In the early hours of Jan. 24, the 51-year-old executive director of publicity and marketing for Knopf posted “The Hierarchy of Book Publishing,” a top-100 ranking of his colleagues and competitors, on his personal Tumblr. Far from a fawning Forbes-style list, Mr. Bogaards’s blog post was a gallows-humor-inflected schematic of an industry in collapse. Books are so screwed, it suggested, that a self-published genre geek (J.A. Konrath, #2), the father of a 4-year-old child who has purportedly been to heaven (Todd Burpo, #4) and the intern running the company Twitter feed (#6) all faced sunnier futures than a feared industry veteran like Andrew Wylie (#11).

A couple hundred publishing-industry observers liked and reblogged the post, including the official Tumblr accounts of Vintage/Anchor, Penguin Press and Pantheon Books.

“It’s funny because it’s true,” Kathryn Ratcliffe-Lee, a HarperCollins assistant, commented.

“AHHHHH PERFECTION,” wrote Emma Straub, the bookstore-clerk-turned-fiction-writer. “And I don’t even get half the jokes.”

But to senior members of the industry, Mr. Bogaards—“Bogie” to friends and colleagues—didn’t quite stick the landing. To them, the power list, rife as it was with personal snipes, more closely resembled a burn book, the wide-ruled repository for a middle schooler’s toxic thoughts.

He called Bill Clegg, the book agent who penned a memoir about his crack addiction, “Stovepipe.” He said New York Times critic Dwight Garner wrote his reviews “juiced, listening to Earl Scruggs.” He imagined superpowered agent Binky Urban (#11) saying, “I wouldn’t take that offer to my maid.” He said nothing of hot-streak publisher Amy Einhorn, per se, but ranked her hair at #3.

This list particularly raised eyebrows for its treatment of women. Next to the names of several, including Word bookseller Stephanie Anderson (#63) and Newsweek editor Tina Brown (#88), Mr. Bogaards added that he “would nail her.”

In Mr. Bogaards’s defense, his book-world libido is gender blind. He would also nail Jamie Byng (#45).

But if one considers the underling who will have to pitch the next big Knopf release to Newsweek, it’s clear the list shared more than its tone with a burn book. It also carries the genre’s thinly veiled self-destructive impulse. Everyone knows such observations are better left unsaid, let alone written down. That’s kind of the point: the thrill of knowing that your thoughts will be known by everyone who never asked for your opinion.

In addition to those who registered their amusement online, there were many who privately rolled their eyes.

“It’s not very Knopf,” one editor sneered.

Others were incredulous, wondering, “How does he still have a job?” and “Who has time for this?”

Still others, women in particular, reacted with “total, utter horror.”

Not on Mr. Bogaards’s end.

“Mostly, people were upset about their ranking,” Mr. Bogaards told The Observer, reached on his ski vacation via email. “‘Why is so-and-so above us?’ Like I’m Comscore.”

All that week, in elevator banks and email chains from Soho and Midtown, editors asked one other, “How is Bogie getting away with this?”

It’s possible he’s not getting away with it. Sonny Mehta, the mercurial Knopf patriarch and Mr. Bogaards’s immediate superior, may simply be unaware of the Tumblr flame out. Mr. Mehta does not use social media and has been out of the country since shortly after it was published. Mr. Bogaards said the two had not talked about it.

But Mr. Mehta has put the brakes on his trolling in the past. Mr. Bogaards had been developing the material in the Tumblr post for months on his Twitter account (@knopfprguy), where he published a mix of PR tips, anti-Amazon bile, and book world fan fiction (imagining what Jeff Bezos and Larry Kirshbaum [#13] would say to each other at the National Book Awards and the like). He amassed 2,000 followers in the process, which is not bad for the publishing industry. In the fall, the stream included a recurring character called Harper Sales Guy, a hard-drinking clown adrift in the digital age.

Did you hear the one about the Harper Sales Guy? He tried to sell his Sony Discman on eBay.

As Mr. Bogaards’s followers speculated about the identity of Harper Sales Guy, Jonathan Burnham, the HarperCollins publisher who would be Harper Sales Guy’s boss, called Mr. Bogaards’s real boss and asked, who is Paul Bogaards and why is publicly trashing my sales guy?

Mr. Mehta asked Mr. Bogaards to reconsider his avatar and Harper Sales Guy became S&S Sales Guy.

If Mr. Bogaards is getting away with something, it’s because, over more than 20 years, he’s proved himself an aggressive and dynamic foil to Mr. Mehta’s Old-World gentility, someone who can be trusted to adapt and react to a rapidly changing business and a powerful publishing figure in his own right.

Mr. Mehta spotted him as a young publicist at William Morrow, where he had led a successful campaign for Michael Chabon’s debut novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh. During the ’80s-’90s heyday of broadcast news, Mr. Bogaards, a tall and boyish-faced redhead, was known as the guy who always got his authors on Charlie Rose’s show.

At Random House, Mr. Bogaards worked in the promotions department, a division Jane Friedman had recently spun out from the traditional publicity shop. Promotions handled television appearances and author tours exclusively; the matter of reviews was left to the longtime department head, Bill Loverd, an elegant peer of Mr. Mehta’s who went over the catalogues with book review editors at his table at the Four Seasons.

Dealing with the television industry’s sharklike producers, Mr. Bogaards developed a brash style that helped Knopf earn the market share its blue-chip roster deserved. Behind Mr. Mehta’s self-effacing politesse, Mr. Bogaards ran big, shameless, TV-driven campaigns for writers like former President Bill Clinton and Carl Hiaasen and earned a reputation for wrangling tough talent.

“He can work with James Ellroy,” said Sarah Weinman, news editor of Publishers Marketplace (and #19). “Not many people can.”

Ms. Weinman herself got a light teasing in Mr. Bogaards’s list but said she enjoys reading his feeds nonetheless.

Boris Kachka, the New York contributing editor who ranked #42, thought his Bogie-given name, “Boris the Butcher” (a reference to his Joan Didion profile), was a bit much, but added that Mr. Bogaards was never too serious when giving him a hard time.

“He quaintly calls that ‘just busting your chops,’” Mr. Kachka said.

To the seasoned industry reporter inundated with press releases, Mr. Bogaards’s no-nonsense style is a god-send.

“I like working with Paul because you always know what he’s saying about a book is straight-up,” Ms. Weinman said. She remembered that Mr. Bogaards’s pitch line for Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman was “It scared the shit out of me.”

Like all good publicists, Mr. Bogaards is strategic and plays a long game.

“He holds a grudge just long enough to have something to hold over on you,” one editor said.

“I have a long memory with the press,” Mr. Bogaards confirmed.

But in an industry so courteous, operating like the press secretary in a gubernatorial race can be divisive.

An editor at a national magazine bristled when her rather formal query for an author interview was returned with “Offline convo” and his phone number.

“Is this guy for real?” she asked.

As the houses clamor to get their titles into the increasingly scarce column inches reserved for book coverage, one editor said that there are only two publicists who retain the clout and the author lists to make journalists come to them: Mr. Bogaards and Jeff Seroy, head of publicity and marketing at Nobelist factory Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Mr. Seroy does not share Mr. Bogaards’s affinity for Twitter and Tumblr, but he does believe they are a key part of the way books are publicized in 2012.

“Every publisher needs to have a full tool kit, that’s for sure. But how we deploy them will vary,” Mr. Seroy said. “It’s just like with authors. Some are ideal for the media and do triple flips off the high board, and some just stay in a cave and write.”

“Bogie is restless and craves attention and is also, from the sound of it, horny,” he went on. “The platform is perfect for him.”

But on a platform where addictive immediacy fuels compulsive intimacy, promotion and self-promotion can quickly become muddled.

“Louise Brockett is every bit as skilled, and you’ll only find her name in the paper when she got married and when she dies,” Mr. Seroy said. “Is Knopf a better digital-age promoter than Norton? I don’t think so.”

Mr. Bogaards wrote that he hopes people take his personal Twitter and Tumblr feeds for what they are: “a curation of industry anxiety.

“Interspersed with humor. And cocktails.”

“I’m probably the poster boy for how not to engage on social media,” he added. “No one should follow my example!”

When Mr. Mehta re-merged Knopf’s publicity and promotions departments in 1999, Mr. Bogaards got the executive director spot, leaving Mr. Loverd a lame duck vice president who retired a few years later. Some took the shake-up as a sign of his closeness to Mr. Mehta. On Twitter Mr. Bogaards suggests a flirtatious rapport (“Email from boss: ‘Bogie, I’m going to fucking kill you. S.’ Love him!”), but others insist that no one is as close to Mr. Mehta—a man so cool Knopf staffers pretend to smoke just to get a private audience at the holiday party—as they would like you to believe.

Although some thought  Mr. Bogaards’s choreographed ascension effectively extinguished the old Alfred A. Knopf culture within the house’s publicity department, in his admiration of Mr. Mehta there’s a certain longing for a bygone era of book publishing.

Even all the talk of whom he would nail suggests a version of the old-boys’ club at yesteryear’s three-martini lunch. Around Knopf, Mr. Bogaards, who lives with his wife and children in New Jersey, has a reputation for playing the alpha male. In the past, he would practice his slap shot in the office, occasionally sending errant pucks down the hall. Now, his Twitter and Facebook avatar is a photograph of a rooster in a metal crate—a caged cock, if you will. Emasculated frustration was written all over the Tumblr post, which described the decline of the publishing industry by deftly using of the implements of its destruction.

Self-publishing platforms like Tumblr enable writers to circumvent the processes that keep publishers in business, but books were never totally about the bottom line. Much more frightening is the fact that they threaten to undermine the publisher’s historic role as culture’s gatekeeper.

Tumblr, Twitter and any other social media that bring authors directly to their readers, unmediated by editors or the magazine journalists whom publicists dispatch to profile them, only serve to dispel the aura of brilliant but imperceptible literary editing that gave the industry its clubby glamour.

It may be that Knopf has let Bogie’s burn book fly as an act of willful ignorance: If they don’t acknowledge it, maybe it will go away. (With any luck, it will take the whole crass enterprise of social media with it.)

The inverse appears to be true, anyway. Giving Mr. Bogaards attention does seem to egg him on. In the Bogie burn book, he snuck in a slight dig at Mr. Burnham, the HarperCollins publisher who tattled on him. The big six publishers collectively ranked #10, but they were individually listed. Mr. Mehta was described as “handsome.” Little, Brown’s Michael Pietsch was “not as handsome as Sonny.” FSG’s Jonathan Galassi got “complicated, a poet,” and S&S’s Jonathan Karp was deemed “a real Yenta.”

“Do they have one at HarperCollins?” Mr. Bogaards wrote where Mr. Burnham’s name ought to have been. “Checking on this.”

Reached via email, Mr. Burnham said he hadn’t read Mr. Bogaards’s Tumblr and so could not comment.

kstoeffel@observer.com

Ms. DeWitt.

The first time Helen DeWitt disappeared was in 2000.

Her debut novel, The Last Samurai, was on the verge of becoming a publishing sensation. It would eventually sell more than 100,000 copies in English and be translated into 20 languages. People told Ms. DeWitt she was a star. Tina Brown, the owner of Talk Miramax Books—the short-lived publishing imprint of her short-lived Talk magazine—wanted to throw her a big release party at the office. Ms. DeWitt did not believe she could handle that. She thought she was going insane and she told everyone as much. “I tell people I try not to go insane,” she said last month over coffee in a diner by Penn Station, a few hours before catching a plane back to Berlin where she currently lives. “And they think it’s funny and then I go insane and they get mad.”

She made it through to the end of the party. She was living in England at the time and had flown in for the occasion, but before that she had put her affairs in order. She gave away her clothes and put her books in storage. She went to the Talk party on Nov. 29, 2000, and after a few days, she left. She got on a train—“my body got on a train” is the way she puts it—got off in New Haven and checked into a hotel. How she spent her days is anyone’s guess. When she speaks about it today, she makes vague allusions to Niagara Falls. She was gone for about two weeks and ended up at her mother’s in a suburb of Washington, D.C. She fired her agent, returned to England and put off trying to sell her second novel.

That novel was called Lightning Rods, and it came out two months ago, with the much smaller press New Directions. She tried at various points over the past decade, but Ms. DeWitt could not get the book published before then. The book should have seen the light of day almost 10 years ago, when it was bought—after lengthy negotiations—by Jonathan Burnham, Ms. DeWitt’s editor and the editorial head of Talk Miramax. He bought the rights and paid Ms. DeWitt her advance, but the novel never surfaced.

Lightning Rods is about a salesman named Joe who fails to sell a single Encyclopedia Britannica and sells exactly one Electrolux vacuum cleaner. He realizes the problem isn’t with him. The problem is with other people. He needs to sell “something people knew they needed anyway.” He sets up a business of contracted female administrative assistants—nicknamed Lightning Rods—that have anonymous sex with the male employees in an office through a glory hole in the bathroom. He says he can convince people that this is a substitute for ordinary sex, and a way of guarding against workplace sexual harassment. The idea sweeps the nation and changes everything. Ms. DeWitt gives the last word of her novel to George Washington: “In America anything is possible.”

Many writers have gone mad trying to finish a manuscript, but Ms. DeWitt, who has a history of depression, is one of the few to lose her mind from the process of trying to publish one. The industry beat her down and wore her out. Mr. Burnham said she was “completely enveloped” in every detail of Last Samurai—from the choice of type to the layout of the page. It drove her to the edge. Like Lightning Rods, Last Samurai had also been bought by one publisher—Rebecca Wilson at Weidenfeld—before being published by another. After reading Ms. Wilson’s comments on the manuscript—“crap comments,” Ms. DeWitt says—she wrote to her agent, Stephanie Cabot, then at William Morris, and said she would commit suicide if she had to keep working with her. She then wrote to Ms. Wilson, thanked her for her comments and informed her she was going away to work on other books. She wanted to “protect her book from the publishing process.” She retreated to a house in Chesterfield in the north of England and started a number of novels; Lightning Rods was the first that she finished.

She wrote it, she said, because she “felt like she was getting fucked from behind through a hole in the wall” by the publishing industry.

Ms. DeWitt was born in 1957. She has platinum blond hair and a youthful face made more girlish by thick-rimmed glasses. She earned her PhD in classics at Oxford, where she wrote her doctorate on propriety in ancient literary criticism, but gave up her academic career in 1988 when she was finishing a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in Arabic poetics. She has varying degrees of fluency in multiple languages, including French, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Russian.

This knowledge informed her debut, which some critics read as a novel about translation. The protagonist of The Last Samurai, Ludo, is an unusually bright boy who is raised by his mother; as a substitute for his absent father, she has him watch Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai (the book’s original title), about a village that hires seven ronin samurai to guard them against bandits. Ludo’s mother refuses to reveal his father’s identity, so he goes on a search for him. The book is a linguistic and aesthetic triumph, seamlessly weaving Greek, Japanese and various other languages into the narrative framework. For that reason, Ms. DeWitt was very particular about the book’s punctuation and typesetting. Greek, with its subtle and significant use of varying accents turns to gibberish if not printed correctly.

In 1998, after Last Samurai’s first deal with Weidenfeld went sour, Ms. DeWitt retreated to the English countryside to write more books; she had given up hope on selling her debut right away. She was at work on several novels, keeping tabs on them by maintaining an elaborate spreadsheet of each manuscript’s title with a word count next to it and the date she expected it to be finished. If she wrote 2,000 words in one day on a given manuscript, she would adjust the date accordingly. After about 10 months, she had finished Lightning Rods. She showed the book to Mr. Burnham at Miramax before she showed him Last Samurai. He wasn’t thrilled by it so she showed him her other book.

“Helen thought Lightning Rods would be very easy to sell and Last Samurai would be very difficult,” Mr. Burnham said. “But I felt that The Last Samurai was a masterpiece.”

He took the novel to the Frankfurt Book Festival, where his hunch proved correct: it quickly became apparent that Last Samurai would be the breakthrough novel of the season.

Ms. DeWitt was looking for an editor who was an intellectual equal and who understood the value of her words. In Mr. Burnham she found someone who at least would give her a contract guaranteeing her the final say on usage. This is very rare. Writers write and editors edit. That is how the publishing industry works. But Ms. DeWitt thought the only way she would remain sane was if she could get Last Samurai into print in two months. She made her final changes to the book’s punctuation and style and sent it off to the copy editor. When she received the 600-page manuscript with the copy editor’s proofs, Ms. DeWitt’s edits had been covered over with whiteout. There were hundreds of changes. “O.K.” was spelled out “okay,” “15” was “fifteen” and so on. “I am Helen DeWitt,” she said. “I wrote this book. You want to write OK as o-k-a-y go write your own novel.” She admits it sounds trivial, but Mr. Burnham himself called her “one of the great talkers and one of the great readers of our time.” She is careful and possessive with her words. Ms. DeWitt had not made a photocopy of her initial edits and had to painstakingly redo them.

“If they had sent a team to my house,” she said, “and just taken a truncheon and smashed my computer and taken my books and stripped the place bare, people would see that as outrageous. But if they just kill the mind that wrote the book, they don’t see that as bad. The point is, once something goes wrong in this particular business, it is very hard to make right.”

It was at this time, near the beginning of 2000, when Ms. DeWitt began to entertain the thought of suicide.

“Joe was the first to admit that he made a lot of mistakes when he started out,” Ms. DeWitt writes in Lightning Rods. “He worried about all the wrong things.” One of his biggest mistakes, Joe says, was thinking that the hardest part would be finding women who would agree to have anonymous sex with their co-workers through a hole in the bathroom wall: not two weeks went by before he’d talked 19 women into believing they were right for the job. The problem was that sex in a bathroom stall felt “clinical and impersonal.” He considers solving this problem by having the woman leave her skirt on so the man can hike it up, but that would compromise the anonymity. He realizes the whole aesthetic is off. For one thing, the toilet would have to go. Joe “seriously underestimated the time he was going to need to get this baby off the ground.”

In 2001, when Ms. DeWitt was living in London, recovering from the depression that had prompted her earlier disappearance, Mr. Burnham had a change of heart about her second book. He made an offer, but Ms. DeWitt turned it down. She didn’t want to deal with the publisher’s world rights department a second time, which was claiming she was still $75,000 in the red for Last Samurai. Mr. Burnham upped the offer to a $525,000 advance for two books. This went back and forth for a while, with Mr. Burnham coming down in the price and eventually offering $400,000 for two books. In addition to Lightning Rods, Ms. DeWitt had proposed a book about poker. “Dealing with the publishing industry was a game of poker,” she said. “Not bridge, where you gather information and use it. It’s a game of lies.”

They negotiated a detailed contract offering Ms. DeWitt technical support for the poker book. The design was to be very specific. But the support never happened. Miramax was breaking up. The lawyer who helped draft the contract, Dev Chatillon, left without briefing Mr. Burnham on it. Ms. DeWitt told him Miramax was in breach of contract for not providing her with the support she needed to make the poker book. Mr. Burnham said he no longer wanted to buy Lightning Rods. Ms. DeWitt walked away with $200,000, her advance for Lightning Rods, which had already been accepted; there was still no published book.

The deal had fallen through and Ms. DeWitt, who was at this time staying on Staten Island, reminded Ms. Chatillon that the stipulations of her contract existed to protect her sanity. Then she once again attempted suicide. “I did not know how to write the books I wanted to write,” she said. She had read that if you took a sedative and tied a plastic bag around your head, you would go to sleep and not wake up. At 4:30 in the morning on May 25, 2004, Ms. DeWitt wrote an email to Ms. Chatillon with the subject line “termination”:

“Please call my cellphone. If I don’t answer you can assume that I am dead; in that case, please call my landlord, Silver Sullivan, and ask him to check my apartment. I have left my mother’s name and phone number by the bed.

It would be helpful if you could also tell Sheila Kohler that I will not be able to come to dinner on Wednesday.”

She wrote to Ms. Chatillon because she thought Ms. Chatillon would be indifferent to the email’s content. Writing to her about the proper disposal of her body was, to Ms. DeWitt’s mind, the same as saying, “I’m going out of town and I left a sirloin steak in the cupboard and it will start to smell.” Committing suicide sounds demented, but almost invariably seems practical to the person wanting to do it. As it turned out, the sedative and bag approach was ineffective. About an hour later she sent a second message:

“This method does not work as well as I’d been told, so I will try something simpler elsewhere. There is no need to call my landlord as the body will not be in the apartment. I will also contact Ms. Kohler.”

Once again, her body got onto a train and she disappeared. Her lawyer contacted her family and friends. As she headed north, she received multiple phone calls, which she didn’t answer. News of her disappearance leaked to the press. The Niagara Falls police department found her a few days later. The New York Times, which in a short article described a “suicidal email message to friends,” printed a comment from Lieutenant Joe Morrison of the Niagara Falls police: “She had a history here,” he said.

Ms. DeWitt had met the literary agent Bill Clegg in 1998, when The Last Samurai was still in the hands of Rebecca Wilson at Weidenfeld. At that time, she was hoping Mr. Clegg could find her a new editor. In 2009, she was reintroduced to Mr. Clegg through the young novelist Ida Hattemer-Higgins. Ms. DeWitt was living in Berlin and working on different writing projects. A short novel, Your Name Here, written in collaboration with the journalist Ilya Gridneff, was excerpted in the literary journal n+1 in 2008. That book never found a publisher, but could be purchased through Ms. DeWitt’s web site. Jenny Turner wrote a nearly 5,000-word review of Your Name Here in the London Review of Books. She said the self-published novel was “like catching a flicker of the future” and praised The Last Samurai as something like “what Joyce and Pound would do with the Internet.” Meanwhile, Ms. DeWitt was becoming widely read as a blogger, cataloguing the grim details of her experience in publishing.

She contacted the defunct Miramax books in 2008 and had it revert the rights to Lightning Rods. Mr. Clegg, now back in the picture, thought he could sell the book in a week to Mitzi Angel at Faber US, but Ms. Angel didn’t think the book was right for her company. Over the course of two months, he sent the novel out to 16 more editors, a checklist of some of the most prominent people in publishing: Hannah Griffiths at Faber UK; Jill Bialosky at Norton; Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown; David Ebershoff at Random House; Andrea Shulz at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Molly Stern at Viking; Lauren Wein at Grove/Atlantic; Gerry Howard at Doubleday; Ethan Nosowsky at Graywolf; James Gurbutt at Constable UK; Nan Graham at Scribner; Dan Frank at Knopf; Anton Mueller at Bloomsbury; Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury; Dan Halpern at Ecco; Sean McDonald at Riverhead. They all turned it down. Most of them liked it; they just couldn’t get over the premise.

Mr. Clegg wanted to resign, but he met once more with Ms. DeWitt, who had flown to New York to show him projects she was working on. She showed him plans for what she calls an “insanely ambitious” novel, the one everyone had wanted from her since Last Samurai. Mr. Clegg was thrilled, but said he wanted to see 100 pages in two months. Ms. DeWitt went to the D.C. suburbs to be with her mother, who required live-in care for about three months after colostomy surgery. Once the surgery was reversed, Ms. DeWitt spent most of her time sitting in intensive care. She did not manage to write 100 pages worthy of submission.

She could not see a way forward. “Fourteen years of publishing crap, no end in sight,” she said. She knew of a 600-foot cliff in Eastbourne. Back in England, she booked a one-way train ticket to Gatwick, an hour from the cliff by train, then checked into a hotel. On Feb. 10, 2010, she sent an email to Mr. Clegg that said, “I’m leaving tomorrow, sorting out a few last-minute things.” She continued:

“… The system strangles the books in the head; it’s not possible to live that way because not living will make someone desperately unhappy.  It goes on too long.   If I had died in 2000 it would have been very simple and clean; the things one does to try to make things work only make it all go on longer.”

Forty minutes later, Mr. Clegg responded:

“None of this—and whatever else is telling you that dying would be better than living—is true, none of it.  As sharply as it may feel so, it is not.   I know, because I reached that black place exactly five years ago.  I failed, somehow, and thank god.  It is snowing today in New York—the fattest flakes against a copper roof out my window.  My brother who is in rehab just called and needed an encouraging voice.  I had lunch with a friend who is having a professional success after years of crushing disappointment.  And you just emailed.  None of these moments would I be here for if I’d left the world when I planned to.”

Ms. DeWitt never made it to the cliff. She sat in her hotel room, smoked, looked at the wall and continued living. It was not long after that when she met with Jeffrey Yang of New Directions. He asked her if he could see Lightning Rods and she said yes.

When Joe’s Lightning Rods business really begins to catch on, he gets a visit from an FBI agent. He thinks to himself: “Holy shit.” The FBI agent, instead of arresting Joe on the spot and shutting down his business, tells him that the public sector is the place where a service like having sex through a hole in the wall is really necessary. People who serve in the public sector, the agent says, “you don’t know when, or how, they’re going to blow.” The bureau would provide a range of locations for Joe to operate his business. They would give him the opportunity to serve his country “and make a profit at the same time.” Joe says, “There comes a time when you have to recognize that you can’t always do things exactly according to plan.”

mmiller@observer.com

Greenman, spelling champion.

The contestants represented New York’s spelling elite. Many of them had whole careers’ worth of spelling behind them, elevated reputations and steady salaries underpinned by the public’s faith in their agility with words.

Now, sitting in two rows before an audience on the third floor of the Standard Hotel, wearing comically large name tags and sparkly bumblebee antennae that bobbled gently as they fidgeted, they awaited the bloodletting. While this particular group might be upstaged by the children on ESPN every year, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Annual Spelling Bee fundraiser is nevertheless a very serious affair.

Ira Silverberg, the dapper silver-tongued literary agent from Sterling Lord Literistic, was the evening’s host. The judge was Jesse Sheidlower, a man whose pinstriped suit, severely trimmed hair and rimless glasses might have passed as a dictionary-editor Halloween costume, if he were not already editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Warming up the crowd, which had just come from a silent auction, Mr. Silverberg asked his co-host what new words would be coming out in the next edition.

“I’m not on the new words team,” said Mr. Sheidlower, flustered.

“Just give us something from the street.”

“Well, the Concise Oxford Dictionary did add ‘sexting,’” he said, then blushed.

The first contestant at the microphone was Jonathan Burnham, the British-born publisher of HarperCollins described by Mr. Silverberg as “a talented pianist, owner of two dogs and a fantastic speller.” Mr. Burnham fulfilled expectations with a flawless execution of the word “reliquary.”

Nancy Franklin, the recently departed television critic of The New Yorker, came next.

“So,” said Mr. Silverberg. “Did you quit your job?”

“I did!” said Ms. Franklin. “I’m leaving my job to not write. I’ve worked for The New Yorker for 33 years.”

“So you started at age 12?” said the charming host.

Her word: “Genealogical.”

“Oh Jesus,” she said, but then rattled it off without error.

The first elimination, however, was not long in coming.

“James Frey!” crooned Mr. Silverberg. “You publishing provocateur! You don’t even write the books, you get kids to write them at the YMCA.” Mr. Frey’s word was “commissariat.”

“It’s going to be a first round exit this year,” he said, sighing. He was right.

The novelist Julia Glass spelled “commissariat” correctly, then Ben Greenman, an editor at The New Yorker, powered through “nacreous” (“made of or resembling mother-of-pearl”). The novelist Bernice McFadden succumbed to “strychnine,” then Francine Prose, David Rakoff and Elissa Schappell all fell afoul of “antecedence,” which most spelled as some variation of “antecedents.” Only Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand finally chose the correct homonym.

“Oh, Simon Winchester,” said Mr. Silverberg to the next contestant, the British author of Krakatoa. “Fancy-schmancy! You’ve always had this posh thing. I like that.” Mr. Winchester poshly spelled “asseverate.”

Thereafter, the casualties came quickly. Meg Wolitzer, author of The Uncoupling, went out on “uncrystallized;” Ms. Simonson fell to “aardwolf;” and Mr. Winchester to “virgule.” Ms. Glass spelled “chary” as “charry.” Both Patricia Marx and Bob Morris misspelled “opprobrium” (although Mr. Morris earned Mr. Silverberg’s opprobrium when he hinted that the host, also Mr. Morris’s husband, would soon be leaving his job at Sterling Lord to a destination as yet unknown). O books editor Sara Nelson succumbed to “wantonness.” Lynne Tillman proved ignorant of “ignoramus.” Finally only Ms. Franklin, Ms. Burnham, and Mr. Greenman remained. The death knell was “pyrosis” or heartburn, which both Mr. Burnham and Ms. Franklin spelled with two “r”s. Mr. Greenman asked for language of origin: Latin. Victory!

Wearing a paper crown decorated with pipecleaners and shaped like a large golden bee and clutching his new copy of the OED, Mr. Greenman looked underwhelmed by his win. “I won before, in 2009,” he said.

Earlier in the evening he had been handing out a small flier for the Occupy Alphabet movement, which read “Why do the top six letters in our alphabet use more than 50 percent of the available space in all spelling? It hardly seems fair.”

Asked if he was a whiz speller as a child, Mr. Greenman said he preferred math. As for his strategy of always asking for the language of origin (including on the word “kibbutznik,” which drew a laugh), Mr. Greenman said, “I just like stalling.”

The next morning, however, Mr. Greenman sent us an e-mail. “I dreamed about spelling, sort of,” he wrote. “I was in some kind of banquet hall and I needed to use the restroom and the doors had M and W on them and the letters were kind of important, there, in the dream. Normally you just find the right one and push on through but I think I had the alphabet on my mind.”

(When Herman Melville was writing Moby-Dick, he wrote a letter to his publisher. “So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket," he wrote, "it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail.’”)

The Hugo Awards for Science Fiction were this weekend! Hurray. And the winner for best novel is... Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra). Best editor goes to Lou Anders at Prometheus Books imprint Pyr and best new writer to Brooklyn's own Lev Grossman. The great thing about the Hugo Awards is that not only do they award best novel and best novella, but also "best novelette", as well as a category called "best semipro zine." Is Girl Crush semipro?

Mike Shatzkin went on NPR's On the Media this weekend to tell us all "What Amazon is Up To." It's a good background on what Amazon is up to.

And Publisher's Weekly looks into the "shady history" of print-on-demand service PublishAmerica, which recently got in trouble with J.K. Rowling for offering to drop authors' books off at her house for her perusal for $49. It turned out Ms. Rowling did not feel like reading all those books.

“I’m so damn, D-A-M-N, nervous,” Ms. Kalman told the judge, Jesse Sheidlower, the soft-spoken editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary.

“If you look at the National Spelling Bee, all of the words are something nobody cares about” Mr. Sheidlower said. “We’re concerned with words everyone knows, but no one can spell.”

The contestants wore sparkly bee antennae and big name tags that hung around their necks. Literary agent Ira Silverberg was the master of ceremonies.

Mr. Burnham—the returning champion—was up first, nailing “leopardess.”

Kenneth Davis—who started the popular “Don’t Know Much About…” series—was knocked out first, stumbling on “bumptiously.”

“Don’t know much about spelling,” Mr. Silverberg said.

“Do these antennae make my butt look big?” asked New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin.

Mr. Frey—who hasn’t made it to the second round for the past two years he’s played—continued his losing streak with “blazonry.”

Then, scandal: Tayari Jones, author of The Untelling, revealed she was using her BlackBerry.

“You were Twittering!” Mr. Silverberg exclaimed, demanding she give up the phone.

“Tweeting,” Ms. Jones said, and handed it over.

“Spell ‘whirlybird!’” Mr. Silverberg yelled. She complied, correctly.

Mr. Musto was not so lucky, putting an “e” in place of the “i” in “dirndl.”

The finalists were authors Ben Greenman, Francine Prose, Ms. Singer and Observer alum Alex Kuczynski. The words came thick and fast: lackadaisical, domiciliary, gazpacho, vilification, brigantine.

“I’d really like to win this award for my newborn baby!” Ms. Kuczynski said frantically. “Oh God! Give it to me!”

But it was Mr. Greenman who prevailed, with an industry term: “colophon.”

Lisa Gallagher, the head of the William Morrow group, has also been laid off, and the division will move under Avon publisher Liate Stehlik.

Much more on the ramifications of this soon. For now, the memo from HarperCollins number two Michael Morrison.

Although he turned out one bestseller after another while working at Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Books from 1999 to 2005, Mr. Burnham was said to be suffering a spell of bad luck at Harper. Anderson Cooper’s book had done well, as did Madeleine Albright’s, but almost every one of Mr. Burnham’s other major undertakings—such as the 992-page novel by Vikram Chandra, for which he’d paid something like $1 million—seemed incapable of catching fire. HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, meanwhile, appeared to be sending big sums of acquisition and hiring money to Steve Ross and his revamped Collins division, Harper’s toughest intramural rival for politics, history and narrative nonfiction titles.

People in publishing wondered: Would Bright Shiny Morning be Mr. Burnham’s last chance?

If the thought had occurred to Mr. Burnham, it had left his head by the end of last month, at which point, according to a source in the HarperCollins building, he began a confident, if not exactly drastic, expansion of his office on the seventh floor. The procedure, now complete, involved the removal of a wall dividing Mr. Burnham’s existing lair from the small one next door that had stood vacant for at least six months.

As one rival publisher put it, noting Harper’s recent “slack” sales figures, “I doubt Jane would have let him expand his office if she was going to can him.”

Mr. Burnham declined in an e-mail to discuss the expansion of his office, saying only that it was a modest enlargement done so he could hold small meetings there instead of in the conference room.

For years, Mary had run an intense daily salon that masqueraded as a small, cluttered, glass-fronted newspaper and magazine shop. Her husband, Fred, sold carpets from the Middle East in the back. And there was a couch. And a piano. Cigarettes. And plenty of white wine. It had various locations and names over the years—it was known as the Fourth Estate for its run at 112 Hudson Street, but neighbors referred to it just as “Mary’s,” for its large, stubborn, glorious white-haired mistress.

What was so wonderful about that salon was that you’d have the local cop as well as a writer, a journalist, an artist, an out-of-work dancer and local property owner, all exchanging a mixture of gossip and political views,” said Jonathan Burnham, senior vice president and publisher of Harper Collins. “It was this mixture of local gossip and larger questions that made it a strangely exhilarating group of people. And Mary was the beating heart of it.”

“Just as Greenwich Village, before it was gentrified, was filled with all kinds of great characters, I think Mary and Fred were two of the last truly great Tribeca characters,” said the actor and producer Andre Gregory. “Their place was sort of like one of the great old places you used to get in Paris, where intellectuals, filmmakers, radicals would meet. She was sort of like this grand hostess, like a queen sitting at the center of this beautiful, funky newspaper place.”

“Mary Parvin is just one of the amazing people of New York,” said the actor and playwright Wallace Shawn. “She’s one of those people that we were lucky to have; she could have been in a lot of different places.”

“In the various places she had stores over years—there was the rug place, the news-cum-coffee place, then the current place—they all were centers for the local community,” said the writer Zoe Heller. “And Mary attracted to her every element of high and low New York. She fed the homeless people; she had actors and artists and real-estate magnates and directors and playwrights. This is not to say she was a beacon of sweetness and light; she had an amazing temper and no embarrassment about dressing people down in public. But she inspired enormous love and loyalty. Her passions ran high, so she loved people passionately and she fought with people passionately, and she often reconciled with people passionately.”

Parvin was also an adopter of people, large and small, who arrived on the shores of Manhattan to make something of themselves.

“It’s very hard to imagine New York with no Mary in it,” said the writer Nick Cohn, his voice scratchy with emotion. “She was just fascinated with the doings of the world. I don’t think that I’ve ever known anyone with a greater appetite for the business of being alive, the daily business of being alive. Which makes it all the harder to do without her.”

Parvin had a way of taking in fledgling New Yorkers and putting the city to work for them.

“I was introduced to her by Nik Cohn, who is a writer who is an old friend of mine from London,” remembered Knopf editor in chief Sonny Mehta. “I was working with Nik on a book called The Heart of the World, and I’d just come to New York and we were spending a lot of time together, and he said, ‘You really must meet Mary.’”

It’s difficult to imagine Mr. Mehta needing a leg up in the city, even 17 years ago.

“She came by to have a drink, and we kind of talked about what it was going to be like living in New York, and I guess other things,” he said.

“Any question I had about my New York growing-up, Mary helped me to answer,” said Rebecca Traister, who is now a writer for Salon. “And we’re talking about stuff like teaching me how to dress to go to weddings or on job interviews. I believe one day she actually literally dressed me in the back of the old shop, when for one reason or another I had to attend the Marine Corps Ball—which was hilarious, since the idea of Mary packing me off to some glorious celebration of the American military is extremely twisted in retrospect. But she did it.”

Steven Van Zandt, who plays Silvio Dante on The Sopranos when he’s not playing guitar for Bruce Springsteen, worked with Mary organizing a benefit in Tribeca for Nelson Mandela when he was first released from prison. “Mary was my favorite revolutionary conspirator, irrepressible and irredeemably uncompromising, unforgiving and unbowed,” he said. “It was easy making history with her. She won’t be missed: Her spirit is alive and well in every cobblestone of downtown Manhattan.”

Mary Hynes Parvin was born on Sept. 16, 1947, in Croydon, a busy backwater on the outskirts of London in Surrey. The daughter of Irish immigrants—her mother was a school cook, her father a miner and construction foreman—she grew up in public housing, a voraciously smart kid. At the age of 11, she won a scholarship to the prestigious Caloma public school.

“At Caloma, she was a riot—very into drama. She would be in a yearly play and would often have a major role,” recalled her younger sister, Madeleine Whale. “And she was very into politics.”

Mary’s daughter, Margaret, traces her mother’s passion for protest politics to her experience as the child of Irish immigrants in 1960’s England.

“I guess that originally we bonded politically, because she identified with Northern Ireland, and it was that time—it was the mid-70’s, so it was a very political time,” said her friend Margaret Ratner Kunstler, a defense attorney and wife of the late civil-rights lawyer William Kunstler.

“In 1968, I had this phone call,” recalled John Cowley, a retired professor of sociology who taught Mary at London’s City University. “I was in this office, and I think I was expecting Mary to come in, and she was calling from Paris, saying, ‘We’ve occupied the British consulate in Paris, so I won’t be seeing you today.’”

Soon Mary uprooted herself and moved to New York. She studied sociology at the New School and waited tables at a pizza joint, Emilio’s, where she fell in love with one of her customers, Fred Parvin. She was the “cute British waitress in a miniskirt,” her daughter recalled; he was the guy who kept coming in to order dessert.

They were married in Fred’s native Tehran in 1971. They had two children as Mary hopped careers, from teacher at St. Joseph’s church to one of Tribeca’s very first real-estate wheeler-dealers. During that time, she helped put Robert De Niro into the Tribeca Film Center —a move that would anchor and inspire the explosion of development that has transformed Tribeca over the past 20 years. Later, as she and Fred focused on their shop, Mary kept a hand in real estate, helping friends find apartments in the area’s rapidly vanishing supply.

But it was as a fiery and charming presence on the perch behind the desk in her shop that Mary burned brightest. “She was just the worst businessperson in the world,” said Mr. Burnham. “They just didn’t take money; they didn’t care about money. It wasn’t a business—or maybe it was a business, but obviously the business didn’t interest them that much. It was a place where you could hold court.”

“I walked in the store,” said Joe Dolce, editor in chief of Star Magazine, “and there was Fred, and she sitting there talking about some event of the day in a very heated way. And I just thought, ‘Who are these two?’ And we just started talking and became fast friends.”

While she cast a jaundiced eye at some of the neighborhood’s glitzy late arrivals, more established celebrities felt comfortable with her.

“John Kennedy Jr. used to hang out there all the time. I think it was one of the few places where he could really relax and feel at home,” said Daily News gossip columnist Joanna Molloy. “When he died, and there was like a flying wedge of reporters all around that store, she wouldn’t say a peep. She was very loyal to him, even in death.”

And when it came to gossip, she knew it all—or indicated that she did.

“I think she knew every local lawyer, every cop, every senior policeman, every property broker,” said Mr. Burnham. “So she would know, before everybody else, who had bought an apartment, or who had lost an apartment, or whose marriage had broken up. Any local news, Mary had it first—she knew way before the media, and she would parcel it out very carefully to people in her store. I knew a good number of journalists who used to come in and hang around and say, ‘Mary, Mary I need something …. ’”

Russ Smith, a columnist for The New York Press, said, “Her friends were legion. She and Fred didn’t have much money, but had tons of friends and were extremely well read. At the time my family lived across the street, in the building where Nobu is the ground tenant. I’m an early bird, and I’d be going down to the deli to get coffee, and she’d be opening up about 6 a.m., and a lot of times I’d help her bring in the newspapers. That was the best time to catch her, because I had her to myself.”

“Her store became this incredible refuge after 9/11,” recalled Mr. Burnham. “A lot of us spent a lot of time in that store in those days, and it became increasingly important to check in each day, to learn what was happening locally. Mary sort of sat there like this Buddha and was the still center of the whirl.”

Not long after 9/11, the Parvins found a new home for their business several blocks up Hudson Street.

And then, at some point along the way, friends became aware that she was ill.

“She was a really courageous woman—and I hesitate to use that word, because these days if you get measles, you’re ‘brave,’” said Ms. Heller. “But she sort of restored some proper meaning to that word. She remained absolutely her kind of ferocious, clever, battling self right up until the end.”

Mary died with her husband by her side on Fidel Castro’s 80th birthday, a fact “she would have loved,” her daughter Margaret said. Her funeral will be held Friday morning at St. Joseph’s church.

There will be a rousing rendition of “The Internationale” and speeches by friends—though those who know her best are all too aware that her fiery eloquence and raw storytelling powers will be a hard performance to match.

“If only she could come back and do it herself,” said Margaret, “because nobody will measure up.”

—Additional reporting by Anna Schneider-Mayerson and Rebecca Dana.

"Flip-flops on Fifth Avenue!" groaned double nominee Michael Kors, his arm around aspiring starlet Molly Sims, whose fringed frock swept the floor. "I'm wearing high heels right now because when you have a model as a date, a guy needs a little height." He lifted up his chunky shoes.

"Bikinis with cellu- leet !" shuddered Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley, who had opted for a teal and yellow muumuu.

"Wearing no clothes," said Martha Stewart, her mouth settling into a firm line. Ms. Stewart was wearing a white satin jacket and black cigarette pants; mercifully, she'd ditched the Birkin bag, arriving with women's-wear nominee Ralph Rucci on her arm instead. For at the so-called "Oscars of the fashion industry," the hottest accessory proved to be the designers themselves. Actress Natalie Portman had a Zac Posen copper flapper dress on her bod and the cream-sateen-clad Mr. Posen by her side (he would go on to win the Emerging Talent statue), while West Side power wife Jessica Seinfeld brought Narciso Rodriguez.

"You can't make no mistakes in fashion," declared hip-hop's Jay-Z, who arrived almost an hour before his alleged girlfriend Beyoncé and was instantly swarmed by eager partygoers. "Fashion is about your attitude, because we all basically shop at the same places, so it's about how you wear something. You gotta wear the clothes, don't let them wear you. I gotta get me a drink now."

What are people excited about wearing this summer?

"Baby barf!" said the singer Seal, who has been playing proud step-papa to luscious model Heidi Klum's 5-week-old baby, Leni.

"I'm just happy if I fit into anything right now," said Ms. Klum, who was poured into a gleaming red Kors gown that puddled around her feet. Encircling her wrist was a delicate rose-gold bracelet with her daughter's name inset in rubies.

"My cheap Chinatown slippers!" said model Alek Wek, swilling orange juice on the rocks.

"I have bought a Pucci bathing suit-I'm very excited about that," said Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour.

The library's ballroom was awash in color, with crystal candelabras and clear vessels of emerald liquid twinkling down long parallel tables. In the foyer, curtains of green crystals hung from the archways. Stepford models had been scattered throughout the room, wearing austere ponytails, blue strappy heels and borrowed fuchsia Marc Jacobs frocks.

Across the street, the inevitable PETA pack was hoisting signs with a photo of an about-to-be-clubbed baby seal, protesting "[Donna] Karan's Killer Look." Ms. Karan was one of the last guests to arrive, after some trouble with the lace overlay on her lime dress. "It's caught on my shoe!" she said, staggering a bit. "I've learned my lesson about lace!" And with that she hurried into the ballroom, leaving those in her wake with an eyeful of black thong.

-Noelle Hancock

Howard's Friends

Dr. Ruth Westheimer was squealing with pleasure. "I love parties!" she yelped as she trotted around the inner courtyard of Tavern on the Green, clutching a glass of Diet Coke with Lemon. "Who would have thought that I'm going to be at a party where there are all these security guards, and where the Mayor's going to come and the Governor, and everybody knows me? Even Cindy Adams knows me! It's wonderful to be Dr. Ruth!"

It was 5:30 p.m. on a steamy Monday evening, and the good doctor was in a state of near-ecstasy as politicians, media moguls, business machers and demi-celebrities from every walk of New York life began pouring into the old Manhattan boîte for one of the year's great schmooze-fests: the 50th-anniversary celebration of Howard Rubenstein's public-relations firm.

The affable septuagenarian, the soirée proved, was capable of being friends with just about everyone. Which is why the party seemed like such a sublime rat-fuck: By night's end, some 3,000 people had crammed the corridors of Tavern on the Green to pay tribute to the father of spin.

"I'm not his client, but still I celebrate Howard," said Dr. Ruth, who was small enough to fit in a pocketbook, and looked like the consummate bubby in her dark slacks, blue-striped silk chemise and sensible shoes.

"I told Howard's wife that I would like someone like him as a husband-but without a wife. I told her because I wanted her to hear it from me, not someone else," she added, before her attention was diverted by a popping flashbulb and she stage-dived into a photograph with Regis Philbin, Cindy Adams (who looked positively hieroglyphic in thick Nefertiti eyeliner) and the man of honor himself, Howard Rubenstein. Later the sly "sexpert" repeated the move just as a photographer was about to snap a rare photo of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Reverend Al Sharpton. Nestled between the unlikely pair, she beamed for the camera like the clueless love child of what might have been the world's strangest political union.

There was Michael Bolton (remember him?), that sensitive soft-rock crooner, talking politics with a gaggle of hard-boiled local electeds in the restaurant's glass-cased rotunda; the craggy-faced Rupert Murdoch squiring Wendy Deng, his youthful wife No. 3, through the crowd of publicists and media vipers; Cardinal Egan rubbing elbows with the divorced Duchess of York.

Indeed, during his 50 years as the city's pre-eminent spin doctor, Mr. Rubenstein (or "Mr. Ruben," as Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert called him during the press-conference portion of the evening) has been nothing if not a master at managing prickly personalities. He has represented Democrats and Republicans, unions and management, a cancer hospital and the Tobacco Institute, somehow stitching them all together into one seamless, if motley, portfolio.

"He is the Gretzky of Rolodexes," said former Mayoral contender Mark Green, smiling at his sports reference. "He's the Great One."

"It's like he's my uncle: He gives me a place where I'm able to be myself," said Duchess Fergie during a fidgety and somewhat depressing speech about the way Mr. Rubenstein had helped her turn her life around after her split from Prince Andrew in 1991. (Among other things, he was the fairy godfather who helped turn her into the Weight Watchers spokeswoman seven years ago.)

"He's gotten me out of many scrapes," she told The Transom a few minutes later, as two Secret Service agents ushered her and her black stilettos out of the event. "My whole life's a scrape."

Indeed, if there was one theme that popped up again and again during the golden-anniversary celebration, it was the 72-year-old spin maestro's uncanny ability to "get people out of problems with the media," as Senator Hillary Clinton put it.

"Now I wouldn't know anything about that," she chuckled as she stood at the podium, a large topiary gorilla looming behind her. "And I didn't meet Howard early enough to have avoided a lot of that. But ever since I did make Howard's acquaintance and develop a friendship with him, it's just remarkable that I've stayed out of trouble as long as I have."

-Lizzy Ratner

Napoleon Complex

Jared Hess, the 24-year-old creator of Napoleon Dynamite -an offbeat comedy to be released in New York on Friday-was recalling the first time the film was screened at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

"I was dry-heaving," Mr. Hess said.

How vivid! He was sitting on June 8 at a sun-drenched table in the dining room of the Essex House on Central Park South.

"I was just pacing outside. I expected to hear crickets. But people laughed from the very first shot to the very end. We got a standing ovation. It was a dream come true."

That dream has brought the Midwesterner to New York for the first time. A little less than five months later, on the eve of the film's release, Mr. Hess appears relaxed and confident, but wholly out of place-wearing a plaid cowboy shirt, jeans and a pair of gray suede New Balance shoes-in the ornate dining room. But it is, after all, the Muse of Not Fitting In that speaks through Mr. Hess. Napoleon Dynamite , about a gangly, bespectacled mouth-breather from rural Preston, Idaho (Mr. Hess' hometown), played by newcomer Jon Heder, is a unique, refreshing homage to the awkwardness of high school, and if the buzz surrounding it is true, it could very well be the sleeper hit of the summer.

The buzz began after that first Sundance screening. Offers from studios-"everyone that I can think of"-began pouring in. His producer's rep, the savvy veteran John Sloss, advised him to hold off scheduling meetings until the end of the second screening the next day. When that time came-before he could say, "Get Harvey!"-Mr. Hess was in a room with what seemed like the entire executive staff of Fox Searchlight Pictures, including president Peter Rice.

"They were all like, 'We love this movie,'" he gushed from behind of a pair of brown rectangular glasses. Mr. Hess, who was in Park City with his wife, Jerusha Hess (who is also the co-writer of the film), said that the Searchlight team seemed "genuine." They outlined how they'd like to market the film and when they'd like to release it. According to Mr. Hess, then they gave him an ultimatum: "We're not leaving until we have this film. And by the way, we have a screening at 5, and if we have to leave and go to that and we haven't closed the deal, we're not coming back for it."

Impressed by their group effort and their track record-especially the success they'd had with the indie thriller 28 Days Later -Mr. Hess, a Mormon who'd only recently dropped out of college, gave the O.K., and Mr. Sloss disappeared into a separate room with the studio's attorney. He emerged, reportedly, with a deal between $3 million and $4.75 million for the film. Mr. Hess has yet to be paid, but he said that was customary until certain "delivery requirements" had been met. He assured The Transom, however, that he'd recently met his contractual obligations and hopes that "the ship will be arriving soon." The film cost $200,000 to make-money producer Jeremy Coon secured through a relative, who will now be reimbursed.

But even though things seem to be working out quite well, Mr. Hess still remembers times on the set when he was more like Napoleon than the next Wes Anderson: "While we were shooting the film," he said, "I was dry-heaving every morning of every day for the two weeks."

-Jake Brooks

Silent Treatment

The Museum of Modern Art never promised you a rose garden, but a garden of some sort would've sufficed for the institution's 36th annual Garden Party, held at the musky Roseland Ballroom on the evening of Monday, June 7.

Ongoing renovation-how long has it been now?-at MoMA's West 54th Street headquarters had forced the revelers from the cool and shady stone yard of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where MoMA clever-clogs usually find themselves when it's time to celebrate.

But MoMA had no problem getting its generous benefactors-the Lauders, the Rockefellers and Agnes Gund included-to slum it for the evening along with the odd celebrity. This year, MoMA honored a very odd one-Steve Martin, the Hollywood man of letters-for his support of contemporary art.

The actor's collection reportedly includes works by Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Edward Hopper and David Hockney.

Sporting a pencil-thin mustache-he's currently playing Inspector Clouseau in a remake of The Pink Panther -Mr. Martin arrived early and alone and quickly parked himself in a dimly lit corner of the ballroom's bar. The Transom had been advised that the actor wasn't talking to press, and indeed Mr. Martin's mustachioed lips were tightly zipped. Attempts to engage were swiftly deflected, thanks in part to an overzealous male chargé d'affaires by his side.

"Here's the problem," said the zealous chargé d'affaires by his side. "He's been shouting on set for a couple of days, and really we're just standing here and not even talking to each other just to save his voice, so I don't mean to be rude," the aide said.

Mr. Martin nodded and appeared to have taken on the look and mannerisms of the socially awkward, poker-faced Inspector Clouseau.

The Transom moved on to another mustachioed, less anxious guest, John Waters. Asked what he made of Mr. Martin's MoMA seal of approval, Mr. Waters was inscrutable.

"I think it's great," he said. "Collectors are honored with everything from having a door named after them in a museum to having their names on boards. He's setting a good example so other movie stars become collectors."

Mr. Waters, himself a collector of "art that makes you mad," was less jovial about his own recent honor, presented to him by the MPAA: an NC-17 rating for his new film A Dirty Shame .

"From whence I came," smiled Mr. Waters. "It's no use in whining. I've had NC-17 ratings in my life for Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos . I personally was shocked this film got one. I lost the appeal. Here we are again: 'NC John.'"

Was this a throwback to the culture wars of the 80's, The Transom wondered?

"I don't speak ill of the dead yet," said Mr. Waters. "Let's give it a week."

-Shazia Ahmad

Nap Time for Nicky

"I need these now," Nicole Kidman announced, placing a pair of squared-off glasses on the bridge her patrician nose. She was about to present a Tony Award to Hugh Jackman for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical. Yet no librarian glasses could hide what was clear to everyone lining the red carpet on June 6: Nicole Kidman was tired.

It was hard not to think of reports that had came out earlier in the day that, after months of editing and 11th-hour additions, nothing and no one had been able to sharpen the vision behind the beleaguered remake of The Stepford Wives , due to hit theaters the following week.

In the end, a three-month production turned into an eight-month epic. "It was a long time, and I don't do well with long times," Ms. Kidman admitted to the New York Post at a press conference held June 3.

Something was very wrong on the set of Stepford -and it was no secret. Since cameras started rolling, rumors have circulated of fighting among the fembots and the men who love them. Specifically, Ms. Kidman and Bette Midler were said to have been at odds, while Christopher Walken reportedly bickered with director Frank Oz, who himself was having difficulties with the Paramount studio heads.

It couldn't help matters that the night of the Los Angeles premiere, Ms. Kidman was busy reading from a teleprompter at Radio City Music Hall, throwing more support behind The Boy from Oz .

"She's been a great supporter of mine," the musical's star and Ms. Kidman's fellow Australian, Hugh Jackman, said later. "I know exactly how busy she is at the moment, and for her to be there tonight just meant the world to me."

Even Ms. Kidman's Stepford husband, Broadway star Matthew Broderick, attended the premiere, leaving real-life wife Sarah Jessica Parker to present the Tony Award for Best Musical with his Producers partner, Nathan Lane.

Yet Ms. Kidman stood by her man-her countryman, that is-whom she'd met through his wife, Australian soap star Deborra-Lee Furness. A longtime friend of Ms. Kidman's, Ms. Furness even offered up her couch to the fluffy, strawberry-haired ingenue when she first moved to L.A.

Now more than a decade, a marriage, two kids, a divorce and one embattled movie later, that same hair was blond, blown straight and anchored back in a taut ponytail.

Glasses on, a decidedly sharp expression on her face, Ms. Kidman announced her friend as the winner. A short, businesslike congratulatory kiss followed.

"[Nicole] said to me, 'If it's not your name, I think I'm going to read yours out anyway,'" Mr. Jackman later recalled fondly to The Transom. "So I would have had a Tony for about 30 seconds before someone came and took us all to jail."

At least she could have gotten some rest.

-N.H.

Rocky's Road

Here's a way to beat the tedium of being an editorial assistant: call up the head of a rival publishing house and tell him you're feeling like your life is all work and no recreation. Explain that you're a singer, looking to get back into practice. Maybe he wants to get together and jam sometime?

That's how Rakesh Satyal, a 23-year-old who works in the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group of Random House, got to know Jonathan Burnham, a classically trained pianist and the president and publisher of Miramax Books.

"I was having lunch in the city one day with Edmund White, who was my creative-writing teacher at Princeton, and he suggested that I contact his friend Jonathan," Mr. Satyal said. (Mr. Burnham spent several years as editorial director of Chatto & Windus, which publishes Mr. White's books in the U.K.) "I felt all right doing it because I had a legitimate point of connection, but I was kind of expecting him to say no."

Mr. Burnham's improbable acquiescence led to the birth of a cabaret act called "Rocky and Johnny," in which Mr. Burnham accompanies Mr. Satyal in a program of show tunes and jazz standards by the likes of Gershwin, Bernstein and Elvis Costello.

Last Wednesday at Danny's Skylight Room, in Danny's Grand Sea Palace, a restaurant where "Bangkok meets Broadway" on West 46th Street, Rocky and Johnny were scheduled to perform at 9:15. The décor was more Thai than nautical: ginger-colored tablecloths, black lacquered chairs, glass panels with etchings of lilypads and carp. By 9:11, there were 15 people in the crowd: a trio in town from Miramax's London office, a friend of Mr. Burnham's and her daughters, a couple from Bloomsbury, plus six friends of Mr. Satyal's from college. No one was sure about the balding guy with the magazine.

"If they don't show, we'll wait another five," a technician said as he consulted the guest list. The small group tried to figure out how to meet the $10 food-and-drink minimum without going over it. Coronas, mostly, though the couple took the cheesecake.

Mr. Burnham, an urbane, well-built man in his 40's, peeked out from the stage door, which doubled as a bus station. Minutes later, Mr. Satyal, who has a slim frame and an excitable manner, emerged from behind a curtain and made his way to a stool in the center of the stage. He was wearing a navy pinstriped suit with a crisp shirt and tie. His hair was parted far on the side, and it looked Brylcreemed, like Mr. Bean's. He apologized for having a cold, which he'd contracted, he explained, trying to paint an apple-tree mural on the wall of his apartment.

"When I'm singing, I'm Nina Simone; when I'm speaking, I'm Joan Rivers," he warned.

In spite of his sinus problems, Mr. Satyal launched into a snappy love song called "All I Care Is About," in a deep yet fresh voice that was startlingly good. His soulful delivery sometimes seemed at odds with the flightiness of his monologues (Madonna! Star Jones! D.I.Y. interior design!), but Mr. Burnham, playing with a tucked chin and bobbing shoulders, followed his partner's fluctuations expertly. A dusky blue light came on, and Mr. Satyal sang Fiona Apple's "Slow Like Honey," kneading the vowels with his voice until "honey" sounded more like "home." The girl from Bloomsbury began to reach for her companion under the table. The room was entirely still-save for the sound of the busboy emptying beer bottles-as he hit the reaches of his falsetto.

The duo practices about every other week, usually on Sundays, at Mr. Burnham's loft in Tribeca, where he keeps a baby grand. Their tastes in music complement each other: Mr. Burnham knows the old stuff, and Mr. Satyal introduces him to singers and songwriters like Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainright. Then there was the Enya Incident.

"I assured Rakesh that this was the only time this particular artist had ever been played in my apartment," Mr. Burnham remembered.

Occasionally, the talk tends toward their day jobs-"We'll talk about proposals we've both seen, and who's taken what and who's rejected what," Mr. Satyal said-but more often, it doesn't.

"The relationship is really through the music," said Mr. Burnham, who, as a student until he was "about 30," earned extra money playing cabaret in bars in places like Oxford, Paris and Venice. And while Mr. Burnham allows that the group, thus far, has drawn a largely literary following, he decried the notion of Rocky and Johnny as a niche act.

"I don't want to make it a mandatory office thing to come," he said. "And we're trying to get it to be more than a publishing crowd."

Mr. Burnham continued to play quiet foil to the star as they reached Mr. Satyal's favorite part of the set, the "Moon River"/"Fly Me to the Moon" sequence, which provoked a flare of a grin from Mr. Burnham, who had spent most of the monologue shuffling through his music and trying to look serious. It was the "Mr. Cellophane" (from Chicago ) finale that had the audience laughing hardest. Mr. Satyal feigned haplessness with real talent as he slumped and pouted and sang, "Mister Cellophane / Shoulda been my name / 'Cause you can look right through me / Walk right by me / And never ever know I'm there."

Mr. Burnham left quickly after the performance, but Mr. Satyal stuck around talking to his friends, several of whom were old a cappella buddies. "Hey-somebody left a full drink," one of them observed, pointing to a watery vodka cranberry at the Miramax table.

-Lauren Collins