Although the 38-year-old Levy, who began the book in 1998, was little known, he had one major advocate: Steven Spielberg. Shortly before Pocket bought "True," DreamWorks snapped up the film rights. The price tag? Two million dollars.

It's hard to fault Pocket's logic. When the most powerful director in Hollywood plans to turn one of your books into a movie -- even if it won't come out for a while -- you've got a built-in publicity campaign whose budget humbles the traditional book promotion budget.

What Pocket may not have known is that DreamWorks -- along with several other studios that were interested in "True" (including Fox 2000 and Universal) -- bid on the basis of a two-page English synopsis; no one at the company ever actually read the untranslated and, at the time, still unpublished book.

Assuming perhaps that Spielberg's taste was infallible, no one at Pocket read the book either.

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At least it used to.

Random House Inc., the parent company of Random House, Doubleday and
Knopf, among other houses, recently announced that it would boost starting
salaries for editorial assistants from $25,000 to $30,000, effective July 1,
just in time to buy a bus ticket to their wealthier friends' summer shares.

In what may be an industry-wide revolution, other houses appear to be
following.

Last week, Penguin Putnam raised its entry-level pay -- from $22,000 to
$25,000. "We're not high rollers now," says one Penguin assistant, "but
every little bit helps."

Simon & Schuster may also give a boost to its booty call. "We're looking at
what we can do to stay competitive," allows corporate spokesman Adam
Rothberg. Holtzbrink -- the corporate parent of St. Martin's Press, Henry Holt
and Co. and Farrar, Straus & Giroux -- confirmed that it too is considering an
increase.

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Eli Lilly maintains that the visit was a routine sales call to the clinic. One of the representatives even left a card. But whatever the reason for Eli Lilly's call, the Indianapolis giant has loomed large in the psychiatrist's life since his harshly critical look at the long-term effects of antidepressants was published April 5.

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"Buddha's Little Finger" mostly follows the (imagined) adventures of 26-year-old Pyotr Voyd, who thinks that he is suffering flashbacks from the Russian civil war. In Voyd's mind, he is a Mauser-carrying poet and revolutionary who wields a mighty pen and argues about the philosophy of death with his commander, the real-life Red Army hero Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev. "Is it my inflamed consciousness that creates the nightmare," Voyd asks, "or is my consciousness itself a creation of the nightmare?"

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In a statement issued last Saturday -- muted in its praise -- the Treviso, Italy, clothing company saluted Toscani "for his fundamental contribution to a new advertising concept." It also stated that Fabrica, the creative think tank once headed by Toscani and affiliated with Benetton, would take over as the company's main communications arm. Fabrica produces Benetton's in-house magazine, Colors, and has produced many of Benetton's most controversial campaigns, including the recent anti-death penalty series, "We, On Death Row."

Benetton and Toscani, who is creative director at Talk magazine, have picked an indelicate time to announce the departure. The $20 million campaign, which ended in March, depicted convicted killers in their prison garb without mentioning their victims. The ads precipitated a civil suit from the state of Missouri and the loss of a major client, Sears, Roebuck and Co. The California State Assembly called for a boycott of Benetton products.

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A Baton Rouge social worker who became acquainted with many celebrities when she lived in New York in the early '70s, Walton later engaged in late-night phone conversations with such stars as Billy Joel, Warren Beatty, Quincy Jones and Richard Gere, often telling them that she was a Tulane University student and a model on the side.

MGM is about to ink a high-six-figure deal for the screen rights to Walton's upcoming Cliffstreet/HarperCollins memoir. Tribeca Films -- owned by one of "Grosvenor's" earliest phone friends, Robert De Niro -- will produce the film. Industry insiders report that De Niro will also direct the movie, although a spokesman for De Niro denies the rumor. Last month, the New York Post reported that MGM also made a low-six-figure deal to buy the rights to an article about her, written by "Barbarians at the Gate" coauthor Bryan Burrough, that appeared in the December Vanity Fair. The total option package has cost MGM close to $1 million.

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Sears, Roebuck & Co., Benetton's longtime client, has stopped selling its products. The California Assembly has called for a boycott against the Treviso, Italy, company. Victims' rights groups, such as Parents of Murdered Children (POMC), are appalled that the murderers -- one of whom is John Lotter, whose killing of Teena Brandon was portrayed in "Boys Don't Cry" -- are remembered in the catalog, rather than the victims.

"They make victims out of the murderers," says Greater Portland, Ore., member Mary Elledge. Her POMC chapter will run a series of Benetton-style billboard ads that will feature the faces of the victims. Benetton's name will appear, but it will have a stroke through it.

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To readers and casual observers, Lauer's proposal doesn't sound that far-fetched. Time magazine, in a cover story featuring King, touted the Internet not just as an amateur's playground but also as a professional's potential gold mine, observing that "if you're already a star, you can avoid the middleman by using the Net to keep most of the money yourself."

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The book, as yet untitled, will focus on Blow's five-year tenure at the Hachette publication. The proposal promises that Blow will reveal what it was like to work alongside Kennedy, who died in a plane crash last July. That Blow signed a mid-six-figure deal with Little, Brown appeared to confirm his publisher's faith in that promise.

Little, Brown publisher Sarah Crichton placed Blow's future book in an unimpeachable line of Kennedy memoirs. "Ted Sorenson wrote about his friendship with John Fitzgerald Kennedy. So did Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ben Bradlee," she said.

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"It's his appreciation, or a reflection, or a memory, or however you want to look at it," says Blow's agent, Joni Evans of the William Morris Agency. (Blow could not be reached for comment.) While Evans did not want to give any further details about the proposal, many are wondering how deeply into Kennedy's personal life this book could go.

One insider who worked with Kennedy and Blow maintains that while the two were friendly, they weren't especially close. "They knew each other well in the sense that they worked together in the office every day," says RoseMarie Terenzio, Kennedy's former executive assistant, who worked for him at the magazine for five years. "I wouldn't call Rich an authority on the mission of George or John Kennedy."

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The Random House title, which hit the stands Tuesday, depicts Geffen as an intensely shrewd but sharp-elbowed hothead who can be as vindictive toward colleagues as he is generous to the Democratic National Committee and charities. King concentrates more on Geffen's business relationships than on his sexual ones -- but that doesn't make the book any less dishy.

Replete with screaming matches and lawsuits, "The Operator" contains some remarkable tantrums, including one in which Geffen's arch-nemesis, power agent Michael Ovitz, invited him in 1996 to repair their 15-year feud, which dated back to the filming of the 1982 cinematic flop "Personal Best."

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But now at least a few of her worries have disappeared. Millett has become an adjunct professor at New York University. And she's back in more ways than one: In March the University of Illinois Press will return both "Sexual Politics" (first published by Doubleday in 1970 and out of print since 1995) and the erotic memoir "Sita" to print. Next fall the house will also publish "The Loony Bin Trip" and "Flying."

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Hertog's copious footnotes certainly quell any suspicion that the biography was faked. But with the second observation, the Amazon customer stumbled onto a truth: Hertog, who spent 10 years writing the book, had a rough journey with the Lindbergh family.

When she approached Anne Morrow Lindbergh in 1985 with the idea of chronicling her life, Lindbergh not only rebuffed her but also rejected her request to examine her personal papers at Yale. That honor eventually went instead -- and exclusively -- to A. Scott Berg, whose "Lindbergh," published by Putnam in 1998, followed the life of Anne's husband, Charles, the ace aviator and Nazi sympathizer.

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Since Klein's 1996 bestseller was a roman ` clef -- one that purportedly offered an intimate insider's take on Gov. Bill Clinton's presidential campaign -- one would expect him to deliver yet another thinly veiled tale of true-life political shenanigans. After all, Klein vowed in 1996 that he would give the Republicans an equally hard time on the next go 'round. Dial Press, Klein's publisher, sent out a press release to announce "The Running Mate," but its description of the book didn't offer much:

This time, the novel is about Senator Charlie Martin, a Vietnam War hero and hot political property. Facing an election year in this era of spin, marketing and vicious personal assaults, Martin is forced to confront the two biggest challenges of his life: a charismatic political opponent who has no scruples, and a dazzling, difficult woman who loves him, but is appalled by his life's work.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/24/klein_6/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/01/21/tk_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/21/tk_2/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/log/2000/01/21/wolfe Tom Wolfe has ratcheted up the hostilities between himself and three of his fellow novelists: John Irving, John Updike and Norman Mailer. Last year, the author of "A Man in Full," talking to the Sunday Gazette Mail of Charleston, W.Va., called Updike and Mailer "two piles of bones." Now, in an upcoming television appearance, Wolfe lumps his new adversary, John Irving, with Mailer and Updike, dubbing the literary troika "the Three Stooges."

"I think of the three of them now -- because there are now three -- as Larry, Curly and Moe," Wolfe says on Friday's episode of the Canadian book show "Hot Type." "It must gall them a bit that everyone -- even them -- is talking about me."

Last month, Irving fired a salvo at Wolfe on the same program, dismissing Wolfe's novels as "yak" and "journalistic hyperbole described as fiction." In turn, Wolfe offered some equally unflattering descriptions of Irving's literary powers. While he conceded that Irving, along with Updike and Mailer, was talented, he said that the three of them weren't "engaging the life around them." Wolfe describes Irving's comments, and negative reviews from Mailer and Updike, as "a lineup" and says the novelists are attacking him because they're "frightened" and "panicked."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/21/tk_2/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/01/20/atlas/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/20/atlas/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/log/2000/01/20/atlas The Saul Bellow-watchers who await James Atlas' biography of the author of "Herzog" will have to wait a little longer. The Random House title, more than 10 years in the making, has been pushed back from April to the fall.

Atlas said the delay has nothing to do with the recent birth of a daughter to the 84-year-old Nobel Prize-winning novelist. "I'm having my own growing pains," Atlas said. "If you've spent 10 years on a book, you can easily get mired in footnotes at the end." As for the news about Bellow's baby, Atlas said that he had "heard about it through the grapevine," and he will incorporate the birth into the biography.

Atlas' book could have followed on the heels of the February release of "Ravelstein," the forthcoming Bellow novel that Atlas says is based on the life of the late Allan Bloom, Bellow's friend and the author of "The Closing of the American Mind."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/20/atlas/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/01/19/syndicate/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/19/syndicate/#comments Wed, 19 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/log/2000/01/19/syndicate You can catch more readers with music than you can with lurid book covers, says one publishing entrepreneur.

Marc Gerald's indefatigable efforts to promote black pulp fiction have included launching the Old School imprint, a line of 18 gritty but stylish tales of crime and intrigue by what Gerald calls a "lost generation" of African-American writers. Now, Gerald wants to foster a renaissance of black noir. "There is a readership out there," he wrote for Salon in 1997. "It's now up to the industry to find some way to capture it." But rather than wait for publishers to bust a move on this untapped market, Gerald has devised his own solution for reaching young readers: hip-hop.

This May, Gerald's Syndicate Media Group plans to introduce original black pulp fiction titles by packaging them with CDs. Gerald, who will edit the novels, has recruited leading hip-hop writers, including Sasha Jenkins, the editor of the hip-hop magazine Ego Trip, and Michael Rodriguez, to write them. One of the lead titles, Ronin Ro's "The Street Sweeper," will be packaged with a compilation of songs by Def Jam artists Ja Rule and Method Man. (Ro is best known for his chronicle of Death Row Records, "Have Gun Will Travel.")

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/19/syndicate/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/01/14/adler/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/14/adler/#comments Fri, 14 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/log/2000/01/14/adler The veteran reporter, critic and novelist Renata Adler has published one of seven new books pegged to the New Yorker's 75th anniversary in February. Unlike its cousins, however, Adler's New Yorker memoir, "Gone," is stirring up trouble. Last November, New York magazine reported that former New Yorker fiction editor and current New York Times Book Review editor Charles "Chip" McGrath had sent a letter of protest to Adler's publisher after reading the galleys of "Gone." Adler, McGrath said, had described him as participating in an event that never occurred.

As soon as "Gone" hit their desks, critics began sharpening their knives. New York magazine media columnist Michael Wolff weighed in this week with a tough, yet fond take on Adler and the New Yorker mystique, and in the Jan. 12 New York Times, Dinitia Smith portrays "Gone" as something of a kvetchathon. (In the Jan. 16 New York Times Magazine, reporter Arthur Lubow's profile of Adler is billed on the cover as "Renata Adler's Enemy List.")

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/14/adler/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/01/07/friday_72/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/07/friday_72/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/log/2000/01/07/trump The political skill of Donald Trump remains to be demonstrated, but the man certainly knows how to dominate a bestseller list. "The Art of the Deal," "The Art of the Comeback" and "Surviving at the Top" have all occupied the New York Times list. Now that Trump is considering a run for president, his publisher, Renaissance, has just shipped his campaign book, "The America We Deserve." If the heavy turnout at a recent New York book signing is any indication of where the book is going, Trump could be in for another hit.

On Jan. 5, in the lobby of the Trump Tower, an appearance by the possible Reform Party presidential candidate attracted a wall of camera crews and hundreds of fans who poured out the door onto Fifth Avenue and around the corner.

"Three of my books have been bestsellers, but this book is different," Trump said to the throngs. No doubt. As a possible contender for the White House, Trump has to explain why he should be president. (And to a lesser extent, why he no longer fears shaking hands. At the signing, he took a leap of faith and pressed the flesh on several occasions.)

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