Everyone from Jay McInerny to New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood to this paper's owner to—but of course—New York magazine's Approval Matrix (which, of course, made a recent Approval Matrix in the magazine).

But what is it like to be plucked, as though by the cloud-like hand of the Gossip Girl casting gods, and immortalized for fifteen seconds of television, mostly to an audience of teenagers who probably don't know who you are?

Isherwood himself once attempted an explanation of this in the pages of the Times. It began with a quote by Gore Vidal. Needless to say, it was not sufficient.

At least, not compared to essayist Sloane Crosley's entry in this month's issue of The Believer, in which no less than 4,625 words are dedicated to the experience, which—in toto—is apparently akin to living through the last thirty minutes of Adaptation, with disappointingly less drug use, and Susan Orlean having been replaced by the guy who plays Chuck Bass.

For example, this is what it's like to experience the pressure of having to dress one's self on Gossip Girl:

She pulled the last dress from my bag and called for her assistant.

"This will work," she said. "But tell you what—why don’t you borrow a pair of these?"

We were flanked by walls of overpriced designer fabrics and tailoring that glimmered at every turn. I peered over her shoulder, anticipating a tray of designer earrings or, say, some very expensive shoes.

She handed me a pair or Spanx.

And this is what it's like to share a scene with Chuck Bass:

Leighton wasn’t in my scene. Nor was Blake Lively (who plays Dan’s ex, Serena) or Jessica Szohr (Dan’s childhood friend, the bi-racial daughter of Vermont hippies, whose mom is a dead ringer for Maya Angelou) or Chace Crawford. But Ed Westwick, the stylish Brit who plays Chuck, was. During the long breaks between takes, in which the women lay on the master bed like mummies, lest they ruin their makeup, Ed chatted with concern about riots in London that had been dominating the news. Then he showed me a perversely hilarious video of a horse being hit by a truck on a country road.

Emphasis ours. Needless to say, not that we've watched in a few years, but this has ruined Gossip Girl forever for us, in that it will in no way be as hysterically funny or as remotely interesting as Ms. Crosley's on-scene exploits (especially of note: the piece of dialogue given to her, a surprise not at all worth spoiling).

Do enjoy:

A DOG NAMED HUMPHREY [The Believer]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Jessica Paré and Jon Hamm.

Feel that buzzing, tingling sound in the part of your brain devoted to recapitulations of things you've already seen? Recap season kicked off with the recent return of Community, but now it's in full swing on occasion of last night's season premiere of Mad Men, two hours notable mainly for co-star Jessica Paré singing a French pop song whose history was noted by the Daily Beast later that night. Seventeen months away from literal armchair analysis of Don Draper and Gen-X-ers' sage nods about how the 1960s really were has made the genre enter a high decadent phase. Herewith, five of the top morning-after Mad Men recaps, recapped!

Todd VanDerWerff, The AV Club

Word count: 2676

Broad thematic analysis: "It’s a show, on the one hand, about how people deal  with sweeping social change, even when it’s happening way, way off their radar (as we see in the final scene of tonight’s episode), but it’s also a show about what it means to live through a decade, to get older and have your position and relationships shift and change."

Plot summary: "He wants to sleep. He didn’t want the party, and he’s embarrassed to have been the center of attention. Betty was forbidden from throwing such parties, he says, and he didn’t celebrate birthdays growing up."

What about that song? "...it’s both sexy and just the slightest bit creepy."

Profundity at the end: "Yet here they are, staring in the mirror, on the other side of 40, time nearing its end."

Number of comments, at this writing: 1130

Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture

Word count: 3067

Broad thematic analysis: "Envy, disappointment, and fear of losing what you've got: These feelings have always powered subplots on Mad Men, but they're front and center in 'A Little Kiss,' a classically structured, self-contained, long-form piece."

Plot summary: "By the close of the episode, Megan has broken down in tears and left work early; when Don finds out and follows her home, she removes her robe and begins cleaning the post-party mess in black underwear, giving her husband a tantalizing rear view of the body he can't have because she's decided he doesn't deserve it."

What about that song? "Megan's unselfconscious abandon — and Jessica Paré's slinky-innocent performance, which I suspect will be looked back on as the moment that made her a star — also confronts Don, and other characters, with another harsh fact of life: none of them are getting any younger, or hipper."

Profundity at the end: "Change is on the horizon, a great sociohistorical wave that's about to wash away a lot of what the once-dominant older generation insisted was important. It happens every couple of decades and always will happen; it's part of the cycles of individual and national life that Mad Men, a timeless drama posing as a time-specific one, examines so well."

Number of comments, at this writing: 91

Jeff Jensen, EW.com

Word count: 3526 over five pages--and part two just went up

Broad thematic analysis: "The year: 1966. Our drop point: The week surrounding Memorial Day, a holiday that was originally intended to honor the Union soldiers who fought and died during The Civil War. With a heavy hand, Mad Men’s opening sequence reminded us that 100 years after the end of slavery, the cause of civil rights still had miles to go."

Plot summary: "Later, when Don was ready to leave for the day, he fetched Megan from the creative bullpen, oblivious to the cues she was giving him. She was working. She wanted to keep working."

What about that song? "Beholding Megan in bawdy bloom, the invited guests toggled between amusement, polite support, furrowed eyebrow bafflement and wide-eyed shock."

Profundity at the end: "No: Don gets what Don wants. He wanted her – and he was damn certain she wanted him. A hard kiss, and then they hit the shag."

Number of comments, at this writing: 9.

Maureen Ryan, The Huffington Post

Word count: 3609

Broad thematic analysis: "And why are these characters so unhappy? I've been thinking a lot lately about how Mad Men is, in some ways, a meditation on narcissism (as was The Sopranos before it). All of these characters are trapped inside their own concerns and frequently unable to see beyond their own agendas and desires."

Plot summary: "Joan loves her baby, but she wanted to go back to work because she's good at it, she derives a sense of satisfaction from it and she commands a lot of hard-won respect at the firm, which she helped build."

What about that song? "The naive French-Canadian minx was undeniably sexy during her dance, but the look on his face said that Don would have rather gotten a private dance and not have had his wife displaying her wares for everyone from a slack-jawed Harry to Don's rumpled accountant."

Profundity at the end: "'You don't know her at all,' Don says about Megan. But does he really know her? Time will tell."

Number of comments, at this writing: 157.

Sloane Crosley, Esquire.com

Word count: 2737

Broad thematic analysis: "'A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.' Martin Luther King Jr. said that, and he was not talking about advertising. But it's a piece of wisdom that applies, on a number of levels, to Sunday night's season-five premiere of Mad Men."

Plot summary: "The big client this round is Heinz Baked Beans. There have been technological advances in pitching. During the meeting, Peggy alludes to a camera that can capture slow-motion, and the pitch itself is presented on storyboards shaped like television sets.."

What about that song? "I wasn't sure if she was saying 'bissou' or 'zoobie zoo,' but she's hot and it doesn't matter."

Profundity at the end: "Zoobie-zoo what?! I need a drink."

Number of comments, at this writing: Comments not enabled.

GalleyCat reports from a statement that Crosley will have the honour of writing a column for The Independent Magazine, a Saturday inset to the centre-left Independent, beginning December 11.

“I am consistently amazed and delighted when any American humour translates," the statement quotes Crosley as saying. "Either we’re all outrageously funny or Independent readers are the most generous and forgiving people on the planet. Either way, I am honoured to publicly take advantage of the situation by contributing to a publication I so admire.”

Writers and comedians have at times found it diffucult to bring American humour across the pond, but if Crosley can keep writing in that frank and relatable style, we're thinking she'll some become a new favourite of the British.

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

When we asked Cole Haan CEO Dave McTague to tell us how the Sharapova collaboration came about, he began at beginning: "Well, Maria started her tennis career as a young girl..." he said. (Skip a few years, and this led to a partnership with Nike and eventually with his own company.) It's a versatile collection of boots, heels, flats, and bags; we're betting the bestseller will be the Air Bacara, a ballet flat with a laced-up back, which also happened to be in the gift bags. (Gentlemen got loafers.)

The photographer and blogger Todd Selby photographed the campaign, and also created some illustrations of things he and Ms. Sharapova find inspiring; these, apparently, include cupcakes, cowboy boots, and pigeons. The cupcake is one item on which their tastes converge: "I love cupcakes! I'm a foodie guy, so any kind of food anything, I'm into." Mr. Selby will start shooting his first film this week on just that subject: "It's going to be about some guys who do some really interesting stuff with food!" he said enthusiastically, if a bit elliptically.

We asked whether Mr. Selby could recommend any restaurants that hadn't been hyped to death. "I encourage people to not worry about that kind of thing," he said—a healthy attitude! "If you like it, then who cares? Who cares that it's been in every magazine or whatever, or if it was in every magazine six months ago? Like, whatever, who cares?" he continued, perhaps unconsciously channeling Fred Armisen's Saturday Night Live impression of The View's Joy Behar.

The Transom stopped by the bar to grab an individually-sized Champagne bottle and a gigantic multicolored lollipop before heading out onto the terrace to catch some air, where we overheard someone casually introducing The Official Filthy Rich Handbook author Christopher Tennant and publicist/essayist Sloane Crosley.

We seized the opportunity to tell Ms. Crosley how much we liked her most recent book of essays, How Did You Get This Number, which came out in June; she graciously thanked us, after offering us "one American dollar" to beat up someone, anyone at the party with the huge lollipop. (We couldn't decide who the victim should be.) She, lucky girl, has already read the new Jonathan Franzen book that we can't seem to go anywhere without hearing chatter about. "I've already read Freedom. It's fairly amazing. It's really, yeah, it's wonderful. My old editor went to FSG, and I emailed him and I was like, 'I want you guys to make t-shirts that say Team Patty.'" We laughed along, pretending to know what that meant. (Some of us have to wait until books come into McNally Jackson to read them!)

Ms. Crosley said she follows her own publicist advice when it comes to reading her reviews: "I always tell my authors—especially if you write short stories or essays or, God love you, poetry and it actually gets published—if everyone hates the same story or objects to the same story, you're in trouble. But it's pretty easy to write it off if it's like, 'By far the weak point in the collection is blank' or 'By far the best essay is blank,' and it's always different... That's a matter of opinion."

A tough, worldly outlook—that's something the Transom can get behind! "I don't know if I have such a great thick skin, or if I've just worked in the skin shop for so long, but I understand how it works," she continued. Wait, so the skin shop in this analogy is the... publishing industry?

"No, I mean the shop where people sell skin," Ms. Crosley deadpanned, perfectly. We think she just named her third book!

After each of the authors read from their respective books there would be a question and answer session, he said. But there were questions the audience "might want to avoid." The questions included: Where do you get your ideas? How do you get published? When are you quitting your day job?

When Mr. Shillue hit that last question he said, "Sloane told me that one. The funny thing is her boss is always asking her that." In addition to being the author of two collections of essays, Ms. Crosley is deputy director of publicity for Vintage/Anchor.

Laughs abounded and pigeons circled overhead as the four authors read selections from their books and answered questions as part of the FUNny Writers panel at the Bryant Park reading room .

Mr. Kilmer-Purcell read a selection about meeting Martha Stewart from his book The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir. "I have sort of a sordid past. So my first memoir was about being a drag queen and drinking and drugs and not really Martha's world," he said before starting to read. "She's not here is she?"

Before Mr. Rich read from his first book Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations, he thanked the crowd.

"Thanks to all of you for giving up a summer afternoon to listen to writers talk about themselves, which is probably the most boring thing in the world," he said. "If it gets too unbearable there's like a pretty decent chess game going on behind me, which I've been eyeing. It's pretty good. So if this gets terrible just go for it."

After the readings, Mr. Shillue asked some questions. He turned to Mr. Rich, who was wearing grey pants, a dress shirt with a tie and sneakers.

"I will first say that I think you are kind of a genius, all right?" Mr. Shillue said. "But I wonder if you know what the heck you're doing." He compared reading Mr. Rich's work to a moment when Salieri looks at a young Mozart in Amadeus. "Because I didn't know what I was doing when I was your age so I'm wondering if you think you know what you are doing or if it's just kind of flowing out of you," Mr. Shillue added.

Just as Mr. Rich was about to answer, Mr. Kilmer-Purcell jumped in: "Wait, he's got a butterfly on his shoulder."

A butterfly had indeed landed on Mr. Rich's shoulder. "It's like the cover of the New Yorker. How much more credibility do you want?" Mr. Rich asked.

Mr. Shillue asked Mr. Rich if he is tired of people asking him about his age. "I actually am a 26-year-old, fully-grown man despite my physical appearance," said Mr. Rich, adding that people will probably stop asking when he is able to grow facial hair.

Afterwards, audience members lined up to get books signed. One woman approached Ms. Crosley to get her book signed, but had an unusual question for the writer, who was dressed in a printed dress, a jean jacket and beige, peep-toe heels. The woman, who looked to be in her 50s, had bird poop stains on her khakis. She asked Ms. Crosely if she knew how to get them out.

"I said, 'why did you ask me that?'" Ms. Crosley told the Transom afterwards. "And she said both a flattering and dangerous thing...She said, 'Well I figure you live here' and I thought, 'Well all these guys live here.' Maybe it's because I'm the one woman..."

Ms. Crosley's answer to the pigeon poo question? Seltzer.

There is a generally accepted practice among New York women that the bathroom is still a place to tell secrets; whether it is the best place is not something they devote much thought to. Women go into the bathroom to gossip about someone spotted at a party, divulge something to a confidante during a dinner party, or complain about a co-worker in the office stalls. One needs to only check the stalls for feet before launching into this or that.

"I think because you've already busted through the boundaries of privacy just by having the sham of a metal sheet between you while you're peeing," explained Ms. Crosley of the ladies' bathroom culture. "What's the harm in then having a little verbal sharing?"

Around 2:30 p.m. one day last week, two young, heavily-made-up women entered the restroom on the ninth floor of Barneys in midtown. "I still can't believe Dad said that, that is so funny," one of them said. "He goes, 'Lily, I mean this in the nicest way possible, but you eat like a horse!' I've always eaten that way though...I'm always eating mine and yours."

Also last week, the Transom dropped by a party at the Standard's newly-opened roof bar Le Bain (meaning The Bath). Around midnight, two women were waiting in line for the bathroom: 'it girl' Becka Diamond and an older woman with long blond hair and a beige off-the-shoulder dress.

"I can't deal with that anymore," Ms. Diamond told her companion.

The music pumped louder making it difficult to hear the rest. Next thing the Transom heard, Ms. Diamond's companion was saying, "Unless you are friends, no fucking way."  

Next door at the Boom Boom Room's bathrooms--unisex structures famous for large windows that make you feel as if all New York can see you doing your business--two other women were lingering.

"He's cute, isn't he?" said the taller woman.

"Obsessed. Want to marry," the shorter woman replied.

The Transom spotted socialite Fabiola Beracasa back at the roof party, who recalled a conversation she overheard in the bathroom at The Mark Hotel recently while powdering her nose.  

"It was these two ladies [and one was saying,] 'You know, I heard that Joanna's husband is cheating on her with I don't know who,'" said Ms. Beracasa. "I was applying powder and leaning in to hear more of the gossip. And she was like, 'I know, she hasn't stopped crying for weeks. I feel so bad for her.'"

Model Agyness Deyn said she is always overhearing bathroom secrets, but feels that there is a responsibility to never repeat them.

"I've heard everything in the bathroom because everyone feels like it's so secret and the rest of the people feel like they can never tell anyone because it's a bathroom," said Ms. Deyn.

She wore a fetching strapless dress, carried a flashdrive of music from a friend (which she threatened to use as a switchblade, or maybe a Taser), and urged guests to try the deviled eggs distributed throughout the room (like Easter eggs, sort of, she said).

When Moby arrived, he greeted her like an old pal. David Schwimmer also put in an appearance: He was overheard outside the party saying that he had only come to retrieve his girlfriend, which he swiftly did. He wore a hat pulled low, presumably to shield partygoers from the glare of his celebrity.

In general, though, the boldfaced names skewed more internet-famous than I Love the Nineties. Lockhart Steele (Curbed), Alex Balk (The Awl), and Jessica Coen (Jezebel) all came. As The Observer caught up with Crosley, ur-Gawker Elizabeth Spiers sat across the room, threatening to share embarrassing stories.

"Is this a free book party?" asked Steele, prompting a half-serious dispute with Coen over the ethics of getting friends' stuff for free. Shouldn't you be willing to support their efforts, Coen wanted to know? Steele said he just wanted a copy with Crosley's signature and her number. Crosley liked this idea: for the last book, she'd drawn cakes when giving autographs, but the recipients tended to think the pictures were little houses or something.

Drawing is not among her talents, but throwing parties is no problem. The Vintage/Anchor publicist assessed the gathering with a practiced eye.

"I underplayed the ratio a little," she said, explaining the bustling-but-not-oppressive crowd on the restaurant's second floor. If it had been someone else's party, she'd have invited 30 percent more people than she expected to actually come. This, she noted, was the same factor by which one should overstate Bookscan figures.

How did it feel to be promoting her sophomore collection?

"You don't take lots of pictures of the second baby," said Crosley.

But she swore she did not mean this in a negative way! She wasn't jaded or anything.  Besides, there are advantages to having a bestselling debut (I Was Told There'd Be Cake) under one's belt. The Times, which had "ignored" her first book, paired this one with Emily Gould's for a review in last Sunday's paper. And while others objected to the pairing, Crosley claimed not to mind--it wasn't like the paper had panned one and loved the other, after all.

Her only reservation was the large, glinting cuff bracelet she wore to the photo shoot.

"I look like I'm She-Ra, Princess of Power," Crosley said.

The townhouse, which Teddy Roosevelt reportedly gave to his daughter Alice as a wedding gift in 1906 and was later occupied by Montgomery Clift in the 1960s, belongs to Estee Lauder exec John Demsey, a tall, gentle man with a tight-lipped smile.

"Paula is a very influential person," Mr. Demsey told the Daily Transom.  About a year ago, he and Ms. Froelich were having dinner when she told him about the book. Mr. Demsey inquired as to whether he might be able to host her first book party.

"I wanted to do something nice for her, she's always done nice things for me—from a personal and a professional standpoint," he said. "She's been nice to me."

The novel, which follows three Manhattan women through their professional and personal calamities, is of the chick-lit genre, but Mr. Demsey seemed to enjoy it just fine.

"I thought it was sassy, funny, ironic, and I recognized aspects of Paula in each of the characters," he said. "I recognized other characters, too. I was kinda nervous I would be in there myself! But it was totally entertaining and I could see it as a movie. The ultimate compliment is reading something and being able to see it as a movie and who can play the parts."

As the house swelled with expensive perfume and cigarette smoke billowing in from two outdoor areas, Ms. Froelich, in a nude-colored cocktail dress, was posing for photos with Ms. Bowden, who did her signature wide smile and bimbo head tilt for the cameras; then with her blond Post colleague Mandy Stadtmiller; and later, with Mr. Lippes, who threw his arms around her taut waist.

"Oh my God, so fabulous," the gossip columnist said of her book party. "I'm having the best time!"

"The City section was one of my favorite sections of the newspaper," said the novelist and essayist Thomas Beller by telephone from New Orleans, where he's currently teaching at Tulane University. "I'm quite upset about it as a reader."

Essayist and Vintage publicist Sloane Crosley called it "a legitimate loss, both literally and symbolically."

Since 1993, City had been a quiet, quirky presence within the larger local edition of the Sunday Times. Edited by Connie Rosenblum since 1997, City took a street-level view of the five boroughs that felt like a break from the multiple-front assault of status anxieties unleashed by the pre-recession Style, Real Estate, and Travel sections, and the various versions of the high-end style guide T.

Unlike its glammier sister sections, City was for smaller subjects like Adam B. Ellick's 2007 piece about the dumpling-making women of St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church or Jennifer Bleyer's last go 'round at the Empire Roller Skating Center in Crown Heights from the same year. It was a place for Times reporters like Charlie LeDuff (now of The Detroit News) to flex more Joseph Mitchell–ish chops and bend his elbows once a week. But, most especially, it was a place for writers to wax poetic about life in New York City, to write personal essays that might not have found a home anywhere else. (This reporter, included.)

"My favorite part of the section is New York Observed," said The Ten-Cent Plague author David Hajdu, referring to the (usually) first-person essays in the section. "I like the scale of New York Observed. There was an appropriateness of scale that is rarer and rarer and as a result more and more precious."

Mr. Hajdu, who recently wrote an essay about Riverside Park, applauded the section's "absence of hype and zeitgeist," saying the editors tend to "ignore and even defy the buzz."

Essayist and novelist Phillip Lopate, who contributed to the section ever since Ms. Rosenblum brought him over from her previous section, Arts & Leisure, seemed to agree. "What I'm finding in newspapers in general and The Times in particular is that on the one hand you have the standard journalistic writing with its contemporary clichés. ... And then you have the entertainment pages in which The Times, playing catch-up, is more and more trying to sound hip. But they never can," he told The Observer. "So they fling around all these slang terms like 'the big kahuna'—that was in the paper yesterday. And, there's something a little bit coarse and vulgar about this attempt to wink-wink at the reader.

"The City section was something different," he said. "The prose style was on a higher level than that kind of excessively casual, 'We're all fascinated with rap stars' kind of writing. ... Part of the problem is, looking at it from a larger perspective, that The Times has so much talent in these slightly older editors. They're just so scared of a graying demographic that they keep wanting to get younger and hipper, so in a way, Connie is in an awkward place."

Ms. Rosenblum, whose book about the Bronx's Grand Concourse, Boulevard of Dreams, will be coming out in August, told readers of the NYTimes.com's Talk to the Newsroom what she looked for in 2008: "[W]e ask our writers and ourselves to use eyes and ears, to walk the streets of individual neighborhoods and see firsthand what's out there. This approach can yield rich rewards."

The result is pieces like this week's "Plot Twist at the Actors’ Temple" or "The Trouble With Trees". It may also explain why writers find themselves mourning the loss of the section. One of them, Thomas Pryor, will be hosting a "toast" to the section on May 4 at the bar 17: It's hard to imagine a  similar event in honor of, say, Escapes, which is also being folded into the larger Times.

"Where are we gonna find those pieces—those neighborhood pieces?" Mr. Hajdu wondered. "I'm not inclined to over-romanticize or glorify the mundane, but what you'd find there in unexpected quarters of the City were wonderful surprises."

Mr. Lopate, who has written profiles of architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable as well as numerous essays about Robert Moses, the AIA Guide, and other topics for City, calls those sorts of articles "urban sketches." He said that he and Mr. Beller, who has a Web site devoted to the genre, had once fantasized about putting together an anthology.

"The urban sketches are a noble form which has a long relationship to newspapers," Mr. Lopate said. "Connie was recruiting writers to stretch out and do things which were reflective. Of course, newspapers have very little room for that. They used to have much more room for it." In the past a writer like George Plimpton could dash off a Talk of the Town about a man talking to himself on an imaginary cellular phone for The New Yorker, but good luck getting something like that in print today.

"I think that writers of any age who are into quirky, slice-of-life pieces that used to run a lot more in Talk of the Town and still do occasionally, it kind of was the only game in town," said Jetpack Dreams author and City contributor Mac Montandon. "For a lot of people it was the first section of The Times they wrote for. For younger journalists, it's a huge loss."

In her Talk to the Newsroom chat, Ms. Rosenblum addressed those young journalists, saying, "We rely largely on a small (half a dozen at the peak) group of young or youngesh [sic] journalists, many of them not long out of journalism school, who have an interest in writing about city affairs and don't mind the ups and downs of the freelance life."

When the redesigned Sunday Metro section hits newsstands May 24, we'll see how much room is left for those writers and their work in The New York Times. Mr. Beller is hopeful that some of Ms. Rosenblum's formula will continue to find a home. "I think the importance of the City section is not that it's a stand-alone section but that it had an editorial mission distinct from the paper," said Mr. Beller, who's written about everything from lost gloves to his apartment for the section. "It's not about coverage, it's about the kind of pieces they ran."

"Its not The Southern Oracle," Ms. Crosley—who's written several of the New York Observed essays—emailed from Paris, referring to the last-chance entry from the children's film The Neverending Story. "There are other ways in. But the City's seat within The Times mimicked the very beat it covered. [I]t always maintained a neighborhood vibe."

"Who wouldn't be sad to see that go?" she asked. "It's like watching your favorite building get torn down."

The reason he couldn't: "I have a 3-year-old! I'm tired, man. I'm old."

Mr. Entrekin used to party. Hasn't in a while. Mostly focused now on running his publishing house, Grove/Atlantic, and hanging with the wife and their little boy.

He seems genuinely fulfilled, a fact he was forced to forget last night when his colleagues in the publishing industry turned to him to reinvigorate the annual dinner known as the National Book Awards and make it fun again.

Like Gene Hackman in Hoosiers or, what the hell, Sylvester Stallone in that last Rocky movie, Mr. Entrekin had some steps to relearn.

With the help of veteran literary agent Lynn Nesbit, Mr. Entrekin did the thing the only way he knew how: by moving the dinner from a tacky hotel in Times Square to Cipriani's Wall Street; spiking the normal guest list of editors and agents with boldface names like Anna Wintour, Jann Wenner, and Candace Bushnell; and throwing a late-night after-party at a club on the far West Side that would be attended mostly by the very young.

"I dunno if they did it consciously but it certainly is a lot more glam than it was last year," said the 33-year-old agent Jud Laghi, while getting a drink at the open bar on the banquet floor toward the end of dinner. As many others did throughout the evening, Mr. Laghi noted the irony of capping this tumultuous year in book publishing at a regally decorated restaurant in the thick of the Financial District.

"Lush opulence" was how Collins publisher Steve Ross described it on his way out of the restroom, gazing with theatrical disbelief at the gold columns and the arches and the elaborate floral arrangements hanging from the walls. "So many adjectives come to mind," he said. "It's so totally inappropriate. But, you know, we get so few opportunities to have anything to celebrate."

Mr. Ross said he was glad the publishing industry and the economy in general are collapsing now rather than when he was first starting out in the early 1980s.

"It'd be absolutely terrifying to be starting out now, to be young and to not have the benefit of years, if not decades, of perspective," Mr. Ross said. "I would have seriously considered leaving book publishing."

What would he have done instead?

"Law school," he said. "Or worse, I would have gotten an MBA."

Later, Jeff Seroy, the director of publicity at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, made fun of his counterpart at Knopf, Paul Bogaards, for coming to the dinner without a tux. "I had to sell my tux to get a ticket, that's how bad things have gotten," Mr. Bogaards said. But was he having fun? "Oh, you know."

Mr. Wenner walked by alongside the expansive British literary agent Ed Victor. Mr. Entrekin, who was pacing nearby and speaking chaotically into a cell phone, came over and said hello. "Thank you for coming," Mr. Entrekin said. "Good to see you, man! How's your family?"

Mr. Wenner said he was having a great time. He was at a table with Harry Evans, the painter Brice Marden, the writer Gita Mehta (wife of Knopf head Sonny), and "a couple of Vanity Fair editors."

Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, explained later that Mr. Wenner had been invited because the board wanted the National Book Awards" to be a "bigger experience." "Mainly, we've had people from the industry here for years and now the two chairs, Morgan Entrekin and Lynn Nesbit, are trying to move it out a little bit for people who are interested in books but aren't necessarily in the business." Hence Ms. Wintour and Ms. Bushnell. "They might not have been at the National Book Awards in the past but they're literary people, and we want to bring them in our community. We shouldn't be saying you're not part of this because you don't exactly do the type of writing that we give awards to. There's a lot of good writing out there."

"They're trying to make it fancy and fun," said literary agent Ira Silverberg. "They're invited people from other fields—in fact, I thought I saw a friend of mine who's in fashion!"

Not everyone noticed the outsiders as immediately.

"I'm not aware of them," said Viking publisher Paul Slovak, who said everyone at his table was either an employee at Penguin Group or an author who publishes with them. Regarding the non-publishing people in attendance: "I couldn't tell you who they are or what they do."

Just before the awards were announced (real quick: fiction to Modern Library's Peter Mathiessen, nonfiction to Norton's Annette Gordon-Reed, poetry to HarperCollins' Mark Doty, children's lit to Scholastic's Judy Blundell), the chairman of the National Book Foundation, David Steinberger, brought up the after-party that Mr. Entrekin—and Harvey Weinstein, who was in London last night—were hosting at Socialista. The National Book Awards had never had an after-party before, Mr. Steinberger said with delight.

His remark was greeted by silence, as if no one at the dinner had been invited.

"I don't know if you're as excited as I am about this," Mr. Steinberger said, clearly surprised by the crowd's cold response. "I'm actually not allowed to tell you where it is, because, if you can believe this, our first after-party is already apparently oversubscribed. So if you want to go to the party, you have to find Morgan and see if you can get him to tell you."

About that: Socialista was basically full by the time the National Book Awards let out. Editorial assistants, magazine editors, young agents—all came at the announced start time of 10 p.m., and by the time Mr. Mathiessen and the rest of the adults showed up, there wasn't that much room for them.

From 10 to 12 Socialista was an anthill on the verge of revolt. The bouncers had been forced to close the list. Only people who were obviously coming from the awards were accommodated; those who weren't waited outside in the cold even if they'd been invited. Inside, guests pushed and shoved their way through the stairwell connecting the main floor and the smaller downstairs bar. The coat check stopped taking bags around 10:30 because there was not enough space. Most people found themselves incapable of discussing anything but how crowded it was.

"I hope never to return, except possibly to get my coat!" said literary agent Jim Rutman of Sterling Lord Literistic. "It was scarring. This is what happens when publishing tries to get cool. It's a horrible mistake!"

One of Mr. Rutman's clients, Beautiful Children author Charles Bock, was forced to put his pregnant wife into a cab and send her home. "We were in here for 10 or so minutes, man, but it was just too much for her," he said.

The novelist Jessica Hagedorn, a board member of the National Book Foundation, made her way down the stairs in a huff. "There's no place to sit, it's ridiculous!" she exclaimed. "I'm leaving!"

A severe woman standing by the door noted, "There are a lot of people here who were not at the National Book Awards."

Jessica Joffe, one of the fashionable youngsters Mr. Entrekin asked to "co-host" the evening, lit a cigarette after finding a seat at the bar. "Hi!" she said to a friend who was walking up to greet her. "Why does this party suck?"

Note: Ms. Joffe seemed to be wrapped in a sleeping bag made from several snow leopard carcasses.

The 24-year-old novelist Nick McDonell was one of Ms. Joffe's co-hosts (along with Vanity Fair staffer Claire Howorth and essayist and Vintage publicist Sloane Crosley). Mr. McDonell, you might remember, had his first novel published when he just 17. Twelve was, broadly speaking, about Twelve, something of the Junya Watanabe of day-school designer drugs, a mysterious and totally new powder, the first sniff of which sends a 17-year-old senior accepted Early Decision at Wesleyan sprawling off her (parents') toilet in ecstatic, convulsive recitation of the Gettysburg Address.

Michiko Kakutani, praising the book, but obviously also the drug, called it "as fast as speed, as relentless as acid," suggesting Mr. McDonell's imagined substance was experience distilled to its essence: i.e., both a dopamine reuptake inhibitor and a strong partial agonist at 5-HT_2A serotonin receptors. And we all know how experience, and Twelve, ends: in an incredible sex party where all those willowy, druggy teens are shot dead at their physical and literary primes, never to fade away.

Six years later, Mr. McDonell wore a tuxedo—long (not bow) tie the ensemble's sole nod to modernity—and chatted with a group of classmates from Harvard College. This party, it was clear, would neither begin nor end with a bang, even if at the moment it was hugging-room only. Come tomorrow, about three-fourths of the aggressively partying partiers here would be trudging to work; half would be facing the private terror of a white screen and hangover-cum-writer's block. The truly unfortunate would suffer both.

As it turns out, Mr. Entrekin, evangelist of a literary scene more youthfully hip, published Twelve on his Grove Press imprint. Which is to say, he's Mr. McDonell's brother's godfather. (Mr. McDonell's father is longtime Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell.) And even if he discovered last night that 24 is not quite as seductively doomed a number as 12, Mr. Entrekin did deliver on at least one psychopharmacological novelty: Everyone could smoke inside, and most —even the young ones old enough to be less interested in transcendence through chemistry than stress relief—did.

After Ms. Joffe, and the tuxedos, and the more bewildered blond socialites left, a strange sort of tribal frenzy took over. Upstairs and downstairs, an expertly curated playlist turned a place called Socialista safe for the bookish: "Love Will Tear Us Apart," New Order, "Common People," "Paper Planes."

Dancing commenced, on furniture, on bodies, even on the books laid out as party favors by Grove and Weinstein. Things had gotten fun, and as the hour sailed towards 3am, people started talking about how they didn't want to go home. It wasn't fiction, but it wasn't half-bad, either.