold us, and besides, it seems like the kind of book that we would be able to milk a few gossipy posts out of. So what gives? Messenger-slip-writing hands all afflicted by carpal tunnel? In-house seminar on "the new world of internet marketing" underattended? In any case, all will be forgiven as soon as we get our talons on a copy.

We've long suspected — okay, known — that people who work in the troll-infested field of book publishing don't need beer goggles to find hotness in the least likely of places. It's a phenomenon we like to call "skinniest girl at fat camp syndrome." Case in point: a tip we received today about dumpster-diving British author Tristram Stuart (pictured), whose book about "radical vegetarianism" got a searching analysis in this week's New Yorker. Our tipster writes, "We're taking a poll in house; so far he's been ranked either 'hotter than my other authors' and 'my hottest author' by the editorial and publicity staffs. What's your vote?"

People keep emailing us this deal announcement:

To be sure, Simpson never explicitly admits to slicing his ex-wife's neck so savagely that he almost decapitated her.

Yesterday, we asked you to choose your least favorite among the Jonathans, Bens and Davids of the literary world and their lovely writer-spouses. You voted for Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss by a pretty substantial margin, spanking runners-up Davendela and Michayelet. Nicole wins a signed copy of the execrable Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Jonathan will receive a signed copy of the 'we hear it's not bad but we have a deep-seated antipathy towards anything contemporary with 'Love' in the title which always strikes us as a marketing gimmick' The History of Love. The couple will also receive a free lifetime subscription to nonexistent UnderCover magazine as well as the privilege of being henceforth referred to as Jonicole. Unfortunately, we didn't include every lit-scene power pair in our poll; a commenter wrote in Salman and Padma (how could we forget her contribution to the canon, Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet?). But the omission we feel worst about has got to be this one: