Leon Neyfakh

Over at the Politico, Jonathan Martin corrects a previous report by Erick Erickson on RedState.com that claimed Sarah Palin spoke off the cuff last night rather than reading from a teleprompter. Erickson says sources close to McCain told him that the teleprompter malfunctioned during Ms. Palin's speech and consequently forced her to improvise. We can confirm that that's false: like Martin, Media Mob was sitting in the press section and could see plainly that the teleprompter was working just fine.

Funny thing though: both times Ms. Palin was called to say the word "nuclear," ("we're going to lay more pipelines, build more nuclear plants, create jobs with clean coal", "Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay") the word was spelled "new-clear" on the screen.  read more »

Last night Mike Huckabee thanked the “elite media” for unifying the Republican Party behind the McCain-Palin ticket.

“I wasn’t sure it could be done,” he said, drawing happy laughter from the crowd.

There were "boos" directed at the press stand last night, and a few more attacks before it was time to file. The media were sitting right there, in plain view, half of them in a section to the immediate right of the stage and all the rest on the left. Arranged by affiliation, they sat quietly in their assigned seats, typing on their laptops with their little hands. The New York Times reporters sat in one row, The Washington Post in another, and so forth; instead of individual desks, each of these was equipped with a long, black surface that resembled nothing so much as a trough.  read more »

Tom Brokaw dined last night with the restaurateur Danny Meyer at the CNN Grill, a watering hole of sorts right outside the convention gates where members of the media can be seen all week sheepishly eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner for free. CNN set the thing up over the weekend, outfitting with new signage, new paint, and twelve TVs what used to be (and will be again once the convention leaves town) the Eagle Street Bar & Grill. Overseeing operations in the kitchen is Michael Romanos, the star chef from Mr. Meyer's banner New York spot, the Union Square Cafe.  

"I had fried chicken and uh.  read more »

Later this month, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey will publish a book called State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (Ecco), a collection of 50 essays, each one between 3,000 and 5,000 words long: Jhumpa Lahiri wrote about Rhode Island, William Vollman wrote about California, Jonathan Franzen wrote about New York, and so forth.

The book is nearly 600 pages altogether, and carries a list price of $29.95. These are big numbers, if you’re really just curious to read what Dave Eggers has to say about Illinois and the rest of it not so much.

Would Mr.  read more »

ST. PAUL—Jack Fowler, the publisher of the National Review, was leaning back in a chair in a banquet hall at the St. Paul University Club.

The party he’d just held there was breaking up, and he was talking to a reporter about President George W. Bush as Jay Nordlinger and Claremont Institute fellow and Power Line blogger Scott Johnson looked on.

“There’s lots of clichés,” he said. “Everybody loves a winner, right? Who wants to be involved with a loser, or a guy who isn’t liked? I like the president. I’m alive, I go to New York City every day, and I take freakin’ Metro-North to Grand Central Station every day and my ass has not been blown up by Al Qaeda.  read more »

Media Mob just received an email sent out to all Random House North American employees from Markus Dohle announcing the departure of Deputy Chairman and Chief Operating Officer Edward Volini.

The text of the memo follows. Expect more on this soon:

TO EVERYONE AT RANDOM HOUSE NORTH AMERICA

It is with great regret that I inform you that EDWARD VOLINI has decided to step down as Deputy Chairman and Chief Operating Officer and will leave the company effective September 30.

Ed has had a very distinguished career at Random House, beginning in May 1997 at Ballantine Books, where he rose to Executive Vice President, Deputy Publisher.  read more »

After we were denied entry into the New York Times tent -- the reporters are on deadline or something -- we happily spotted David Brooks and asked him about his first day at the convention.

Did the schedule changes throw off all your plans?
Nah, my deadline was before the real convention anyway, so I just wrote a column in my hotel room about Sarah Palin.

Is that up now?
No, this is old media, it takes hours. It’s for tomorrow.

What are you saying about Sarah Palin?
I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s the pros and cons.

How did you react to today's news?
I confess I was happy.  read more »

Just ran into local hero David Carr on his way to the New York Times’ filing center. He said he has spent his day so far not in the Xcel Center but outdoors, reporting on the protests. The big question there, he said, was whether the local anarchists who organized the march were going to overcome their natural inclination towards mild-mannered politesse, a.k.a Minnesota Nice.

“I got pulled over this morning for doing 60 in a 30 zone,” he said, by way of illustration of the phenomenon. “He apologized and let me go. He said, ‘I’m sorry I had to pull you over, I know you're busy, but you were really hauling the mail, and I had to tell you to slow down.'”

Newt Gingrich walked into the USA Today/Gannett pavilion a little bit ago to talk to reporters as part of the paper's "Newsmakers" program. What he's saying in there-- and whether he's saying it on or off the record-- we don't know, because the event is distinctly not open to the public. Apparently, when Jimmy Carter paid his "Newsmakers" visit at the DNC last week, too many non-USAT reporters tried to sneak in and editors ordered a clampdown. According to one of the people doing scheduling and logistics for USA Today, there were supposed to be four or five other Newsmakers coming to visit over the course of this week, but at this point it's unclear which of them are going to come through. Haley Barbour was supposed to stop by yesterday but canceled.

A 64-year-old woman named JoAn Karkos from Maine stole a book from the Lewiston Public Library and now she won't give it back because she's afraid it would fall into the wrong hands if she did. The book is It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, which, according to Publishers Weekly, features "two characters—an easygoing bird and an apprehensive bee" and includes charming watercolor-and-pencil art that is "alternately playful and realistic (and occasionally graphic)." (This comes via Bookslut.)

Ms. Karkos has been critical of the book for a while: In September 2007, she checked out two copies of It's Perfectly Normal and refused to return them, paying the libraries for the cost of the books and including a note that read, "I have been sufficiently horrified of the illustrations and sexually graphic, amoral, abnormal contents.  read more »

The New York Post's Keith Kelly reported yesterday that Michael Wolff’s book on Rupert Murdoch and the Dow Jones takeover is coming out in December, instead of February as initially intended. This spurred Media Mob to get in touch with Mr. Wolff and find out why. We did, pretty much right away, and the answer was just “Christmas,” so we stayed on the line for another few minutes and asked Mr. Wolff some more things.

Below, the conversation is reproduced, though be warned that while none of Mr. Wolff’s words were changed or rearranged, the questions in bold have been reconstructed from memory.  read more »

Portfolio.com has a story up by Edmund Lee about Amazon's clever and admirably imaginative use of word of mouth as a means of promoting that little white reading machine they've been so excited about lately. Basically, they started a message board—proving once again that Web 2.0 is just a fancy version of what the internet in the early 90s—where people who want to see an actual Kindle in real life can post their location and wait for somone who lives nearby and has a bit of time on their hands to come forward and schedule a meet-up.

To wit: around lunchtime yesterday one Karen Bosscher from Lubbock, Texas posted a message asking if anyone in her area had a Kindle she could see so she can figure out if it's right for her family. This morning P. J. Gueras responded, telling Ms. Bosscher that although she and her husband live in Austin, they were planning to be in Lubbock for a wedding on Saturday, October 4th and could meet the. "If no one in Lubbock replies to your post, maybe you could meet my husband and me for breakfast to look at and discuss my Kindle before we leave for Austin on Sunday, October 5th," Ms. Gueras wrote.  read more »

It could be a movie: After years of struggle, four writers, close friends and allies from their days working together in the early '90s on a small but highly influential magazine of politics and culture, are all suddenly enjoying varying degrees of success in the world of American letters. Matt is an editor at The Paris Review. Rick is a historian. The other two are both named Tom: one of them is a magazine journalist and the other writes a column for the Wall Street Journal. Each of them has written a book, and against all odds they are being published mere weeks apart.  read more »

Before Mitzi Angel became the new head of FSG imprint Faber & Faber here in New York, a job she started only a few weeks ago, she lived in London with her boyfriend and worked as an editor at a small literary publishing house founded during the mid-1980s called 4th Estate. It was an enormously successful operation for an independent, and it was not long after Ms. Angel joined up that it merged with HarperCollins UK. Because so many people quit or were laid off in the aftermath of the transition, she rose quickly and was soon known as an editor with an uncommon talent for finding new writers.  read more »

Jerome Corsi, whose bestselling anti-Obama book, The Obama Nation, has been widely dismissed since its publication as inaccurate and misleading, has written a 60-page defense of his claims that he hopes to post on the Web site WorldNetDaily later this week. Mr. Corsi, who was one of the authors of 2004's Unfit for Command, said in an interview today that his rebuttal will challenge, point by point, the strongly-worded "Unfit for Publication" pdf composed by the Obama campaign and posted on the Web site FightTheSmears.com after Mr. Corsi's book hit stores earlier this month. In that pdf, which clocked in at a hefty 40 pages, the Obama campaign said Mr. Corsi was a "bigoted fringe author" whose new book was "full of rehashed distortions and the same old lies" that have been circulating about Obama since he started his run for president.  read more »

Surprisingly, no one caught wind of this early, but Slate editor Jacob Weisberg has apparently signed on to write a biweekly column for Newsweek. Like Mr. Weisberg's long-running on-again-off-again Slate column—which last appeared in January, and has not been a regular feature since April 2007—this new one will be called The Big Idea, and it will run in Newsweek and Slate simultaneously.

The first edition of the column appears as part of this week's special issue on the DNC, along with pieces by Princeton professor Sean Wilentz and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, both of whom will, according to Jon Meacham's editor's note, contribute to Newsweek occasionally.  read more »

Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo, the events coordinator at the Nolita bookstore McNally Jackson, has been public about her intention to open a new independent bookstore in Brooklyn since at least January, when she won a $15,000 grant for the project from the Brooklyn Public Library. Since then, she seems to have zeroed in on Fort Greene as her neighborhood of choice, and the Fort Greene Association, which administered a survey to 380 locals and found that 74% of them wanted a bookstore in the neighborhood, is trying to help her make it happen.

Over the weekend a launch party was scheduled and announced for what's being called the Fort Greene Bookstore Initiative.  read more »

Last week, Media Mob wondered whether Simon & Schuster Inc. would be taken to task for allowing Threshold Editions, its conservative imprint, to publish The Obama Nation, Jerome Corsi's bestselling hit job on the presumptive Democratic nominee.

In the front of this week's New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg does exactly that. "On a foundation of small, medium-sized, and extra-large falsehoods," Mr. Hertzberg writes, "'The Obama Nation' erects a superstructure of innuendo, guilt by (often nonexistent) association, baseless speculation, and sinister-sounding but irrelevant digression."

He goes on to say that Mr. Corsi's last book—Unfit for Command, re: John Kerry—was published by Regnery, a publisher whose "sole raison d’être.  read more »

This week's issue of Time has an article about how "Online Americans, fed up with e-mail overload and blogorrhea, are retreating into micro-writing." That means six-word memoirs, four-word film reviews, twelve-word novels, and, er, Twitter.com.

These things are like Japanese haikus, according to Time. Which is a charming argument, and one that would have been even stronger if the author of the piece had included the fact that in Japan lately a whole lot of the books that appear on the best-seller list are paper adaptations of novels that were originally published as serialized text messages. This was written about in The Times in  read more »

In her New York Post column today, Cindy Adams takes to task Johns Hopkins University assistant professor of psychiatry John D. Gartner for the Bill Clinton bio he's publishing at the end of September through St. Martin's Press. In the book, titled In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography, professor Gartner claims that Clinton's father is not Bill Blythe, as Clinton has always believed, but rather Arkansas doctor George Wright.

Gartner lays out a whole psycho-biography of Clinton (as is his wont—talk about a weird niche!) that explains why he fell in love with Hillary (she looked like his grandma) and why he went for Monica (she reminded him of his mom).  read more »

Jerome Corsi, author of the 2004 Anti-John Kerry book Unfit for Command, has taken a lot of heat for his latest effort, a grouchy little volume called The Obama Nation that puts forth the notion that Barack Obama might be and probably is a drug addicted Muslim-lover. So far, Simon & Schuster, the company that published Mr. Corsi's book through its conservative Threshold Editions imprint, hasn't been asked to defend their decision to put it out.

Ben Smith at the Politico raises the issue today on his blog, asking a "series of Simon & Schuster authors—including Michael Moore, Alexandra Pelosi, and Paul Begala" how they feel about getting their paychecks from the same place as Mr.  read more »

Simon & Schuster announced this morning that Bob Woodward's new book—his fourth on the Bush Administration—will be called The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008, and that The Washington Post will excerpt it on Sunday, Sept. 7, the day before it goes on sale. They're printing almost a million copies of this thing, according to the announcement, in which Mr. Woodward's editor, Alice Mayhew, is quoted as saying, rather boldly, that the book offers the most "authoritative and intimate account of presidential decision making since the Nixon tapes and the Pentagon Papers."

Naturally, seeing as Mr. Woodward's books are always full of electrifying little news breaks, The War Within is embargoed until the day of its release.  read more »

Scott Moyers gave up his job as editor-in-chief of the Penguin Press just over a year ago to become the number two man at the Wylie Agency. It was a classic path, one that many editors before him had followed, but it nevertheless carried certain connotations—sort of like when a beloved professor gives up his or her work and takes a higher paying job as a university administrator, or worse, a researcher at a private think tank. Although Mr. Moyers at the time sounded excited about his new job and confident that the work would not be so different or less intellectually stimulating than what he was used to in editorial, there was still a bit of grieving among editors in this city when he announced his decision.  read more »

Yesterday, Media Mob reported the baffling fact that this photo of bonobos doing it had been used as the cover of two totally unrelated recently published books: Susan Squire's I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage and Francis Levy's independently-published novel about sex and carnality Erotomania. We also reported that Daphne Merkin had mysteriously blurbed both books.

Late in the afternoon we reached Mr. Levy and Ms. Merkin and got our answers.

First things first: The photo comes from a New Yorker article by Ian Parker published last summer about primatologist Frans de Waal and his work with bonobos. Mr. de Waal took the photo himself, and when Mr.  read more »

You might think Jonathan Mahler would have been pleased when he heard on the afternoon of July 18 that Guantánamo detainee Salim Hamdan was going to face trial just as Farrar, Straus and Giroux was getting ready to publish the book that Mr. Mahler had spent the last four years writing about him.

Instead, the 39-year-old journalist panicked a little. He hadn’t expected the trial so soon, and the timing made him self-conscious. What if readers thought his book, a rigorous chronicle of the Supreme Court case that led up to the trial, was just some thrown-off quickie meant to expire and disappear within a few news cycles?

 read more »

The editors and assistants of Farrar, Straus and Giroux received an upsetting e-mail yesterday morning from the venerable publishing house's director of operations informing them that the water in their building on 18th Street was being shut off until the following day. The building manager had reported "unanticipated problems," but a promise was made that they would be resolved very soon.

In the meantime, anyone who needed to use the restroom would have to go downstairs to the Cupcake Cafe, a small operation housed inside the Books of Wonder children's bookstore. This went on until around 4 PM today when the water came back on.  read more »

Two new books that came out days apart but have absolutely nothing to do with each other both feature on their covers the same photo of two bonobos having sex with each other in the missionary position. The photo is a pretty famous black-and-white one taken by the primatologist Frans de Waal; the books whose covers it graces are Erotomania, a novel by Francis Levy published on August 1st by Ohio-based indie press Two Dollar Radio, and I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage that Bloomsbury published just a week earlier. It should be noted that the photo appears left-to-right on Erotomania and right-to-left on I Don't.  read more »

Sherry Jones, the journalist whose debut novel, The Jewel of Medina, about the prophet Muhammed and his lady friend A'isha, got canceled when Random House, her publisher, got scared of getting terrorist-attacked, has posted a brief but fierce missive that her 14-year-old daughter Mariah wrote in response to one Jonathan Moeller, who'd been critical of her mom's book on his blog.

Mariah posted her note as a comment on Mr. Moeller's blog last night at 11:17pm:

Hello, I am Sherry Jones's daughter, Mariah. I'm fourteen, and for a teenager, I see that this article is disgraceful. My mother's book (which I have actually read), is anything but 'Trashy'.

 read more »

Tech journalist John Biggs, who edits the blog CrunchGear.com and has contributed to The New York Times, has signed a contract with Susan Kamil at the Dial Press to write a book called Marie Antoinette's Watch.

The book will tell the story of an impossibly elaborate wristwatch that one of Marie Antoinette's lovers commissioned around the time of the French Revolution from the master watchmaker Abraham Louis Breguet. The watch—the "iPhone of its day," according to Mr. Biggs' literary agent, Larry Weissman, because of its unprecedented range of features and functions—took 44 years to make, and Marie Antoinette was long dead by the time it was complete.  read more »

Jonathan Mahler didn't know whether to be happy or sad when he read on July 22 that Salim Ahmed Hamdan's Military Commission trial had begun. He'd been following the case for years, and as it happened, he'd recently finished a book about it that was scheduled to come out in just a few weeks. Consequently, what happens to Mr. Hamdan—a Yemeni in his 30s who served as Osama bin Laden's driver until he was captured by U.S. forces in 2001 and taken to Guantánamo Bay—would have serious ramifications for Mr. Mahler's book, and what they would be, he did not immediately know.

The book, titled The Challenge, hit stores this week, and the trial concluded with a split verdict on Wednesday.  read more »

No doubt riding high on the breakout success of David Wrobewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, the Ecco Press appears to be on something of a spending spree! Matthew Flamm at Crain's reports that Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith (not to be mistaken with Sinclair Lewis' similarly titled book), has sold them the rights to his autobiography for more than $2 million. This news comes just over a week after Ecco's publisher, Dan Halpern, dropped more than $2 million on that survival memoir Crazy for the Storm that had everyone wondering whether Rob Weisbach had taken up agenting.

We'll reserve our judgment on whether $2 million is or isn't an insane amount of money to pay for Steven Tyler's autobiography. As Flamm notes, it wouldn't be the first time an ex-rock star with wrinkles got seven figures to write a book.

It was a small party on Steve Rubin's roof last night, not a big party. Just two "civilians" there, as Jane Friedman, the guest of honor, put it—everyone else was either a publishing executive, an editor, a high-powered literary agent, or a member of her family.

Bob Miller, head of the Harper Studio imprint at the publishing house Ms. Friedman ran until a few months ago, said that if you bombed the terrace, "you'd lose the entire industry."

For Ms. Friedman, it was really just about friendship. Almost everyone who came, she said, except for the publicist Matthew Hiltzik, she'd known for over 20 years.  read more »

Sarah McNally does not feel like an underdog. So please, everybody, stop trying to convince her that she should. Yes, it’s true that she owns a small, independent bookstore and is thus competing for business with some pretty big corporations. But no, she’s not scared of them, because she thinks her store is better.

“People love writing the story of independent bookstores being foolhardy and failing,” she said last Friday afternoon, perched noncommittally on a couch in the living room of her new Brooklyn apartment. “People love that story, and that’s almost the only thing I get called about. A bookstore closes somewhere in Manhattan or in New Jersey, and someone calls and wants a quote about, you know, how grim it is to be an independent bookstore.  read more »

Henry Holt’s flagship imprint has a new editor in chief. Who it is we don’t know yet, nor will we for two or three more weeks unless the wrong person hears about it and sings. Apparently, whoever it is hasn’t quite gotten up the nerve to give notice yet at his or her old job, and Holt’s publisher, Dan Farley, promised to keep it close until the bed was made. That, or Holt’s just running out the clock until after Labor Day, so that colleagues in the publishing industry, many of whom tend to spend the month of August unapologetically summering, actually get the memo.  read more »

News Corp.'s fourth quarter earnings report is in, and it looks like HarperCollins made Rupert Murdoch about as much money this year ($160 million) as it did in 2007. His TV, cable, and film divisions, meanwhile, made him about $1.3 billion each! 

Sorry, sorry, just some perspective. Back to HarperCollins: earnings for this quarter ($29 million) were down slightly compared to Q3, but up by a full third compared to Q4 last year. According to the summary provided in the report, the biggest titles of the quarter were James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning, Elissa Wall's Stolen Innocence, and an updated edition of YOU: The Owner's Manual by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet Oz.  read more »

Politico was first to the line in the race for Ron Suskind's embargoed new book, reporting last night at 11:23 PM that according to Mr. Suskind's reporting, the White House had ordered the CIA to forge a "back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein" in order to strengthen the link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. The book, entitled Way of the World, had been under lock and key ever since the 500,000 copies HarperCollins ordered for the first print run had come in.

As she prepared to go home yesterday, HarperCollins publicity director Tina Andreadis braced herself for a long, nervous night.  read more »

James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning comes out in the U.K. this week, and the press has started to come in. The most interesting thing so far is a dramatic little feature from the Times called "The US Antihero" by Alan Franks. Quotes from Frey are peppered throughout the piece, including this doozy:

I've been in conflict with everything for my whole life. That's the rule, not the exception. Conflict with myself, over ideas of how to live and think, what to think, what to believe. My wife laughs and says I'm only comfortable when there's a fight. I have to have it.

 read more »

Jennifer Senior profiles her former colleague David Carr in this week's New York. In a welcome curveball, she focuses not on his recovery from drug addiction but on his transformation from misogynistic creep to loving husband and father, which she argues was "the real redemptive story in David's life, even if it's a less dramatic one than kicking a coke habit."

The main revelation in the piece is that for all his honesty, there was a lot of stuff Mr. Carr couldn't bring himself to cover in the book, or removed from the final version at the urging of friends. A lot of this material apparently concerned the "busy" and reckless sex life that he led as an addict: "People said, 'There's enough sort of misogyny and objectification without this kind of fratty stuff.  read more »

For most of the summer, the conventional wisdom on Bloomsbury USA was, "Well, at least they still have Colin Dickerman there."

No longer. Starting September 2nd, Mr. Dickerman—who had been serving as publisher of the house since spring—will join health/wellness publisher Rodale Books as publishing director for narrative nonfiction. He will report to his old boss Karen Rinaldi, who helped launch Bloomsbury USA in 1998 and abruptly decamped for Rodale in March.

The fact of Mr. Dickerman's hiring at Rodale—an unlikely turn of events, considering his tastes run closer to literary fiction and high-quality nonfiction than to health and fitness—suggests that the house is looking to expand its nonfiction publishing program, something its CEO, Steve Murphy, has been talking about doing for at least eight years.  read more »

The four soldiers being charged with of conspiring to murder Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad last spring are in the same company as The New Republic's former man in Iraq, Scott Beauchamp, Media Mob has learned.

Mr. Beauchamp wrote several pieces for TNR under the name Scott Thomas last summer in which he described in harrowing detail what it was like to be a soldier in Baghdad. His pieces included several gruesome scenes—one in which soldiers in his company deliberately ran over dogs in their Humvees, another in which they mock an Iraqi woman who had been wounded by an IED—that drew suspicions from skeptical readers.  read more »

Stop us if you've heard this one: A popular humorous Web log is being turned into a paper book! This time it's Garfield Minus Garfield, the very funny—some might say Kafkaesque—tumblr by Irish musician Dan Walsh that features old Garfield strips from which Garfield himself has been surgically removed so that it looks like Jon Arbuckle is just talking to himself like a crazy person.

Ballantine, which has been publishing Garfield since 1980, will rush the book as a trade paperback for release in October, according to an announcement posted on Mr. Walsh's personal tumblr. Jim Davis, who created Garfield and owns all the copyrights, has given the project his blessing.  read more »

In our defense, this morning's piece on David Carr didn't technically assert that no one had ever written a reported memoir before. Good thing, too, because the late Katharine Graham totally did it more than 15 years ago and won a Pulitzer prize for it! We know this now thanks to Chicago-based author Carol Felsenthal, who brought it to our attention in a comment she left on our Carr story.  read more »

Ms. Felsenthal started reporting her unauthorized biography of Graham in the early '90s, while Graham herself was working on the memoir that would become 1998's Personal History. According to Ms. Felsenthal, many of the people she interviewed for her book—