In your soggy Monday media column: Salon's sad sale talks fall through, Oprah's network is unpopular, Lorin Stein is the Hot Sexxxy Literary It Boy of the moment, Tina Brown is provincially famous, and John King's future is murky.

The gossip from Frankfurt, where international rights to books are bought and sold during a traditionally ribald and booze-sodden week every October, is beginning to trickle in as the fair draws to a close. It is all lame. There's no "big book" this year, only a "big story" about the dissolution of British agency PFD, whose 85 employees simultaneously quit, leaving clients like Ruth Rendell unmoored. FSG editor Lorin Stein, who, according to our inbox, is a "notoriously arch shithead" and a "boat-shoe wearing schmuck," let Times book lady Motoko Rich follow him around as he played hooky from the fair to pick apples in the Rhine Valley and attended dinners that found him "carving slabs of pork ribs and sampling the local apple wine. ('It's wretched,' he declared after the first sip.)" Something interesting must have happened, though, at the notorious Canongate party?