Dickerman.

The Penguin Press expansion continues, following the recent hire of Andrea Walker to acquire fiction for the Penguin imprint and the announcement by president Ann Godoff this spring that Penguin Press would be aiming to grow its list by 50 percent.

Colin Dickerman, most recently vice president and publishing director of Rodale Books, has now been hired as executive editor following the departure of Eamon Dolan from Penguin Press. Mr. Dolan left to start an eponymous imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt after losing his editor-in-chief title when Scott Moyers returned from the Wylie Agency earlier this year. (It's all a little complicated.)

Mr. Dickerman has a reputation for producing quality non-fiction and before arriving at Rodale in 2008 was publisher at Bloomsbury USA.

Walker.

We were told Penguin Press would be expanding, and now the first hire has been announced since Scott Moyers's return from The Wylie Agency and Eamon Dolan's departure for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Andrea Walker has been hired as a senior editor at Penguin Press from Reagan Arthur Books, where she started as an associate editor in 2009 and was promoted to editor in November 2010. Before that Ms. Walker spent five years in the books department at The New Yorker.

Ms. Walker's hire indicates Penguin Press, which is known as a non-fiction powerhouse, is trying to devote more focus to fiction. Reached by phone, Ann Godoff, president and editor-in-chief at Penguin Press, confirmed that fiction would comprise "a bigger percentage" of its list, although not by much.

"We were doing four pieces a year and we're probably going to do half again as much," she said.

Ms. Walker's list of announced deals from her time at Reagan Arthur on Publisher's Marketplace is exclusively comprised of debut fiction that will be released over the coming months. It includes Stuart Nadler's The Book of Life,  a novel about a father-son trip; debuts by Charlotte Rogan and the Australian writer Poppy Gee and Eowyn Ivey's Snow Child, a novel about homesteaders in Alaska who receive a visit from a mysterious child. Ms. Walker's writers extended their congratulations to her on Twitter yesterday.

The book, which generated heated interest in the days leading up to its sale, sold at auction to Ann Godoff of Penguin Press. According to an editor at a major New York publishing house, the final price was in the high six figures.

Godoff declined to comment, as did Chua's agent, Tina Bennett of Janklow and Nesbit.

The book describes Chua's decision to raise her third-generation, half-Jewish daughters in a super-traditional Chinese style: no praise, no sleepovers, no B-pluses, lots of piano practice. Chua lays out a working definition of "the Chinese mother" and becomes one by choice.

This is not the precious navel-gazing of the world's Ayelet Waldmans (No home-baked bread! Bad mother!)--this is a chronicle of X-treme parenting.

Future required reading for Park Slope naptimes?

Several sources said it was her own decision.

Ms. Mobley, widely thought to be among the most talented 30-somethings in town when it comes to editing non-fiction, has worked with writers such as Samantha Power, Caroline Elkins, Clay Shirky, and Matt Bai. In the past year, she has signed up major books by New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza and the video game designer Jane McGonigal, as well as lower-profile projects by young writers Ben Tarnoff and Louisa Thomas.

Reached by phone this afternoon, Ms. Mobley declined to comment.

Ann Godoff did not immediately return a call seeking more information. 

For several publishers within Penguin, however—that is, all of the ones whose interest in Mr. Silver's books was subsumed under the "house bid" Penguin submitted last week to his literary agent Sydelle Kramer—that was only round one. Round two took place over the course of the past week, as Mr. Silver and his agent considered their options.

There were lots! At least three Penguin imprints were in the mix, among them Geoff Kloske's Riverhead, Paul Slovak's Viking, and Ann Godoff's Penguin Press. Then, as of yesterday, the game was over, and everyone but Ms. Godoff had taken their ball and gone home.

According to Tracy Locke, the publicity director at the Penguin Press, Mr. Silver's two books—one a Freakonomics-style book on polling called Electrometrics and the second a survey of people who predict things for a living—will not be published in the order that the author originally had in mind. The "predictors" one will come out first, though it's unclear exactly when, Ms. Locke said, and the one about polling will come out in time for the 2012 election. Laura Stickney will edit.

After submitting the project to a select group of editors at the Frankfurt Book Fair last month, Ms. Lea, who also counts among her clients the activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is said to have secured an advance worth $1 million.

Ann Godoff, the publisher of Penguin Press, could not be reached for comment. A publicist for Penguin Press declined to comment or to confirm or deny the advance.

The Penguin Press, one of the most prestigious publishers of non-fiction in town, is a logical home for Mr. Barber, a vocal advocate of sustainable agriculture and locally-grown food whose intellectual predelictions are not dissimilar from those of Michael Pollan, who is also published there.

As we reported last month, the book Mr. Barber wants to write will be comprised of stories about “all the different farmers and characters” he’s met over the course of his career as a chef, all of which will, taken together, form one coherent narrative. When we interviewed him, Mr. Barber also told us that he wants to write a cookbook, but at this point that project is not formally on the docket.

Mr. Black would not disclose how much money Mr. Barber would be getting for the book. He said that although a lot of publishers saw the proposal and wanted to publish the book, he did not hold a formal auction because Mr. Barber felt such an "editorial connection" with Penguin Press publisher Ann Godoff.

Mr. Black said Mr. Barber would take "a few years" to write the book, meaning readers shouldn't expect it on shelves before 2010.

The first sign that the Penguin Press is not your run-of-the-mill commercial publisher is the plain-brown-paper catalog cover. (An earlier version of the cover was made of the more typical metallic paper; it was nixed as "too commercial.") Inside, each of the 14 books gets a two-page spread, as opposed to the one-page announcement that many catalogs give most books. Each book cover is shown in black and white (surely, in the flesh, there'll be some color) and otherwise illustrated with sepia photo strips. Nothing flashy here. The message seems to be: "We're Old World-smart and subdued." Penguin Press is the publishing equivalent of shabby chic.

So are the books themselves: all nonfiction except for one novel, The Shadow of the Wind , by Spanish-born Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves. Many are current-affairsy: Ken Auletta's Back Story: Inside the Business of News , Roger Lowenstein's Origins of the Crash . There's only one business book: The Carolina Way , by Dean Smith. And for sentimental value (and upmarket cachet), there's Colored Lights , the collected articles and columns of the late, beloved journalist Michael Kelly. "There's not much fun here," admits one publishing executive who worked for the company at the time the list was being put together. Even the one surefire best-seller in this history-obsessed age, Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, is pitched as serious homework and makes barely any mention of the sexual scandals that plagued the founding father. That all the authors here are male is probably coincidental-"for reasons more cosmic than practical," as Ms. Godoff says in her letter at the front of the catalog-but it's striking that they come mainly via three of the toniest agencies: Melanie Jackson, the Wylie Agency and I.C.M. (Noted nonfiction agent Kathy Robbins has one book on the list, as does Thomas Colchie, who represents virtually all of the literary Latin American books published in this country.) To further the sense of upmarketness-and, not incidentally, to fill out what would be a thin catalog-Ms. Godoff also publishes excerpts from all the featured books. This is super-serious stuff: "A bunch of books for serious readers!" it fairly screams. It's almost as if Ms. Godoff-who, for all the accusations of literariness, published such crowd-pleasers as Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation books and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -has taken to heart what both her critics and fans have said. She's a serious publisher, goddammit! She'll leave the fluff to the other guys.

And yet … there's a self-consciousness about this catalog, this list, that makes you root for it. First of all, there's that letter in the front. While it's not unusual for an imprint founder to introduce herself and her list to journalists and booksellers, the tone here is an endearing combination of feisty and defensive. "It's back to old-fashioned publishing for the brand-new Penguin Press," writes the woman who fell afoul of the newfangled variety. But then she backtracks. "If you build it, will they come?" she asks plaintively. "Knock wood." And, as if to thwart speculation about what will come next, the publisher includes a list of authors whose books are forthcoming from Penguin Press. Never mind that the naysayers point to the former Godoffites who aren't there-Zadie Smith, Adam Gopnik-the to-be-published list is pretty impressive and a lot more varied. It includes John Berendt (which puts to rest rumors that he would stay at Random House) as well as Hendrik Hertzberg, David Nasaw, Michael Pollan, Alexandra ( Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight ) Fuller, and food mavens Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters. Could it be that, over time, Ms. Godoff will build the kind of rich and varied list that made her the star she was for so many years at Random House? Nobody at her old shop wants to talk about it, naturally, and Ms. Godoff, as is her wont, declined to be interviewed for this article. Apparently, she believes that the books speak for her, and for themselves.

Then again, she's already said it, and I'm just repeating: "Knock wood."

Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time , published by Putnam, a division of Penguin (USA), is in bookstores now.

Diving on Penguin?

It's a Lovely Match

Not since 1999, when Tina Brown dumped Condé Nast for a little adventure called Talk , has there been so much buzz about the comings and goings of a middle-aged media personage. But for the past two weeks, the only thing people in book publishing could talk about was the rat-a-tat firing and hiring of star editor Ann Godoff.

Just in case you've been wasting your attention on more trivial matters like whether we're going to war with Iraq, here's a quick recap: Two weeks ago, Ms. Godoff was abruptly fired by Random House chief executive Peter Olson for, on the record, repeatedly falling short of the target goals for her imprint, known in the industry as "Little Random." The common wisdom, however, was that the feared or revered (depending on whom you talk to-sometimes both adjectives come from the same source) Ms. Godoff was let go for more personal reasons.

"She's a literary snob," some said, despite the fact that many of her signature books, like Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , are hardly of the highest brow. "She doesn't play well with others," others said, pointing to her supposed feuds with Knopf chief Sonny Mehta and with Gina Centrello, the publisher of sister imprint Ballantine, which has now absorbed Little Random. Eight days later, Ms. Godoff had her own imprint with the Penguin Group (USA) and was signing up a Random editor, Scott Moyers, to help her publish a line of primarily nonfiction titles. She'll soon make another hire, according to Penguin president Susan Petersen Kennedy, for her as-yet-unnamed imprint. (It will launch in 2004.) "We hired her for her taste, her editorial acumen and her brilliant work," Ms. Petersen Kennedy told the Financial Times on Monday. "I really admire her, and have for several years," she echoed to me.

Ms. Godoff's detractors may predict disaster, but Penguin's move makes sense. The Pearson-owned publisher is all about expansion, having added several imprints in the past two years, including Portfolio, a business-book publisher headed up by Adrian Zackheim, formerly of HarperCollins, and Gotham books, which is run by longtime publishing personality William Shinker. And Ms. Godoff is what anybody would call a real "get": a "prestige" publisher who may well bring best-selling authors like Mr. Brokaw, Mr. Berendt and Caleb Carr to her new job.

But why would she choose Penguin? Not the type to kick back and reconfigure her life, those who know her say-and savvy enough to take advantage of the very small window of time before her writers get settled in with other editors-Ms. Godoff may simply have taken the first good offer to come her way. Ms. Petersen Kennedy said she was on the phone to Ms. Godoff "within minutes" of hearing the news. HarperCollins probably didn't come calling at all: Ms. Godoff and HarperCollins honcho Cathy Hemming barely speak, said one editor who knows them both. Ultra-commercial Warner Books-even before it was officially put up for sale-would have been out of the question; Holtzbrinck surely doesn't pay in the Ann Godoff $500,000 range. And Simon & Schuster already has its own heavy-hitting nonfiction editor in Alice Mayhew.

Still, the switcheroo has caused no small measure of confusion and controversy. Pity poor Ms. Godoff: Anxiety follows her wherever she goes. When she was fired, the hue and cry was that Random House had given up on "literary" publishing, and some agents and editors worried there would soon be fewer outlets for the kind of smart books they like to publish. Now that Ms. Godoff's landed at Penguin, staffers there worry for their own jobs and lists. Whereas Random House imprints are allowed-make that encouraged -to bid against each other for projects, the Penguin group forbids such competition. With Ms. Godoff's contacts and track record, some fear that all the best books will go to her automatically, that they'll be shut out of the bidding. "If I were Suzanne Gluck," says one of the nervous, referring to the William Morris mega-agent who represents Mr. Carr and Mr. Berendt, among others, and is thought to be a semi-direct pipeline to Ms. Godoff, "would I give a book to Ann, or to some other Penguin editor?"

As one might imagine, Ms. Petersen Kennedy waves away these intimations of trouble, suggesting instead that the more "collegial" atmosphere at Penguin will make it easier, not harder, for editors to divvy up the projects. And one longtime staffer is similarly sanguine, in a resigned kind of way: "I was often bidding for the same books as she was," this person said, "and I lost most of them to her bigger advances. At least now when I lose them, they'll stay within the company." But I can't help thinking that Ms. Godoff has exchanged a headache for a stomachache: Never the teamiest of team players-even her staunchest supporters say she thrives on competition-it's hard to imagine her giving ground to other editors. In other words, if I were Bill Shinker or Rick Kot at Viking (another strong editor of narrative nonfiction), I'd be worried.

And what about those big advances? The $8 million she spent on Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier's unwritten second novel is already the stuff of legend, not to mention the $3 million she authorized for the purchase-from Suzanne Gluck-of a second book by the authors of The Nanny Diaries . To judge from Mr. Olson's memo-which was either candid or, as most agree, just plain mean -Ms. Godoff's generosity (authors and agents say), or her profligacy (competitors insist), became a piece of the rope he hung her with. Will Penguin allow her to spend so freely? Will she even try?

And who, exactly, will run little Random now-and which editors will Ms. Godoff poach? When it was first reported that she would make one hire, I'd have bet that her choice would be Jon Karp, the editor of the best-seller Seabiscuit and a Godoff favorite. (She welcomed him right back into the Random House fold after he bolted for what turned out to be a disastrous six-week stint working for the film producer Scott Rudin in 2000.) But so far she's only hired Scott Moyers, who also worked closely with her at Random House, and Mr. Karp is staying put: He has a ways to go on his contract, and though he declines to comment on any of this, those who know him say he's gambling on getting the editor-in-chief job. Mr. Karp is "a player," says one agent. "He knows how to get along over there."

If that's true, he learned on his own. For all her talent, surviving the particular publishing quagmire that is Random House is one skill that Ms. Godoff, his former boss, apparently couldn't master.

Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time will be published this fall by Putnam, an imprint of the Penguin Group (USA) .

Sources inside the company said Ms. Godoff had spent too much on acquisitions in the last year--in one instance, she paid $3 million on a two-book deal for the authors of The Nanny Diaries , based on three sample chapters agented by Suzanne Gluck of the William Morris Agency.

In an unusually brusque memo to staffers, Mr. Olson announced his fiscal displeasure with Random House: "They have been the only Random House Inc. publishing division to consistently fall short of their annual profitability targets," he said.

Random House employees were generally blindsided by the announcement. "Holy shit! Holy shit!" said one editor, upon opening Mr. Olson's memo. Members of the publishing industry had about the same kind of reaction. "I was surprised by it," said Esther Newberg, the senior vice president of ICM, who had done siginificant business with Ms. Godoff in the last year. "I'm a huge fan of Ann Godoff. She's got keen instincts, she's a standup editor and she's got a closed mouth in a business where everybody thinks its okay to prattle on." Ms. Newberg characterized Ms. Godoff as "an author's publisher."

While at Random House, Ms. Godoff published best-sellers like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , The Alienist , White Teeth and A Short Guide to a Happy Life .

Others in the company had suspected a change was imminent, considering the reports of big losses. But they were taken aback by how it was done. "Some of the shrewder people in the company have been predicting this," said one staffer. "But there are ways of dealing with this short of axing a highly visible and accomplished publishing figure. The shock is the way it's been done. It feels like they're spiritually downsizing the Random House imprint. You've got to wonder about the wisdom of that."

The conventional wisdom immediately declared Ms. Godoff's ouster a victory for Alfred A. Knopf publisher, Sonny Mehta, the chain-smoking president and editor in chief who was thought to be in an ongoing intra-company competition with Ms. Godoff, as he was with former Random House president Harry Evans, who hired Ms. Godoff. Now, said sources in the company, the up-market soul of Random House falls squarely to Knopf. Lumping Random Trade with Ballantine, a decidedly downmarket imprint, is seen as a clear sign of Mr. Mehta's prestige primacy.

As it happens, Mr. Mehta was featured in a two-page spread in Vanity Fair this month, pictured with a gaggle of his famous authors, including Lyndon Johnson biographer and National Book Award winner Robert Caro and novelist Richard Ford.

Reached for comment, Mr. Evans took a dim view of the merger. "There are more important things than the fate of an individual," he said, referring to Ms. Godoff. "It's the fact that the house has been sacraficed. I think it's a mistake. From the accounting standpoint it may make a point, but underneath that is a reputation and that will come around and hit the accountants on the head."

The changes arrive just as the entire company was moving into its new headquarters at 1745 Broadway. According to a company newsletter, Random House was to reside on the 16th and 17th floors, Ballantine on the 22nd and 23rd, and Knopf on the 21st. How the merger will affect the new seating charts is not known. Random House spokespersons declined to comment on it.

One publishing executive who declined to be named--and they all did--wondered if Ms. Godoff's ouster and the merger signify a tectonic shift in how much money will be spent on books in the future. "If Random House is not going to pay the money that they've been paying," he said, "it changes what people are going to be getting for books in a big way."

In his memo, Mr. Olson announced that the Random House Ballantine Group will now be headed by Gina Centrello, the president of Ballantine Books. Ms. Centrello was formerly the president and publisher of Pocket Books.