When we arrived at the Algonquin Hotel last night, shortly before the reception for the annual Thurber Prize for American Humor, Larry Doyle and his wife were already in the lobby, chatting with his agent, Sarah Burnes, and we mentioned that unfortunately we would not be able to stay for the actual awards ceremony because of another commitment. Doyle advised, totally deadpan, we should stay to witness the scene he would create when he was passed over for the award by either of the other two nominees, Patricia Marx or Simon Rich. "It'll have been a conspiracy," he insisted preemptively. "Voter fraud!" we suggested.

Fortunately, that outburst never came to pass, as Doyle's novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper, was declared the winner of the 2008 Thurber Prize, which goes a long way towards sealing its reputation as the funniest book of the year. And it turns out that the novel, which began as a film treatment that wasn't going anywhere, has since found its way back to Hollywood, with Hayden Panettiere as the eponymous object of desire. (The film is scheduled for release in early 2009; we understand that the test screenings are already taking place.) Doyle, however, is happy to stay with his family back in Baltimore; during his years as a writer on The Simpsons, he recalled, he used to commute nearly an hour to work every morning—two hours if he took the freeway.

(photo: Scott Manning)

During a day packed with news of a panicked Wall Street, a number of Internet writers still covered the debut of The Daily Beast--Tina Brown's first step into webby journalism.

In this big launch, the author of The Diana Chronicles and former New Yorker editor crossed The Huffington Post, the content aggregating site Digg, and a glossy magazine from a happier era.

At Politico, Michael Calderone asked Is Tina just following Arianna?, and explored the new blog's influences.

Maud Newton cheered on the new site, pointing out her own book and publishing coverage on the site.

Paid Content noted the clever book industry tie-ins:

"One quick-hit way to get top names up there: the Buzz Board featuring what 'smart people recommend' and led by Bill Clinton on launch day recommending 'three bailout-related books.'

Earlier today, one book editor asked how to blog. Over the weekend, another editor discovered how not to blog.

The website for godot recently released a 3,785-page pdf "book" that contained thousands of pages of apparently computer-generated poetry, all of it attributed to real people--including Walt Whitman, blogger Ed Champion, and poet Ron Silliman.

On his blog, Silliman called it "an act of anarcho-flarf vandalism" and warned the editor to think about angry "contributors" and potential lawsuits. Finally, he listed the name, phone number, and email address of the anthology editor.

The editor responded that the phone number was actually his parents' line, and described the work as a publishing experiment.

"I expected its size, format, and (to my eye) clearly algorithmically generated content to make our intentions clear. I wholeheartedly support the world of small press publishing and small press writing. Following the distribution of Issue 1, I would consider myself to be a member of that community on some small scale."

Blogging is a tough business, and it's only getting tougher--projected drops in advertising could soon rewire the blogosphere.

Even book executives are pondering the future of this mysterious art. Debbie Stier, Associate Publisher at HarperStudio, confessed that she never imagined what sort of mental gymnastics authors endured following her digital evangelism:

"First of all, it's really hard. Do you know how many times I told authors, without batting an eye, 'Blog Blog Blog.' I feel so guilty now that I've discovered how hard it is to be 'on' when someone says 'go.'"

After a few weeks in the driver's seat of a blog, Stier is looking for blogging advice from the Internets. GalleyCat suggests this RSS feed primer from Yen Cheong. What do you think? Help Stier and her authors answer the question: "What makes a good blog?"

Update: AgencySpy landed an interview with Gawker publisher Nick Denton, discussing layoffs and the future of blogs.

In this week's installment of mediabistro.com's "Pitching an Agent," M. David Hornbuckle visits the Linda Chester Agency, where Alexandra Machinist (right) is actively looking for new authors, with "a particular affinity for historical fiction, plot-driven literary fiction, women's fiction that straddles the line of commercial and literary, narrative nonfiction, and revealing (but not self-indulgent) memoir." She's willing to search through the slush pile, but if you're going to contact her directly, make sure to explain why you think she might be the agent for you.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you're not a member yet, you can register for $59 a year, and start reading those articles, receive discounts on mediabistro.com seminars and workshops, and get all sorts of other swell bonuses.

Mingling with writers, producers, and a legal bordello owner, authors Patrick Buckley and Lily Binns celebrated the release of their new book, The Hungry Scientist Handbook on Friday.

Subtitled Electric Birthday Cakes, Edible Origami, and Other DIY Projects for Techies, Tinkerers, and Foodies, the book was the brainchild of an engineer and his creative friends. As the country shuffles into a recession, these two famished authors hope that their science book can help readers.

At the Manhattan party, favors included liquid nitrogen ice cream, edible lingerie, and a wired pastry. The party was hosted by pioneering editor, Judith Regan, Buckley's proud mother. Among the guests was Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof, the brothel owner featured on the HBO show, Cathouse.

The controversy surrounding Sherry Jones's The Jewel of Medina, a novel in which the youngest wife of the Muslim prophet Muhammad tells the story of their marriage from her perspective, intensified last week, after an attempt to firebomb the book's British publisher created momentary uncertainty about whether that edition would go forward (it will) and raised security concerns at the offices of Beaufort Books, the novel's American publisher. Ultimately, Beaufort—which picked up the book after Random House, citing its own security concerns, dropped it—decided to move the publication date up so that it would be available in bookstores starting today. "There's a lot of talk about what is and isn't in the book by people who haven't read it," Jones explained as we chatted in a café near Beaufort's Manhattan offices Friday afternoon. "Until people read it, the dialogue can't move on. The discussion cannot progress."

When American forces invaded Afghanistan seven years ago, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as supporters declared that the intervention would end the repression of women under the Taliban's interpretations of Islamic doctrine, Jones wanted to learn more. She read the first two books she could find on women and Islam—Geraldine Brooks's Nine Parts of Desire and Jan Goodwin's Price of Honor—both of which mentioned the story of A'isha. "I was just fascinated by her tale," Jones recalled. "I was drawn to her immediately; I felt empathy and compassion for her." She began writing the novel that became The Jewel of Medina in an effort to better understand A'isha: "I asked myself, how does a young girl whose life is completely controlled by men transform into the leader and warrior and scholar that she became? So I gave her obstacles and temptations in the course of imagining how she would grow."

The problem (as we see it) stems from the flagrant mischaracterization of the novel by Islamic studies professor Denise Spellberg, whom Ballantine Books had approached hoping for a blurb, as "soft core pornography" and anti-Muslim propaganda; Spellberg's zealous efforts to alert Muslims to the book's impending publication were particularly effective in giving the public a distorted impression of its contents. And we do mean distorted: Now that we've read the novel for ourselves, and seen precisely two paragraphs that might be construed as sexually explicit (and that's being extremely generous to one of them), Jones deserves a public apology from Spellberg for her public misrepresentations. (Jones has asked Spellberg to recant; she told us Friday that repeated efforts to contact her detractor have met with silence.)

continued...

When we saw the ARC for the Beaufort Books edition of Sherry Jones's The Jewel of Medina, we immediately picked up on the similarity to the cover Ballantine Books had prepared for the book before corporate superiors at Random House scrapped its publication. So when we interviewed Jones Friday afternoon, we asked about the covers, and Beaufort's publicist confirmed that they had chosen the same basic artwork because that image had become so publicly identified with the novel during the hoopla surrounding its cancellation.

The source material for the two designs turns out to be a painting, rather more provocative in its uncropped totality, called "The Queen of the Harem" by the German painer Ferdinand Max Bredt, about whom we are ashamed to say we know nothing more than that he created other works along similarly orientalist lines, and that he was born in 1868 and died in 1921. Care to enlighten us?

When literary blogger Maud Newton wrote last Friday about being disabused of a literary prejudice by reading Keith Lee Morris's latest, The Dart League King, which proved to her that novels written in a close-third person voice with multiple, alternating perspectives don't have to be "emotionally empty, utterly plotless stories that drift from one unsympathetic character to another and culminate in wishy-washy epiphanies," it reminded us that we'd gotten a copy of that novel ourselves recently, which was sitting near the top of one of our own to-read stacks. So we had a look at the opening chapters over the weekend, and, doggone it, she was right: It is awfully engrossing. (Read an excerpt for yourself, and see if you agree.)

And that, coupled with another conversation about Maud's post, got us to thinking: What "least rational contemporary fiction prejudices" were we still holding in our hearts? This proved more difficult a question that we'd anticipated at first—particularly since we were in a hurry, which rather hampered our ability to fully interrogate our assumptions—but we did finally allow as how we generally have to be dragged kicking and screaming into reading any epic fantasy that isn't written by George R.R. Martin, and that we should stop acting "pleasantly surprised" when anybody else's work in the genre turns out to be good.

How about you? What biases in your reading habits could use a good challenge this week? Email us or share your thoughts in the comments section.

It was nearly a year ago that we raved to you about Daniel Pink's Wired article on manga, specifically the flourishing fan subculture known as dojinshi. Tonight, in a lecture at New York's Japan Society, Pink will share what he learned about that nation's comic book scene in a more intimate setting—we hesitate to call it a lecture—with, we're told, loads of visual references.

How did Pink get turned on to the subject in the first place? "I saw the manga sections of libraries and bookstores in the U.S. expanding," he emailed us recently, "and I wanted to get a better sense of what was going on. Why were these Japanese comics so appealing to American young people? Then as I dug a little deeper, I discovered that manga was a huge business in Japan. That combination—a powerful industry that also was beginning to have a grip on the cultural mind—lwas irresistible."

So irresistible that Pink wrote his latest handbook of career advice, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, in manga format, with illustrations by Rob Ten Pas (who also drew the headshot of Pink at right). "Writing this book definitely honed my narrative abilities," Pink says of the experience. "I had no idea how to tell a story with pictures. Rob helped teach me that. And it was powerful. I never realized how much narrative freight pictures could carry. I think the ultimate effect of that is that I'm now slightly better at narrating more succinctly. Alas, my next book is going to be more traditional. It will have sentences and paragraphs and page numbers and all those ancient conventions!"

When Claire LaZebnik came to New York last week to celebrate the publication of her latest novel, The Smart One and the Pretty One, the book party quickly turned into a family gathering. LaZebnik (second from right) was joined by her three sisters—Sabrina writer Nell Scovell, Julie Kaufman, and kid's book author Alice Coleman—as well as her cousin, Jane Weitzman (the wife of shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, at whose Columbus Circle showroom the reception was held).

Then there was Conan O'Brien, who isn't actually related to LaZebnik, but did graduate in the same class at Harvard (a year behind her husband, Simpsons writer Rob LaZebnik).

Between the newly-signed bailout's bazillion dollar price tag and Gawker's layoffs and the 159,000 jobs we lost in September, everybody could use some good news.

How about a free book? Small Beer Press just posted a free digital download of Kelly Link's winning collection of short stories, Magic for Beginners. It's a whole book of short stories--a bailout for your monthly literary budget.

From the download link:

"To celebrate the publication of Kelly's new collection, Pretty Monsters, most of Kelly's previous collection Magic for Beginners is now available as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached."

When it comes to digital book readers, the iPhone and iPod Touch are gaining ground against the Amazon Kindle. Forbes reports that mobile-phone-based applications like Stanza are leading the ebook race in a telling market:

"According to Paris-based Feedbooks, Stanza's largest distributor of content, the application's users have downloaded more than 2 million books. By comparison, Kindle users who access Feedbooks' book catalog--directly via multiple methods, including through its preinstalled Web browser--have downloaded less than 40,000 of Feedbooks' titles, although they also have wireless access to the company's contents."

If you want to sample some of that winning content, Feedbooks has a special Banned Book list--just in time for Banned Books Week festivities. That list includes George Orwell's classic 1984. That dark novel is the most popular book on Feedbooks, followed by The Art of War--these are gloomy days, even in ebooks. (Via TeleRead)

Felicia Sullivan, the Senior Online Marketing Manager at HarperCollins, is leaving today--joining the civilian world to work on a film adaptation of her memoir, The Sky Isn't Visible from Here.

Sullivan once confessed to writing her memoir on the clock at another day-job, but she won't have to juggle anymore. In her exit interview with GalleyCat, the founder of Small Spiral Notebook discussed her upcoming film and her next book:

"As I'm working with a small production company, I'm thrilled with the opportunity to not only write the screenplay but play an integral role in the production. I also have plans to start my novel, which is tentatively titled: Women and Children First. I also have plans to consult in online marketing, strategy and website development and will be taking on freelance projects in late December."

Aficionados of Thomas Pynchon's hardboiled spy novel, V, or his conspiratorial detective-work in The Crying of Lot 49 have reason to celebrate this weekend. Critic Steven Moore gave a tantalizing look at the reclusive author's new book on Blog About Town:

"The rep told me it's around 400 pages, and is a kind of noir detective story set in the 1960s, with lots of psychedelia as background. How groovy is that! (Sounds like I'm making this up, but I swear to Xenu that's what he told me.)"

Moore set the publishing date at August 2009, giving us plenty of time to speculate about the adventures of a private dick living in a Pynchonian universe. Apparently this information has been circulating on mailing lists devoted to the work of Pynchon and William Gaddis for a few weeks now. (Thanks, Conversation Reading)