Think you're so cool for thanking MacDowell or Yaddo in your acknowledgments? Peasant. Guess you didn't pass muster with Baronessa Beatrice (Be-uh-TREE-chay, you idiot) Monti, who invites a select group of young, book-hot literary lights every year to her luxurious villa, so that they might amuse her with their witty conversation and bad table manners (and, presumably, write or whatever). Staying there is free, of course, but it does have its price: you have to listen to an old lady yammer away at you about all the famous people she's ever met, entertained, been a muse to, played tennis with, or, like, thought about. One book-hottie who couldn't take it: last year's most overhyped debut novelist, Ben Kunkel. The Kunk gets back a little bit of the respect that we lost for him after reading the latter half of his book/any article in his lit mag by peaceing out of the villa before he was "excused."

We hear from a scout (remember what those are?) that the Borat book sold at auction, with the Bruno book, for a cool $4 million, but the agency (Trident) won't say to whom. This isn't particularly fishy: sometimes deals aren't announced for weeks (or even months) for strategic or making-them-think-we-have-a-strategy reasons. But this particular bout of tight lippedness makes us think twice, in part because of a suspicion an agent planted in our heads. We thought he was totally crazypants at the time — and still kind of do — when he responded to our post about the book's putative megadeal with a cryptic email: "check Rush&Molloy of Nov. 1st." But we did as we were told:

As part of their continuing efforts to make endless re-releases of classic books at least somewhat interesting, Penguin has lately been experimenting with different cover design strategies. Across the pond, Penguin UK has hit on an ultra-minimalist approach: no cover at all. That is, they're releasing six classics with shrink-wrapped blank white paper covers, the idea being that you, the creative consumer, will draw your own cover. Artistes can then submit their cover designs for display on Penguin's website. For the next cycle, the pages will also be blank, allowing you to give The Picture of Dorian Gray that happy ending you just know Oscar Wilde would've wanted.

Today, Slate investigates the possibility that Google Book Search means the end of plagiarism as we know it (no!), for the simple reason that it makes it possible to find out, with a mere button-click, whether a sentence appears in more than one book. We'll be sad to see plagiarism go — it was very, very fun while it lasted. We do gleefully anticipate some fun gotcha moments as the new technology becomes more widespread, though. In fact, just for kicks, we plugged a favorite recent phrase into Google Book Search:

From issues of sexuality to issues of no sex at all, here's a promo clip that permanently cross-legged hymen regenerator Dawn Eden made for her new book, The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On. Remember how we all thought that Twyla Tharp musical was gonna kill Bob Dylan? Well, if he survives this one, we know he's bulletproof.

In an interview that aired last night on WCBS2, Golan Cipel (whose hotness was famously the downfall of everyone's fave Gay American, ex- NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey), refutes McGreevey's claim that the two shared an "immediate and intense and apparently reciprocated" attraction. According to Cipel, none of the softly lit, delicately scented, rapturous lovemaking that was like two souls being knit into one by the crochet hook of true, true love, uh, happened. Like, at all. In fact, he says he was sexually harassed. We find ourselves not caring so so much about who is right or wrong here and who is just trying to make a buck here. We just like comparing and contrasting the two accounts of that first encounter.

Thanks, tipster! Boy, having an editor here who used to work in publishing sure is paying off.

Welcome to TODO, formerly 1 Thing, and not to be confused with our To Do event listings. TODO is one daily thing recommended for you, by us.

Publishing a Borat book is clearly a totally genius idea. After all, people will still be just as feverishly enthusiastic about Borat a year from now, right? And Borat's accent-based humor seems like it would translate to the printed page really, really well. (Borat voice:) NAAHHT! (Yeah, see how funny that was?)

Page Six reports that 'The Office' megahottie John "Jim" Krasinski is in town shooting an adaptation of David Foster Wallace's unfilmable-seeming footnotefest The Broom of The System, but a quick imdb'ing reveals that the unfilmable-seeming footnotefest Krasinski is actually working on is Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Jesus H, Page Six. To, like, twelve geeks, this is a WAY bigger fuckup than the Butterscotch Stallion/Mocha Pony scandal last week. Hey, speaking of the Stallion and the Pony, we've always thought they'd be perfectly cast as Hal and Orin Incandenza. John, keep that in mind for when you get around to Infinite Jest, okay?

Elizabeth Merrick's This Is Not Chick Lit anthology has been kicking up bloggy controversy since the deal was first announced on Publisher's Marketplace. Then Merrick fanned the flames with an outspoken defense of her decision to marginalize an entire ill-defined genre of female writers, who she accused of writing about nothing but "more feet! more purses! more stilettos!" So you'd think she and the ladies who her subtitle deems "America's best women writers" would be a little bit more choosy about where they'd plan to host an event celebrating the "golden literary moment" that "serious women writers" are having right now.

The Asheville Citizen-Times ("Voice of The Mountains") took a break from their usual coverage of jam band festivals and moonshine-still flareups to profile hometown girl made good Marisha Pessl, author of summertime hit Special Topics in Calamity Physics. We feel a little bit bad about continuing to mock Ms. "book Broadway hot" Pessl — it isn't her fault that she has "brains as well as beauty," as the Citizen-Times puts it. But it is her fault that she continues to let people take ridiculous pictures of her. Thus, we have been forced to up(down)grade her condition to "Steve Madden ad hot."

So yeah, Slate scribe and Jonathan Safran Foer sib Joshua sold his memoir about memorizing shit to Anne Godoff for a cool 1.2 million, like we said.
Today we learn that film rights to the book, now tentatively titled Moonwalking with Einstein, have sold to Paramount.

The book sold on the basis of a proposal, which we hear was rather scanty and unimpressive. But maybe Joshua's a really kickass writer whose work is worth a ton of money. Let's dip into our own archives and see if we can come up with any evidence either way . . . ah, here we go. Joshua Foer, on Conor Oberst:

The pervier corners of the internet are abuzz this morning with the news that aging sexpot Kim "for all intents and purposes, Samantha" Cattrall flashed her bukiluki (NSFWork, men's heterosexuality) at a signing for her book Sexual Intelligence, which just came out in paperback. This reminded us of something we dimly knew at one time or another: Kim Cattrall is the author of another, more recently published book that we think is probably even more ridic than Sexual Intelligence (which is saying something). An excerpt from the Amazon description is after the jump. Trust us, you want to go there.

To push its new author-narrated crime show Murder by the Book, Court TV is installing narrow-band "audiobeam" sound projectors in bookstores that focus whispery monologues at individual customers. " "Hey you, over here. Don't turn around. Can you hear me? Do you ever think about murder, committing the ultimate crime?" intones the voice to you, and you alone, or anyone else who walks into the beam. Just in case you scream "Yes! Oh yes!" and attack your fellow book-browsers with joyful homicidal abandon, nearby posters warn that the "mystery whisperer" (gag) is all part of this innocuous effort at "experiential marketing" (double gag). Supposedly, the devices have been installed in Time Warner Center, so enjoy that on your lunch break for this rainy day. The technology involved comes mainly from military use, so it has no chance of accidentally boiling your brains out or anything.

We can't even begin to describe the amazing wonders inside Dirty Blonde, Courtney Love's new memoir/diary/hemorrhage of random life detritus. The woman basically stopped just short of including a used tampon with every copy sold. Seriously. Anyway, expect more Love from us in days to come, possibly in the form of a daily Zen koan from everyone's favorite devout Buddhist. (Ex: "What would the rose do?/Would the rose hire a publicist?/Let's be mountain junkies and breed/satanic mall rats.") But for today, we thought we'd just reprint an excerpt from an email conversation between Love and one of her acolytes: the one and only Lindsay Lohan. After the jump, soak up the learning.

We've always been unimpressed with the people who trumpet their participation in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which as far as we can tell involves telling everyone you know (usually via your blog) that you're writing a novel in a month, woohoo, way to go you. Seriously, it's almost as tiresome as people who think they're all special for sprinting through five boroughs. Color us not impressed.
But you know what IS impressive? NaDruWriNi — National Drunken Writing Night — which we had no idea was this past Saturday. (Even so, we may have inadvertently participated). The concept is wonderful, but the results are even better. Some of the drunkest are collected here. To whet your whistle, here's an excerpt from one of our favorites from last year:

Today, Rush & Molloy reprinted this sparkly gem from Lance Bass armcandy Reichen Lehmkuhl's "erotically charged" memoir, Here's What We'll Say: Growing Up, Coming Out, and the US Air Force (We smell book club potential!)

From a marketing sheet for Village Voice gossipist Michael Musto's new book. Nothing but love for the Musto, but "original voice of snark"? Chronology aside, who would even want that title? Reminds us of when Camille Paglia revealed that she invented blogs. And if you're pegging your book push to name-checking Gawker, you may already be in trouble. Ourselves cheerfully excepted of course!

From this compilation of Amazon.com reviews of classic literature: