Mr. Hastings's new book.

"Two years ago, Michael showed up on our doorstep," said Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates of his star writer Michael Hastings. The viability of the profile Mr. Hastings had pitched, Mr. Bates said speaking in retrospect, "really depends on what kind of access you can get."The audience erupted in laughter.

A crowd was gathered at the Half King Bar to celebrate the release of Mr. Hastings’s new book, The Operators, a document of the American war in Afghanistan built in part upon Mr. Hastings’s incendiary, excessively accessed profile of General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone—one that led to the general’s resignation.

After a secondary introduction by David Rosenthal, publisher of Penguin imprint Blue Rider Press (the publisher that snapped up Mr. Hastings’s manuscript after Little, Brown had abandoned it), Mr. Hastings took the floor. "I can hear, from 400 miles away, the expletives going through Eric’s head when I file my copy!" said Mr. Hastings, by way of thanks. He mentioned, a few times, the catchphrase "hashtag-humblebrag," and incited his audience to follow him on Twitter, before reading a brief excerpt from his book.

Upon mention of one unflatteringly portrayed soldier, Mr. Hastings interrupted his own work to note, "He also gave me the one-star review on Amazon, probably." (Mr. Hastings has nothing about which to worry: he was featured at number 20 on the Jan. 29 extended hardcover best-sellers list in the Times Book Review.) Reading an digression about a particular soldier, Mr. Hastings referred to his Rolling Stone coup: "The story was so fucking good we didn’t need that."

"It needed some editing, shall we say, but the bone structure was good," said Mr. Rosenthal. "I want him to do another book—he’ll be a star for years to come."

But how can Mr. Hastings get access like that again? "I have a profile coming out of an up-and-coming radio star," he told The Observer outside his reading. "It’s always challenging to get stories that no one else has, but if you look at my stories for Rolling Stone over the past couple years, we break news every time."

As for Little, Brown’s loss, Mr. Hastings began: "They lost their nerve." In the midst of describing the challenges fending off Obama administration challenges to the book’s facts, he spotted a familiar face: "I think that’s Sebastian."

It was, indeed, war correspondent and Half King co-owner

Sebastian Junger, wandering around the base of the High Line on his cell phone. After a bit more of our questioning of Mr. Hastings, Mr. Junger had hung up, and was thanked for his attendance at the reading."I was outside talking to a friend. But, it was good?" asked Mr. Junger.

It was, said Mr. Hastings.

"You got a book coming out?" said Mr. Junger.

Mr. Hastings offered to send him a copy.

Echols.

Sarah Hochman, senior editor at David Rosenthal's still-new Penguin imprint Blue Rider Press, has acquired a memoir by Damien Echols. Mr. Echols was one of the "West Memphis Three," who were wrongfully convicted for the 1993 murders of three children in West Memphis, Ark. and released from prison this past August. Mr. Echols was in New York this week for a screening of the third installment in the documentary series about his case, Paradise Lost 3, which was shown at the New York Film Festival on October 10.

According to a statement from Blue Rider, an imprint of Penguin, "The as-yet untitled book will be Echols’ account of the trial proceedings and eighteen years spent on death row, including his personal and public quest for exoneration, his prison diaries, and accounts of support from his wife and friends."

The book is scheduled for release in September 2012.

Rolling Stone

Mr. Hastings' book is based on his Rolling Stone article "The Runaway General," which provoked President Obama into firing General Stanley McChrystal. In July, a spokesperson for Little, Brown announced that its "publication plans have been cancelled due to editorial differences." [Publishers Marketplace]

Mr. Rosenthal, 56, was until last week the publisher of Simon & Schuster, the flagship imprint of CBS's publishing arm. He held the job for 13 years, all of them under Carolyn Reidy, the CEO who fired him last week and replaced him with the earnest, gifted 46-year-old Jonathan Karp.

"You know, I haven't been satisfied with the numbers either, but over the term I've been here, which is a long time, we've delivered the numbers and created a whole lot of great books," Mr. Rosenthal said by phone on Friday afternoon, not long before he left his office for the last time. "When your numbers are not what you'd like them to be, you're always vulnerable. You know, it is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately moment. But it is what it is."

On its face, the defenestration of Mr. Rosenthal signals the snuffing out of a leader who did his job with an old-fashioned boldness: a publishing executive who spoke with a knowing purr and cultivated a reputation for sneering in the face of the corporation that owned him. It also promises a new Simon & Schuster, an imprint that once defined itself as everything that pre-millennial Little Random, the potently literary Random House imprint where Mr. Karp spent his first sixteen years in the business, was not. The joke back then was that editors at Random House wore tortoise-shell glasses, while editors at Simon & Schuster, taking their cues from the flashy executive Dick Snyder, preferred aviators.

A self-conscious throwback to a time in publishing when editors felt more free to do and say what they felt like, Mr. Rosenthal represents an era at Simon & Schuster that is now properly over. That said, if there are tears shed for his managerial aesthetic, anyone who cares about the future of serious non-fiction should be rooting for Mr. Karp when he starts on June 14th. If Mr. Karp can turn the Simon & Schuster imprint around, then more good journalists and historians—and even a few novelists!—will get paid more money to write more good books. 

Mr. Rosenthal's biggest successes at Simon & Schuster—crucially, the longtime home of powerhouse editor Alice Mayhew—were political memoir, history, and current events. He published Bob Woodward, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and David McCullough, as well as Hunter S. Thompson, Bob Dylan, Jim Cramer, and Mary Higgins Clark. But in the past few year he has lost some major authors, including Michael Beschloss, James B. Stewart, and Jimmy Carter. He also recently lost Richard Ben Cramer to Mr. Karp.

Several top literary agents said they weren't surprised that Mr. Rosenthal had been let go last Wednesday—Simon & Schuster had been struggling conspicuously, they said, and needed a reboot. Rosenthal loyalists, however, including some editors and authors, see the firing as a sacrificial gesture carried out by Ms. Reidy in order to signal to her superiors at CBS that she is actively making changes at a time when the entire company—not just Mr. Rosenthal's imprint—is putting up unsatisfactory numbers. 

"When your team is doing badly you fire the manager," said the humorist Christopher Cerf, son of Random House founder Bennett Cerf and chairman of the Modern Library's board of advisors. "I'm sure there was a lot of pressure from CBS and all that."

Ms. Reidy, who hired Mr. Rosenthal herself and sold him her house in Brooklyn ten years ago, would not comment on that theory, but Simon & Schuster corporate spokesman Adam Rothberg called it "absurd."

Mr. Karp, who counts Mr. Rosenthal's one-time rival Ann Godoff as his primary mentor, said Friday that he had not spoken to his predecessor since the announcement, and did not want to speculate about the reasons for his firing. 

"Maybe it's just that things change," he said, sitting behind a desk in his soon-to-be-former office at Hachette Book Group, where he spent the past five years running a mega-successful boutique imprint called Twelve. The imprint was just him, a few assistants, and the ambitious, energetic publicity director Cary Goldstein, who is currently helping to find a replacement for his ex-boss. Their model was to publish just one book per month, and to sell the hell out of it for that entire time. They have made bestsellers out of books like Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, Christopher Buckley's Boomsday, and Dave Cullen's Columbine. 

Mr. Karp had been serving as editor-in-chief of the flagship imprint at Random House when he left abruptly and started Twelve as an imprint of Warner Books. Though the move meant newfound autonomy, it was seen by some as a stumble for the lifelong Random Houser because super-corporate Warner was known for down-market commercial authors like Nelson DeMille and Nicholas Sparks. But Mr. Karp's model worked, and the Warner brand proved a non-issue when Hachette bought the publishing house in 2006. By the time it was announced last week that Mr. Karp was taking over Simon & Schuster, more than half of the 37 books he published under the Twelve name had become New York Times bestsellers. 

It's a track record that makes the editorial team at Simon & Schuster optimistic, even as they acknowledge that their house will never be the same without Mr. Rosenthal.  

People who knew Mr. Karp when he was an assistant at Random House describe a sweet, goofy kid whose current status as a major publishing player could not have been predicted when he arrived at Random House at age 26 after deciding to abandon a career in newspaper journalism. He was known to have written and produced an Off Broadway musical, and he contributed to the Random House in-house magazine, At Random. As one former colleague put it, "He's everything Rosenthal isn't." 

To be fair, Mr. Karp definitely has some jokes—he has been known to say that "publishers who work in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," a reference to the glass interior of the Hachette Book Group building—but Mr. Rosenthal has, well, infinite jokes. This is a guy who commissioned Henry Beard to write a book based on O.J. Simpson's courtroom scribbles and hired a Judge Ito lookalike to give copies of it out at the courthouse from the back of a white Bronco—a guy whom Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonnell credits with coming up with, "He's hot, he's sexy, and he's dead," the famous 1981 Rolling Stone cover line on Jim Morrison's posthumous popularity. This is a guy who would have probably been walking around with a hand buzzer if it was the 1930s.

"Let's put it this way: I was never in a meeting run by anyone that resembled a meeting run by David," said Bob Bender, who has been an editor at Simon & Schuster since before Mr. Rosenthal arrived there. "It was like a rehearsal for a stand up comedy routine, you know? Any kind of comment was welcome, especially if it was witty."

Working for Mr. Rosenthal, Mr. Bender said, you felt insulated from the suits in the finance department. Which isn't to say Mr. Rosenthal had the power to actually protect anyone—but he made known his scorn for corporate culture, and walked around with a swagger that empowered his underlings. 

"He regarded the corporate life as something you had to put up with," Mr. Bender said. "The more you could work around it or ignore it or make fun of it the better off you were. In a sense it created a camaraderie among everybody, like we all knew what we were up against... We'd all roll our eyes, but David would roll his eyes and raise his voice."

His attitude, according to longtime Simon & Schuster author—and Rosenthal pal—James Carville, made "the boys in accounting irritated."

Mr. Rosenthal liked being seen as something of an outlaw, shocking people with profanity and regularly deploying politically incorrect remarks in the press.

"People always loved to call him up for a quote and he was always willing to oblige them," said Mr. Bender. "He had to have been the most quoted publisher in the business over the last decade." 

Mr. Rosenthal liked reporters in part because he was one at heart, having started his career in New York as a copy boy at the Post after graduating from high school. Ken Auletta, who worked there briefly while Mr. Rosenthal was there, said he was known even then as an aggressive little raptor. Before he got into book publishing, he served as a top editor at New York magazine, and as managing editor of Rolling Stone until Jann Wenner reportedly fired him for "not liking music."

He never fell out of love with the press, and you could tell just by reading his quotes (see sidebar) that he had fun being a regular, reliably feisty presence in the papers. Ask him now why he courted reporters, though, and he'll tell you it was all about strategy.

"I did that for a reason—to create a certain persona, a certain excitement about Simon & Schuster which had been lacking." Mr. Rosenthal said, when asked if colleagues and competitors resented his attention-seeking tactics. "The more you can help people in the media, the better chance you have of getting your authors in the press and getting coverage for them."

Mr. Karp talks about them a fair amount. Since starting Twelve—whose unusual 12 books-per-year model was an implicit critique of how the rest of big publishing works—he has made himself visible in his own way, rarely making catty comments to reporters but writing essays for the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly about why houses should be putting out fewer books. 

Some in the publishing world are puzzled by the fact that this evangelist for small lists has accepted an offer from Simon & Schuster to take over an operation that produces more than 100 hardcover books per year in addition to a paperback line. What about all that talk of focused and narrow? 

Mr. Karp gets a teensy bit defensive about this when you ask him about it directly. He wrote those essays for the Post and PW because he was asked, he insists, not because he had some unequivocal conviction that his way of doing things at Twelve was the right way. 

"You can infer a lot from a person's decisions but that doesn't necessarily mean that was what they were thinking," he said. "I also think it would be really small to assume that there's only one right way to publish."

Mr. Karp said he knows the Twelve model shouldn't scale, and he knows some of the core principles he has been championing as its publisher might turn out to be inapplicable at Simon & Schuster. The fact is, though, as long as he hits his budget targets, no one's going to be worried about whether he's staying true to anything.

"If you make money you can do whatever you want to do," said Mr. Bender. "You can wear your tie backwards on your back if you're making money, if that's your style. Nobody cares. You can wear gloves in the office if you want. But when you're not making money, when financial times are tight, then every single quirk comes in for re-examination."  

lneyfakh@observer.com

With additional reporting credit to Molly Fischer

Tentatively titled Odysseys: Adventures in Reading the Greeks, the new book was acquired by Simon publisher David Rosenthal at auction for a sum that a source said was in the high six figures.  

Mr. Mendelsohn’s essays on film, literature, and music are published regularly in popular publications such as the New York Review of Books, but he is also a trained classicist, having earned his Ph.D. in the field at Princeton in 1994. After he completed his Ph.D., Mr. Mendelsohn was a lecturer in the classics department at Princeton for eight years, and since 2006 has been a professor at Bard.  

Netiher Mr. Rosenthal nor Simon & Schuster's publicity director, Victoria Meyer, would comment on the book when asked about it this morning. But in a press release sent out late this afternoon, Ms. Meyer indicated that Mr. Mendelsohn will be edited by Sarah Hochman, and that the book is scheduled for 2012. Ms. Meyer's press release, which strangely adapts a line from Mr. Mendelsohn's book proposal in place of an actual comment from the author—"It is, I hope, a book that will wed a deep critical examination to an unabashed emotionality about how texts can add immeasurably to our understanding of our lived experience"—calls the book "a literal and figurative voyage in search of the meanings of the greatest of the Classics, from Homer to Aristophanes and beyond, offering an innovative and unconventional guide to understanding these rich texts and a perspective that will be inspiring for any reader."

Attempts to reach Mr. Mendelsohn and his agent went unreturned.

Ms. Weisberger’s publisher, Simon and Schuster, paid over a million dollars at auction for Everyone Worth Knowing—a staggering sum for a novel. The house felt so strongly about its seven-figure author that it bought Ms. Weisberger’s third novel for another million or so back in May, months before Everyone’s release date, before the critical reception, and before the author even had an inkling of what she’d write about next.

It seems, though, judging by the glutted sea of candy-colored books about young women in the big city, the content of them matters very little. Not surprisingly, Everyone Worth Knowing tracks a twentysomething single gal in New York City who lives in a small apartment, has wisecracking gay friends, hates her job, spends her evenings in nightclubs and searches for True Love.

“It’s still very much a door open into something that readers wouldn’t experience for themselves,” said Ms. Weisberger’s agent, Deborah Schneider, when asked what separates Ms. Weisberger from other writers. “Inside New York nightlife, public relations, youth culture, downtown culture—I don’t think anybody is writing what she writes at this point.”

And yet Everyone’s plotline—template—is so familiar that most people could fill in the rest of the details themselves. A newly engaged best friend? An obsession with the Styles section? Bad takeout dinners and large, sugary drinks? These types of books have affected the way even New Yorkers view New York. And while Everyone Worth Knowing is an obvious whipping boy because of how much Simon and Schuster paid for it, it’s also a perfect representative of this dusty, overly familiar and perhaps occasionally appealing genre.

David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon and Schuster—which has, along with most other major publishing houses, thrust forth a number of such novels with almost identical themes—made the decision to buy the book, and was more than happy to explain why he thinks this one is special.

“I think it’s a good milieu,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “I think the nightlife scene in New York is of great interest to many people—the velvet ropes and so on. I think it’s a hoot. And she wants a boyfriend.”

And, Mr. Rosenthal added, “Very few people write a first novel that has the commercial success that Prada did.”

Indeed. The Devil Wears Prada, which was published by Doubleday in 2003, spent six months on the best-seller list. Simon and Schuster’s aggressive move for her second and third books signals either a deep faith in Ms. Weisberger’s abilities or a deep faith in the lasting power of The Devil Wears Prada.

“We believe in this girl,” Mr. Rosenthal said.

Of course, chick-lit, boss-lit, gossip-lit and every other permutation of easy-to-read single-girl writing has always been a lightning rod in the book world—adored, scorned, debated as if it were Flaubert. (There are currently dueling anthologies in the pipeline called This Is Not Chick Lit and This Is Chick Lit, and the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, in a review of Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot in The Times, suggested that using the term was akin to “calling another woman a slut.”) Every publisher has tried to cash in on the success of Melissa Bank and Helen Fielding and Jennifer Weiner, and considering the past sales figures of some of their books, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever stop reading about expensive shoes and toxic bachelors—even as the culture has moved on.

“Publishing is famous for wanting to not reinvent itself very much, to do things that replicate things that have been successful before,” said Carole DeSanti, vice president and editor at large at Viking Penguin, who edited both of Ms. Bank’s novels. “Now sometimes that works like a charm, and sometimes it doesn’t. But it does kind of work, if you want to do a sort of formulaic type of publishing that is conservative and protective. Publishing has a long history of publishing schlocky fiction for women.”

But as with every attempt to capitalize on previous successes, there are uncertainties: Will Ms. Weisberger prove to be an incredibly expensive one-hit wonder, in the style of Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, the authors of The Nanny Diaries, whose follow-up novel, Citizen Girl, flopped spectacularly without the gossipy faux-realism of the earlier book? Or is she a nascent Candace Bushnell, who continues to sell and sell? A sequel must be more than just a sequel to succeed, a reality illustrated by the tepid response to The Wonder Spot, Ms. Bank’s second novel, the follow-up to The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing.

“I think the audience is smart, and they really do know the good from the bad, and they can tell the tired form from the fresh form,” said Jonathan Burnham, who bought Plum Sykes’ Bergdorf Blondes and her as-yet-unpublished next book while he was at Miramax Books. “I think it’s really important that those novels don’t just present a series of parties and fashion. They have to have a really good plot.”

But what is a good plot within the narrow confines of single-girl-in-the-city? So far, The New York Times Book Review has called Everyone Worth Knowing a “fatuous, clunky second novel” in a joint review that made Candace Bushnell look like Edith Wharton by comparison. Both Publishers Weekly and Entertainment Weekly called the book a “rehash.” And The Wall Street Journal wrote: “the taxonomy of fame, the cult of consumerism and New York night life are tired topics.”

“What [Ms. Weisberger] did with her first book—it was a very important book. She was the first one to crack the Condé Nast tower,” said a literary agent familiar with the genre. “But in this case, it’s much more about the writing.”

The Devil Wears Prada was something new, a critical early entry in the canon of disgruntled-former-wage-slave literature, a gossipy novel whose story took place at an elite New York City fashion magazine, based on Ms. Weisberger’s own past experiences as an overworked assistant at Vogue, where she served editrix-in-chief Anna Wintour. Although getting through the sentences was often like hacking your way through a forest, the novel crackled with its central villain’s pure, eccentric evil; the Wintour-like magazine editor Miranda Priestly was so bizarre in her demands, her glossy employees so anorexic and fashion-obsessed, that the book had a certain twisted appeal.

Random House’s Doubleday, which paid something in the realm of $250,000 for The Devil Wears Prada, did bid on the second book, but the house and the author couldn’t agree on financial terms. After doing fantastically well with the breakout best-seller, the house decided “to walk away when it was good,” according to an executive there, declining to pay the newly inflated sum that Ms. Weisberger was asking for, leaving the author and her agent, Deborah Schneider, to look elsewhere.

Simon and Schuster took the opposite tack, “wooing and paying,” as Mr. Rosenthal put it, and beating out a handful of other houses. The deal was struck based on little more than a 10-page rough outline and the impressive sales of The Devil Wears Prada. (Fox 2000 just started shooting the film version, directed by David Frankel and starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway and Adrian Grenier, which just last Monday was shooting a scene at the Mayrose diner, much to the delight of Entourage and Prada fans everywhere.)

But apparently, a million dollars in today’s New York gets you a one-bedroom in a doorman building … or some book buzz.

“There’s a way of looking at it where you see that the scale of the advance in itself becomes an event, and that creates a certain electricity around the book,” said Mr. Burnham, using the recent Dracula novel The Historian, which sold for $2 million, as an example. In fact, Mr. Burnham just won a frenzied auction for a 1,200-page literary novel by Vikram Chandra, paying $1 million for the North American rights. “It can backfire, of course, but it helps give the book a certain spotlight before it’s even published. Booksellers see those deals, and they remember that this book was part of a major auction, and it feeds into the way the book will be sold in.”

Fortunately for Ms. Weisberger, her own contribution to the body of New York City publicist-literature is being shepherded through the marketing process by a very enthusiastic team. When asked what excited her about Ms. Weisberger’s writing, Marysue Rucci, Ms. Weisberger’s editor at Simon and Schuster, said: “I mean, I think she’s a terrific writer. We took this book on, and there are very few writers who sell at the level of her first novel.”

In many ways, Everyone Worth Knowing is actually Ms. Weisberger’s true first novel, an original work of fiction based on a world she had to create (or research specifically for her book.) In this case, it’s one of Manhattan event-planners and publicists, women with blow-outs and tiny wireless phones who organize parties for corporate clients such as BlackBerry and Playboy, secure them mentions in gossip columns and spend their evenings getting plastered at Bungalow 8. Stock characters abound. Out of “the single girl,” “the bitchy publicist,” “the aristocrat bad-boy,” “the hilarious gay guy,” “the down-to-earth friend” and “the down-to-earth love interest,” Uncle Will, the hilarious gay guy, was cited as the most interesting character by those involved with the book.

A sampling of Uncle Will: “‘You are an absolutely intoxicating creature, so fascinating, so fabulous, and I think that dreary job of yours was suppressing it all.’ He placed his huge, well-manicured hands around my middle and almost shrieked. ‘What is this I see? A waist? By God, Simon, the girl’s got her figure back. Christ, you look like you’ve spent the last few weeks getting lipoed in all the right places. Welcome back, darling!’”

The writing suggests a certain relaxed attitude on the part of the author toward her craft: “It was seven-thirty in the evening on day four of my working at Kelly & Company as a party planner,” begins one chapter in painful earnest. The depiction of life in an investment bank, among other things, is completely implausible: “Mrs. Kaufman, I truly understand your concern over the market’s slight decline, but let me assure you that we have everything under control … I assure you our traders are excellent,” Bette, the protagonist and a supposed five-year veteran of UBS in Manhattan, tells a client over the phone.

As for Bette, a hapless character whose appearance goes undescribed for almost a hundred pages—she’s caught, like all stereotypical New York women heroines, in a perpetual state of faux-angst: “I tried to assure myself that my unhappiness stemmed from my genuine concern that Penelope was marrying a truly terrible guy and not from some deep-rooted envy that she now had a fiancé when I didn’t have so much as a second date.”

The real test might be whether readers identify with Ms. Weisberger the same way they do with Ms. Weiner or Ms. Bushnell—which, in the end, will prove whether Prada was a gimmicky, one-shot deal or the result of a truly likeable young voice.

Ms. Weisberger, for her part, declined to comment. But Simon and Schuster kindly included a list of “suggested questions for Lauren Weisberger” with its press materials. “Is this book an accurate portrayal of the life of an ‘it’ girl in NYC?” was one. “What advice would you give to young people who aspire to become successful writers like yourself?” was another. And finally: “What’s up next for you? Do you have another novel in the works?”

Today, some people think David Rosenthal is crazy. It has been nearly a year since Mr. Rosenthal, 33, left his marriage and abandoned Hollywood, leaving barely a trace. He estranged himself from close friends and colleagues, moved into posh hotels and gave away a million dollars to young women, some of whom he barely knew. He wrote an angry play called Love, which contains an extraordinary amount of cursing. Love also details Mr. Rosenthal's feelings about faith, monogamy and his desire to have intercourse with the supermodel Heidi Klum. Mr. Rosenthal said that after he sent a copy of the play to his father, his father took him to a mental hospital, where Mr. Rosenthal was kept for 48 hours.

Now Mr. Rosenthal lives in New York City. He just moved into an apartment downtown, but until recently he was living at the Four Seasons Hotel on East 57th Street. He walks around the city and thinks about his life, listens to music, writes and prepares for his debut as a playwright. Love opens for previews off-Broadway at the East 13th Street Theater on Wednesday, Sept. 4, and premieres on Sept. 13.

Mr. Rosenthal believes his story is relatively easy to explain.

"One day I was like, 'Wait a minute!'" he said. It was late on the afternoon of Wednesday, Aug. 15, and Mr. Rosenthal was sitting in an easy chair in the lobby of the Four Seasons. "'I don't care about money. I don't care about power. I don't care about success. What do I care about?' You know what I realized?

"I wanted to have sex with Heidi Klum," he said. "I was sitting there in my five-bedroom house, with my pool and my brand-new Porsche convertible in the driveway and my two-and-a-half-million-dollar-a-year job at Twentieth Century Fox studios, and I realized that I would rather be having sex with Heidi Klum. I would give all of this up right now to go have sex with Heidi Klum … and so I sat down and wrote this play."

Mr. Rosenthal is compact and wiry, with graying black curly hair. He has blue eyes, and on this day he had a slight, scruffy beard; he looks a little like a smaller version of the actor Daniel Stern. In conversation, he is engaging and friendly, sometimes a bit energetic, bouncing nervously and tugging at his earlobe.

"I really believe I have a unique and very original voice for the American theater," Mr. Rosenthal said. "I believe people will respond to it–if they are willing to be open-minded, because people can be very, very offended by what I write and say. But I think it's important that people understand that I mean well and it's my truth."

Over the next two hours, Mr. Rosenthal talked candidly about a number of things: about his disillusionment with Hollywood; about his failure as a husband; about how he wants to reinvent himself as a playwright. He talked about giving away that million dollars, and he said unflattering things about celebrities he's worked with. He called Michael J. Fox "Michael Jerk Fox." He also offered to run for President of the United States–and all the while, he insisted he is perfectly happy and sound of mind.

David Rosenthal was raised in Lawrenceville, N.J. By his own account, his was a relatively average suburban childhood. He was prom king, and performed in high-school productions of Grease and The Fantasticks . He attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1989, and shortly thereafter he moved to Hollywood. A former student of his father's, Janis Hirsch, was the co-creator of a sitcom named Anything but Love , which starred Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis. Mr. Rosenthal got a job as a writer's assistant.

"I immediately knew this was home," he said. "They were nice, kind, gentle people who spent the day laughing together, telling stories. I was completely dazzled."

Mr. Rosenthal began to write on his own and wound up getting a job on a show called Nurses . Nurses flopped, but he was hired as a staff writer on Anything but Love . When that ended, he wrote for Laurie Hill , a show created by Neil Marlens and Carol Black, the people behind The Wonder Years . That didn't last long either, but later, with Mr. Marlens and Ms. Black, Mr. Rosenthal helped develop a sitcom for Laurie Hill co-star Ellen DeGeneres. The show, entitled These Friends of Mine , became Ellen . Pretty soon, Mr. Rosenthal was running it. He was just 24.

"David was hot," said Mr. Rosenthal's friend, Teddy Tenenbaum, a screenwriter who worked as a script coordinator on Ellen . "Neil and Carol were hot shit–hugely successful television creators–and David was their protégé."

It was during Ellen, however, that Mr. Rosenthal also began to experience television's ugly side. He was let go from the show after two years, and felt devastated. But he remained a wanted man, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, now at DreamWorks, asked Mr. Rosenthal to write a pilot for Michael J. Fox. When Mr. Fox passed on the pilot (called Max, it was about a man who ditches his wife at the altar), Mr. Rosenthal was asked to develop a show for Arsenio Hall. But that unraveled, too. Shortly after tapings began, there was an infamous blow-up that made the newspapers. According to Mr. Rosenthal, Mr. Hall yelled at him: "Why don't you get your dick out of your ass and write me some fucking jokes?" Mr. Rosenthal said he burst into tears on the spot. (A representative for DreamWorks Television and Mr. Katzenberg declined to comment, and a representative for Mr. Hall at his agency, 3 Arts Entertainment, didn't respond to requests for comment.)

Mr. Rosenthal left Mr. Hall's show. By then, Michael J. Fox was in New York starring in Spin City , and Mr. Rosenthal went to work there. He was dating another television writer and they moved into a place at 89th and Amsterdam. In 1999, they were married at the boathouse in Central Park.

At first, Mr. Rosenthal was happy. Spin City was a proven hit before he got there, and he liked working for it. But by his second season–he was now the show runner–he had grown unhappy with his job and his home life. He said he had an affair and he also developed his huge crush on Spin City guest star Heidi Klum–though he never told her of it. (Through her publicist, Ms. Klum declined comment.)

Mr. Rosenthal also felt his work was underappreciated by Mr. Fox, adding that he was hurt that Mr. Fox didn't mention him during his Golden Globes acceptance speech in 2000. "I'm not saying he was a jerk to anybody else, but you know what? He was a jerk to me," Mr. Rosenthal said. (Mr. Fox was away and unavailable for comment, said his spokesperson.)

Mr. Fox, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, left Spin City in the spring of 2000, after a memorable finale. Mr. Rosenthal moved back to Los Angeles and took a lucrative job developing shows for Fox Television Studios. He wrote a pilot he was proud of called My Embarrassing Life , but it wasn't picked up. His relationship with Fox Studios grew strained, and eventually both sides parted ways.

By the fall, Mr. Rosenthal's life was in disarray. He had moved out of his house. He kicked around for awhile before moving into the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard because he wanted to "live like a rock star." By then he had also begun a foundation, called The Creators, and he gave $50,000 grants to young female artists, whom he felt were largely ignored in Hollywood. Some of the recipients he knew well; some of them he didn't. A few women were weirded out by the offer, he said, but more than 20 took it. "Some people are really blown away by it," said Caroline Surace, an actress and grant recipient who met Mr. Rosenthal last winter while working at the Mondrian's famous Sky Bar.

Around that time, Mr. Rosenthal said he had a kind of revelation.

"My way to liberate myself was just to be truthful," he said. "Completely truthful. And once I decided that, I went hog wild."

This was around the time he wrote Love . "I gave it to my wife, and people thought I was crazy … my parents thought I was crazy. I gave it to my friends at Spin City, and they thought it was crazy."

In December, Mr. Rosenthal said he flew back to L.A. from Miami, where he had visited a model he was seeing named Misty.

"I get off the plane, it's like 10 at night or something, and there's my father," he said. "I'm actually happy to see him. It's a little weird. I'm like, 'Dad, what are you doing here?'

"And it's not just him, he's standing there with two burly security guards, a cot with restraints and a psychologist with a beard. And I'm like, 'What is going on?' And [my father] is like, 'David, you have lost your mind. I read your play. Everybody's worried about you. Your wife says you are crazy, you quit your job. How can you survive? Why would you give up on millions of dollars?' And I'm like, 'Dad, I'm happy, I'm rich and I'm dating a model. Leave me alone.' And he says, 'No. We've got to take you to the UCLA Medical Center.'" (Reached by The Observer on Aug. 16, Rabbi Morton Rosenthal said he had "no comment" for this story.)

David Rosenthal said he eventually agreed to go to UCLA, where he says he spent 48 hours until his sister, Sandra, a lawyer, helped get him released.

Now it is many months later, and Mr. Rosenthal is on his own in New York, focusing on his play. Love is costing $400,000 to produce, he said, most of which he's providing himself, with some contributions from friends. He declined to say who. In hours of conversation, it's the only thing he's reluctant to talk about. (Despite his recent spending, Mr. Rosenthal said he remains a multimillionaire.)

Love is a confrontational, personal work, more performance art than play, and is unlike anything Mr. Rosenthal wrote for TV. The show's cast and crew expect a few people might get freaked and walk out during periods like midway through the staccato-like third act, when the word "cunt" is uttered more than 30 times in the space of several minutes.

Still, Mr. Rosenthal intends to jump onstage and talk with the audience after the show.

"There very well could be attacks from the audience, and he's fine with that," said Love 's director, Dan Fields. "He's ready for it because he believes so strongly in the need to express himself."

Mr. Rosenthal said he considers Love to be a kind of "job interview," and hopes that through the show he can find people who share his opinions. He even thinks it could be the beginnings of a grassroots campaign for public office, even for the U.S. Presidency.

"I should be President," Mr. Rosenthal said. "I should be. I don't need to be. I don't even want to be. But you know, I am willing to be. If enough people decide that they agree with me and they think I'm smart and right and they believe in me, I am willing to be President. I'm willing to be the Democratic nominee for President in 2004.

"And I know, it's like, 'Is he crazy ? Is this guy crazy ?' But I'm telling you, I have no doubt in my mind that I would be a great President. No doubt."

There has been a lot of chattering about Mr. Rosenthal in Hollywood over the past 10 months or so. Many of his colleagues and friends express support and concern, but are reluctant to talk publicly. "I love him. We have been friends a long time. I wish him the best," said Jon Pollack, a Spin City writer. "That's all I want to say. It's personal." Kim Kimbro, who was Mr. Fox's assistant on Spin City and received a copy of Love, said of the play: "I don't think anyone expected it from him." (There is also sympathy for his wife. Mr. Rosenthal said they are currently in divorce proceedings. According to her literary agent, she was traveling in Europe and unavailable for comment.)

Mr. Rosenthal has kept in occasional contact with a small group of people, including Teddy Tenenbaum. "I think people who knew him and see these things going on in his life think he must be crazy, but they haven't spoken to him," Mr. Tenenbaum said. "David seems to be as together as he always did."

But the buzz grew louder after comments from Mr. Rosenthal popped up in the New York Post 's Page Six on July 29 and Aug. 6, followed by a 20-minute interview on the Howard Stern show on Aug. 13.

"I heard from someone that the day he was on Howard Stern, there was some dinner party and [David] was the main topic of conversation," said Eric Horsted, a writer for sitcoms such as Futurama and Home Improvement , who has known Mr. Rosenthal since they were assistants on Anything but Love .

"It's kind of hilarious," Mr. Horsted said. "As much as he's trying to divorce himself from this town, the way this town works, he could continue this bridge-burning campaign and it could make him hotter."

Meanwhile, Mr. Rosenthal also keeps in touch with The Creators. One afternoon, I reached one of the recipients, a 24-year-old woman named Leigh Landau, on her cell phone. She was driving around Memphis in a minivan, shooting a documentary about waiters and waitresses called Serving America.

Ms. Landau said she barely knew Mr. Rosenthal when he offered her the money. Her friend, Marisa Katz, was Mr. Rosenthal's assistant at Spin City . Ms. Landau said her boyfriend at the time thought that Mr. Rosenthal's grant was creepy, but she decided to accept it. She quit her job, and every week she gets a check for $1,000, she said.

"I can honestly say he has changed my life," she said.

Ms. Landau said she didn't think Mr. Rosenthal was crazy.

"When people do something outrageous, people immediately think you are insane," Ms. Landau said. "Although it may be unique to do something this extravagant, I don't think you should be considered crazy ."

A Couple days later, I met Mr. Rosenthal again at the Four Seasons. This time, a photographer was with us. After Mr. Rosenthal posed for a few pictures in the lobby, we walked down to the intersection of Seventh Avenue and West 48th Street in Times Square, where a gigantic billboard for Love has just been erected. Mr. Rosenthal hadn't seen the billboard yet, and he was enthusiastic.

On the way over, Mr. Rosenthal said he hoped people from L.A. would come see his play. "I want those Hollywood fucks to come and sit," he said, excitedly. "Come and hear–if they have the balls to come to the theater and see it."

We arrived at the intersection. There, high above us, was a towering ad for Love, featuring an enormous closed fist. On the side it read: "WARNING: NO ONE UNDER 17 ADMITTED. EXPLICIT LANGUAGE AND SUBJECT MATTER."

"That is awesome, " Mr. Rosenthal said, gazing upward. "That makes me very happy."

He posed for a couple more photos, and then we walked back to the hotel. Seated on a couch in the lobby, Mr. Rosenthal said that the night before, he had met with his parents for the first time in months.

"It went great," he said. "Really nice. Yeah. It's been a tough year for them, you know? Look, my dad was acting out of love and concern to me. He really believed that I had gone crazy. Colossal blunder, but he believed it. And so, yeah, it was very tough … but you know, we sat last night and talked and I have totally forgiven them. I'm totally over it. I have no hard feelings. I think they are great parents and amazing people."

I asked Mr. Rosenthal if he was seeing a therapist in New York. He said no. Had he ever been depressed? "I would say that I have felt depressed, but I wouldn't say I was ever in a depression," he said. "I read that book, Darkness Visible . Who is that guy–William Styron? I don't know that world. I wouldn't put myself in that category." He said he wasn't taking any antidepressants.

Had he ever been suicidal? "No, never, never, never ," he said. "To me, that's the most absurd thought in the universe, the notion of suicide."

No, David Rosenthal said, maybe he was eccentric, even by Hollywood standards, but he hadn't lost his mind.

"I'm perfectly fine," he said. "I'm sane, I'm happy. I'm just passionate about issues." He paused. "Yeah. I'm just a passionate guy. I have strong feelings about things, but no, I'm not crazy.

"I read an interview with Angelina Jolie … where she talks about loving her husband so much she wants to kill him sometime, and it's like, you read that and because she is an actress and a star, it's O.K. for her to say that. But if she was just some woman on the street who said that, you'd think she was crazy. So the irony is that the more famous I get, the less crazy I'm going to seem."

"I didn't see that, but if that's the case, I don't take that seriously," said Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal, adding that the publishing house has been a tiny part of the big empire for a while.

If the $80 billion merger is approved, the proportion of Simon & Schuster's total revenue at Viacom-CBS will shrink from 4.7 percent to 2.4 percent. "It's dwarfed by the billion-dollar units," said Albert Greco, a professor who specializes in publishing at Fordham University's graduate school of business. "They become a smaller player at the corporate level."

"Size is not the only issue," said Mr. Rosenthal. "There are other factors than the size of a unit in any company."

Maybe size matters in this way: Simon & Schuster stands to shrink into a metaphor for the publishing industry.

"Ten years ago, Simon & Schuster felt like it was bigger than the island of Manhattan, and now they feel like an imprint," said Jim Fitzgerald, a former St. Martin's Press editor who became an agent this year with the Carol Mann Agency.

That's the way history has been writing it. "If you look at the largest book-publishing companies, even 10 years ago, they have been increasingly smaller portions of increasingly larger media and entertainment conglomerates," said Robert J. Broadwater, a managing director at Veronis, Suhler & Associates, an investment bank that specializes in the communications industries.

The conglomerates exert certain pressures. "The whole industry in the last 20 years has seen a shift from editorial to marketing and sales," said Robert Weil, an executive editor at the employee-owned W.W. Norton & Company. "Without question, editorial plays a smaller and smaller role. I don't think there are more than 200 editors in mainstream American publishing. What a takeover means is that a publishing company must return big profits very quickly, so as an editor you are turning down good things that could sell 10,000 or 15,000 copies. The big corporations are not interested in those. They want to do very big books." Mr. Weil spent 11 years as an editor at St. Martin's Press, which was purchased by the von Holtzbrinck Group in 1995.

Simon & Schuster's publisher Mr. Rosenthal pooh-poohed the notion that the deal signaled anything but a change for the better. "I think people are excited," he said. "It's a swell deal. There was not a sense of dread. It wasn't like we had just merged with Dow Chemical. I mean, CBS is a swell company with a great tradition."

Some publishing executives think the swell deal is no big deal. "I don't see how it makes any difference if you're 4 percent or 2 percent," said Time Warner Trade Publishing's chief executive Laurence Kirshbaum, whose company met with Viacom this summer about forming a joint venture with Simon & Schuster. "The fact is, this business will go on. As long as the company seems to be functioning well and solvent, personalities prevail over corporate superstructures."

"It might make some difference to the people at the top, because they've got different bosses," said Peter Mayer, who was the chief executive at Penguin for 19 years and now is publisher of the Overlook Press. "Let's say you're small and throwing off large profits, they'll love you, the owners. It all depends on whether the new owner is encouraging of trade publishing or not."

The industry is used to the musical chairs by now. Literary agent Liz Darhansoff, whose clients include Annie Proulx ( Wyoming Stories , The Shipping News ) and Ivan Doig ( Mountain Time ), said she won't stop submitting projects to Scribner, the rather literary imprint of Simon & Schuster. "It doesn't make me feel any differently," she said. "It's the people who are there that matter. For the moment, I'm comfortable. If these deals made a difference, we'd all close up shop."

Born as a publisher of crossword puzzle books in 1924, Simon & Schuster stacked up across 75 years into a global publishing power that appealed to conglomerates. In 1975, the year New York City almost went bankrupt, Gulf & Western bought the publisher. That was before answering machines, before brewed decaffeinated coffee and before the word "synergy" had reached the first tier of the media lexicon. But the idea was there: G&W wanted its Paramount Pictures studio and the nice publishing house to play together. So, too, when Viacom Inc. bought Paramount in 1994 (Gulf & Western had changed its name to Paramount Communications in 1989), it was hoping to raid Simon & Schuster's closet for something that would go well with the silver screen, a game show or perhaps a ride at Great America. Or better, turn pixels into type.

The rationale may be wearing thin. "Synergy works only in classrooms and bankers' offices," said Professor Greco. "It takes years and years to develop those relationships. They've done some things, sure– Rugrats , Titanic , MTV Books–but we're not talking about major undertakings. The only company that was ever able to do this successfully was Disney."

But using Rugrats as a measure of success is hardly reassuring for those who read books. Watching Simon & Schuster become just another page in the annual report is disconcerting, to say the least, for those whose experience of America has been in many ways defined by certain books and the public conversation stimulated by those books. Look at some of Simon & Schuster's backlist: How to Win Friends & Influence People , by Dale Carnegie; The Organization Man , by William H. Whyte; Catch-22 , by Joseph Heller; Lonesome Dove , by Larry McMurtry; All the President's Men , by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward; and Angela's Ashes , by Frank McCourt.

And yet, as one analyst put it, a prestigious backlist can be a swollen asset. "A backlist is great, but it's only worth something if you can find a way to get people to pay you for it again and again," said Mr. Broadwater. "It makes you zero money until you can work it into a product you can sell."

According to publishing sources, Simon & Schuster's chief executive, Jonathan Newcomb, will be reporting directly to CBS Corporation's president and chief executive officer, Mel Karmazin. Mr. Karmazin, a born ad man known for his cost-cutting skills, is both a suit and arguably a creative type. "He's very similar to [the Walt Disney Company's chief executive] Michael Eisner and [USA Networks Inc.'s chief executive] Barry Diller," said Professor Greco. "It doesn't matter whether Karmazin likes books or not, his ultimate concern is return on investment to stockholders."

It remains to be seen how bookish Mr. Karmazin is feeling these days. "I wouldn't think he's interested in Simon & Schuster unless he can sell ads in the endpapers," said one publishing executive. But, said one CBS executive, "There's no question that publishing is part of the content-providing food chain that helps a company make the most of its various ideas and other assets."

Still, industry observers believe that Simon & Schuster is losing its two biggest boosters at Viacom, deputy chairmen Philippe Dauman and Tom Dooley, who will be leaving with laden pockets and will remain on the board.

"Viacom as a whole has been supportive," said Mr. Rosenthal, who never reported to Mr. Dauman or Mr. Dooley directly, and had no comment on their support or lack thereof for Simon & Schuster. "It's a company. It's not about individuals. Viacom has been a benevolent corporate parent. What's going to happen with us, and with any other division, remains to be seen.

"When the other [publishing] divisions were sold, Viacom went to great pains to make everyone here understand that they were an important part of the company," said Mr. Rosenthal. "I think it was a symbol of their interest that Sumner and other key players came to our 75th-anniversary extravaganza. And that synergy between Viacom entities and S.&S. is very strong, be it Angela's Ashes coming out this fall from Paramount or all the children's publishing that continues to tie in with Nickelodeon."

For persnickety observers, one early indicator of life under Viacom-CBS may come Sept. 15, when Scribner is throwing a swishy bash to celebrate the publication of Mr. McCourt's second book, 'Tis . Mr. Redstone is scheduled to be out of town, and so won't be found among the 150 guests munching cheese and crackers in a party space in Grand Central Terminal. There are more than 2 million hardcover copies of Angela's Ashes in print in North America. It fastened itself to The New York Times ' best seller list for 117 weeks. The memoir is published in 25 languages, including Catalan, Croatian and Slovene.

Was Mr. Karmazin invited to the festivities? "No," said Scribner publicity director Pat Eisemann. "When the merger is a fait accompli , we will address updating our corporate guest lists."

The Publishing column can be reached at emanus@observer.com.