According to the notice on Publishers Marketplace, Anonymous: Tales From Inside The Accidental Cyberwar was "pitched as Barbarians at the Gate for the digital era" and tells "the story of the ordinary people who became hacker-activists and successfully brought down government agencies and multinational corporations around the world." Anonymous recently secured local notoriety by releasing the personal data of pepper spraying New York City Police officer Anthony Bologna.

Given the subject matter of their book it's interesting that Mr. Housh and Mr. Brown went with Amazon Publishing, which in the past has demanded that in exchange for author-friendly royalty rates and large advances all digital books be sold exclusively through the Kindle, or through the Amazon store for the iPad or other devices.

Dan Conaway, the Writers House agent who represents Mr. Housh and Mr. Brown, confirmed that "digitally, Amazon’s policy is that they’re available for Kindle only but they’ll be producing physical books as well that will be going to as many retail outlets as possible." [Update: After this blog post was published, Amazon spokesperson Sarah Gelman wrote to inform us that Mr. Conaway was incorrect and, "we intend to make this book available for sale for other e-readers." She did not specify which ones.] He added that Ms. Cheiffetz's digital literacy was another selling point: "Julia Cheiffetz has a deep understanding of the digital space both in terms of publishing and in terms of the philosophical ethos that is the underpinning of this book."

Not that you were going to buy the book. What is Anonymous good for if not ensuring a quality pirated copy of its own biography?

What was less expected was Amazon Publishing's latest move: hiring one of the editors of The Believer to acquire fiction for the imprint. Ed Park, whom The New York Times once called "The Wizard of Whimsy", will now represent the literary side of the Seattle company's New York publishing house. His hire indicates that Amazon will be competing with publishers in all kinds of books, not just in the realm of bestselling megabooks, and also that the company is willing to look beyond the ranks of traditional publishing employees in its hiring. Mr. Park, as far as we have ascertained,* does not have a background at one of the Big Six houses. In addition to being a founding editor of The Believer and a novelist, he has worked as an associate editor for The Poetry Foundation and an editor at The Voice Literary Supplement.

Mr. Park is the fourth big hire at Amazon Publishing, following David Moldawer, who was hired as a senior editor from McGraw-Hill, Julia Cheiffetz, who was hired as editorial director from HarperCollins and Larry Kirshbaum, who was named publisher back in May. If these four have something in common, it's a relatively strong interest in social media (which in the context of publishing basically means they have Facebook pages or blogs, but still) and some possible motivations for being frustrated with traditional publishing. Ms. Cheiffetz worked at HarperCollins imprint Collins HarperStudio, which quickly folded after launching with much fanfare; Mr. Moldawer left his previous job after less than a year there and Mr. Kirshbaum went from heading Time Warner Books to running an agency, where he realized his attempts to be both publisher and agent would be "cleaner" if he just went into digital publishing.

This is also not the first time Ms. Cheiffetz has placed a vote of confidence in Mr. Park: back in 2007, she acquired his novel Personal Days in a pre-empt for Random House.

*Regarding our questions about Mr. Park's hire, Amazon's spokesperson replied, "We don’t have anything to share yet on the new hires, so we’ll decline the interview at this time."

Julia Cheiffetz, an editor at the HarperCollins imprint, made the announcement on the company blog this morning in the form of a brief Q&A with Mr. Layne. The book is described there as "a history of California’s culture, environment and politics framed by his bravely idiotic solo hike up the entire 1,000-mile coastline of America’s weirdest, most populous state.”

Mr. Layne, who has been a blogger at Wonkette on and off since 2006, has apparently considered and rejected more than one book idea over the years.

"Before this was a book idea, it was just something I planned to do after the completely exhausting 2008 campaign and election," Mr. Layne is quoted as saying in the interview. "And then I started thinking about how nice it would be to collect strange tales and stories at such a leisurely walking pace, in this fantastic setting with the pounding Pacific and the beach towns, the enclaves of the ultra-wealthy and camps of the homeless, the stretches of wilderness and military bases and railroad track, Mexican drug shipments rolling ashore on lifeboats, toxic harbors and sewage lagoons, and a million-dollar ocean sunset every day."

The book will be called The Left Coast, and will be published some time in 2010. 

We'll update after we get Ms. Cheiffetz on the phone and find out more about how the project came about.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Sicha said the as-yet-untitled book will follow a group of 20-somethings as they try to make their lives in a city that doesn't work the way it once did.

"It used to be, you came to New York and you got a job as an assistant, and sooner or later you got to have part of your boss’s job and you moved up," Mr. Sicha said. "There was sort of a continuum. There was a thing called a career in New York."

Not anymore. 

"For me, what the recession for young working people reminds me of is H.I.V. in the early '90s, when my generation of gay men decided there wasn’t much of a future," Mr. Sicha said. "I feel like I hear from people now, and they’re like, 'Fuck tomorrow!' Which seems completely reasonable to me. And whether that’s based on a real understanding of the economy or on what we’re getting through the filter of the media, it doesn’t matter–it’s a completely appropriate response to the moment we’re in."

Mr. Sicha said he is in the process of choosing his young subjects. He said he has so far been focusing on gay men ("I feel like New York City is ... powered by gays in many ways") but planning to cut a "broader swath." According to his editor at HarperStudio, Julia Cheiffetz, he will eventually settle on four main characters and follow them for a year as they go to work, go out, go to parties, look for love and generally think things through.

Ms. Cheiffetz said the idea for the book came out of a series of informal conversations the two of them had about “the death of New York.” The first of these, she said, took place in January, shortly after Mr. Sicha's boyfriend was laid off and a few months after Mr. Sicha himself lost his job as editor-at-large of Radar when that magazine closed.

Mr. Sicha is 37, and he has spent the better part of the past decade working as a journalist: first as a freelancer, then as editor of Gawker, then as an editor at this newspaper, then as editor of Gawker again. During that time (his last stint at Gawker ended in November 2007), he distinguished himself as the blogosphere's first native poet, and in so doing helped pioneer many of the stylistic and attitudinal conventions that have come to define the form.

It was in part Mr. Sicha's origins in blogging that have kept him from writing a book up till now, despite the encouragement of his longtime literary agent, PJ Mark of the firm McCormick & Williams. 
 
"I was always insanely resistant to writing a book," Mr. Sicha said. "I wanted to write things that were good for about eight seconds and disposable—things that were true and then just disappeared. And I think there’s something really wonderful about that. It’s sort of the opposite of writing a book." What changed, he said, is he started noticing things happening in the city that he felt compelled to describe for posterity. "I’ve become obsessed with this topic and what’s going on now," he said. "There should be some sort of document about this that’s not ephemeral." 

Mr. Sicha has lived in New York since 1994, having grown up outside of Chicago and spent his late adolescence doing this and that in San Francisco. When he arrived here, he rented a room in the East Village for a couple hundred dollars a month and worked part-time helping to conduct psychiatric research at Kings County Hospital.

He remembers feeling like the city offered him unlimited possibilities—that if he wanted to have access to something, he could. This much, he believes, has not changed.

"If you’re fascinated by something you can get close to it—that’s always been true about New York," he said. "But I also feel like the $1.99 breakfast sort of went away, and the room for rent in the East Village went away, too. The cost of entry became prohibitive with the last little boomlet we had, in a kind of extreme way." He went on: "I had a million jobs when I moved here, and what I see happening among my younger friends, and among people I’m interviewing who are kind enough to give me their time, is there’s nowhere to go."

Asked how he plans to avoid the pitfalls he described in a 2008 Observer column about how contemporary male writers had grown too enchanted with their own inner lives, Mr. Sicha said he probably wouldn't, and that in the end his book would "just be a series of unreported personal essays about my feelings."    

But, no, seriously, he said: "I am going to try to avoid looking at people's lives through 'the lens of the self,' as they say. I am going to try to do this crazy thing that people used to and sometimes still do, which is to write about actual other people!"