Who’s Answering the Phone?

Results of phone calls to offices of publishing executives as of 4 p.m. on Friday, August 12:

Daniel Menaker, executive editor-in-chief, Random House: no answer

Bill Thomas, editor-in-chief, Doubleday-Broadway Publishing Group: no answer (voice mail indicated he’s on vacation until August 29th)

David Hirshey, executive editor, HarperCollins: no answer

Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief, Read More

Another Erotic Memoir—This One Starring a Pouty Teen

100 Strokes of the Brush

Before Bed, by Melissa Panarello, Grove Press, 176 pages, $22.

Contrary to what you might expect, 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed has almost nothing to do with hair-maintenance. The artfully obscured young thing on the cover of this book (she’s brushing a chunk of hair across her face) Read More

Big Boff at Frankfurt Hof

Every year, New York’s publishing world issues a collective complaint about the zoo-like nature of the fall Frankfurt Book Fair, the feeding frenzy of foreign-rights directors, agents and publishers who come to this dreary German city to do face-to-face what they do by fax and e-mail throughout the year: buy and sell the rights to Read More

A 9-Inch Book on a Big Topic, Unillustrated, Alas

The Book of the Penis , by Maggie Paley. Grove-Atlantic, 242 pages, $20.

Maggie Paley has taken the source of human greatness, power and passion, our capacity for nobility and forbearance, our sense of beauty, our capacity for art, our longing for the poetic, our connection with the infinite, the inspiration for voyages to the Read More