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.

Markham, in better days.

Pity the plagiarist! Especially if he has written a thriller, and the books he copied from are James Bond novels and books by Robert Ludlum. That's what Quentin Rowan, who writes as Q.R. Markham, has done. Today Little, Brown recalled his debut novel, Assassin of Secrets, from the shelves of bookstores across the country, offering refunds to those who have already bought and now would like to return his book.

Earlier today Publishers Marketplace's Michael Cader reported that Mr. Rowan is part-owner of Spoonbill & Sugartown, the Bedford Ave. bookstore that keeps Williamsburg weird. We called and spoke with the owner, Miles Bellamy, who said that Mr. Rowan was not really an owner, just a "small investor." Mr. Markham/Rowan referred to himself as a co-owner just a couple weeks ago on HuffPo, but that's only as good as his (borrowed) word.

"There are a lot of different people who have supported the bookstore over the years," said Mr. Bellamy, who declined to comment further. According to a Facebook invitation, Spoonbill & Sugartown hosted Mr. Markham's spy-themed costume party in honor of the book's release last week.

Edward Champion has started to compare some passages of Mr. Rowan's book with passages from books he lifted from, and it does not look good.

Playing Scrabulous on Facebook! Following the Lynn Hirschberg/MIA feud on Twitter! Watching Real Housewives of New Jersey!

Also: having dinner with international writers and plowing through the galleys for Jonathan Franzen's unreleased novel Freedom.

Oh, well.

It was an issue that would have been good to square away before the memoir's publication. The fact that amends were never made would surely leave Mr. Clegg—who has been an agent at William Morris since his return to publishing four years ago—vulnerable to some pretty bad PR, when reporters writing potentially helpful fluff pieces started calling around asking questions.

So, in a meeting at Little, Brown offices with Mr. Clegg and agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Mr. Pietsch brought up the question of apologizing to Ms. Burnes. The expectation after that meeting was that Mr. Clegg would reach out to Ms. Burnes.

But the years-long silence from Mr. Clegg continued for at least a while longer, say two sources close to the situation: In a subsequent conversation with Ms. Burnes, Mr. Pietsch expressed dismay upon learning that Mr. Clegg still had not contacted her.

Ms. Burnes received an email from Mr. Clegg shortly afterward.

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, which Little, Brown published this week, recounts Mr. Clegg's double life as a literary golden boy and drug addict: His world of book parties and supportive relationships includes periodic breaks for crack and Ketel One in the high-end hotels of Manhattan. This balancing act falls apart over the course of an extended binge, wreaking both personal and professional havoc.

In the book, Mr. Clegg describes dissolving his business with Ms. Burnes—pregnant at the time and preparing to go on maternity leave—via email: "Before I press Send, I look out the window at the thick flakes of snow coming down in slow motion between the buildings and think I am doing her a favor. Giving her permission to get out and move on. I feel next to nothing as I end our partnership, our business, my career."

Burnes & Clegg, the boutique agency that the two had founded, shuttered. Their authors scrambled for new agents, and the new agents scrambled to make sense of Mr. Clegg's deals. Ms. Burnes went to the Gernert Company. After rehab, Mr. Clegg took a job with Ms. Walsh at William Morris Endeavor.

"Bill welcomed the opportunity to make amends," said Ms. Walsh, who is Mr. Clegg's agent as well as his boss. According to her account, Mr. Clegg only learned it was a possibility in the meeting, from Mr. Pietsch. She said that Mr. Clegg's previous understanding had been that Ms. Burnes wanted no contact with him, a wish that her lawyer had conveyed in the aftermath of their company's dissolution.

"It was unbelievably sympathetic," said Ms. Walsh of the conversation that took place with Mr. Pietsch. "It was not a ‘you should do this' by any stretch of the imagination."

Mr. Pietsch was on vacation and could not be reached. Neither Ms. Burnes nor her colleagues and the Gernert Company would comment; and in an email, Mr. Clegg declined, as he has every time anyone has asked, to speak about Ms. Burnes.

Mr. Clegg touches on the subject of amends and forgiveness only delicately in his memoir.

"There is a time, much later, when I imagine what it was like for everyone else, those who were by blood, accident, or inclination involved," he writes. "At first I'm consumed with shame and guilt and regret, but slowly, with the help of kindred spirits, these feelings evolve, are still evolving, into something less self-concerned."

“You’re not giving these away?” asked a hopeful young woman from an educational publishing company.

“Well,” replied publisher and editor in chief Jonathan Karp, “who are you?”

He handed over the desired books—on the condition that she recommend them to everyone.

Karp said that there was a “wonderful randomness” to the scene at BEA.  Also, he added, between the crowds and the venue and the constant rush, it was “as close to athletics” as the publishing world gets.

“A photographer almost punched me out,” he reported.

Agent Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company shepherded Harbach's book through what publishing industry sources say was "an old-fashioned auction"--stretching from Wednesday to Friday and involving eight imprints, seven bidders, and a final price in the mid-six-figures.

Harbach is the third n+1 editor to prove his sad young literary manhood with a novel. Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision came out in 2005, and Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men in 2008.

Harbach's book centers on a Wisconsin liberal arts college and the lives that intersect around its baseball team. There's a gifted shortstop with a psychological block, a college president in an unlikely relationship, and the president's daughter, fresh from a failed marriage. It's about baseball and so much more, insists everyone who's seen the book.

It would seem so: the excitement extended even to scouts for foreign publishers, who were evidently undaunted by the prospect of getting Europeans to read a baseball book. But hey: if Netherland can make Americans care about cricket, why not?

According to several sources, Ms. Kantor's book will draw on the three years of reporting she has done since giving up the editorship of The Times' Arts & Leisure section, in 2005. During the campaign, Ms. Kantor produced a number of biographical stories about the president and his inner circle, including one on his time at the head of the Harvard Law Review, one on his career as a law professor, one on his basketball-playing and one on how his friends were bracing themselves for his presidency.

This follows the Times Magazine cover story that Kantor wrote on the Obamas' marriage last month.

The Observer has learned that Chuck Todd—the defiantly goateed newsman who serves as the chief White House correspondent and political director for NBC News—has sold a book proposal to editor Geoff Shandler of Little, Brown about the first few years of Mr. Obama's presidency.

In January, Vintage published Mr. Todd's first book—which he wrote along with NBC director of elections Sheldon Gawaiser—called How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election.

According to Mr. Todd's agent, Matthew Carnicelli of the Trident Media Group, Mr. Todd's new book will be a "nuanced analytical narrative" focusing on the political relationship between President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Carnicelli noted that if things go according to plan, Mr. Todd will be delivering the manuscript to his editor in the summer of 2011 for a likely mid-2012 publication.

"Chuck has met with Clinton and Obama on a number of occasions," Mr. Carnicelli wrote to The Observer via email on Monday afternoon. "Indeed, few other journalists in DC or New York have the type of access he has."

Novelist Carolyn Parkhurst, bestselling author of The Dogs of Babel and Lost and Found, has moved from Little, Brown to Doubleday, where she is now under contract for a two-book deal that one knowledgeable source said is worth $1.3 million.

According to Alison Rich, Doubleday's director of publicity, Ms. Parkhurst's first book for Doubleday will be called The Nobodies Album, and it is scheduled for publication in 2010. Her editor will be Alison Callahan.

Ms. Rich declined to comment on Ms. Parkhurt's advance, citing corporate policy.

The deal was brokered by literary agent Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic.

Why did Mr. Wolfe leave his home? According to FSG editor-in-chief Jonathan Galassi, it was a question only of money.

"We just couldn't agree on the price for the project. That was the only thing," Mr. Galassi said. "We love Tom. He's a big part of the family here. It's sad, but there are certain things that are just determining."

Mr. Galassi said he read about 20 pages of Mr. Wolfe's book when Lynn Nesbit--Mr. Wolfe's longtime literary agent--submitted it to him in early December. Ms. Nesbit, who could not be reached for comment, took the book elsewhere when it became clear that an agreement with FSG would not be reached.

Mr. Wolfe's editor at Little, Brown will be Pat Strachan, who worked with him on Bonfire of the Vanities and five other books while she was an editor at FSG during the 1970s and '80s.

When Ms. Strachan left FSG in 1987 to become a fiction editor at The New Yorker in 1988, Mr. Wolfe started working with Mr. Galassi, who had been named editor-in-chief of the house earlier that year. Mr. Galassi worked with Mr. Wolfe on his last three books, starting with the 1998 novel A Man In Full.

Mr. Wolfe's upcoming novel--slated for publication in 2009--will be set in Miami, according to a press release from Little, Brown, and will consider issues of "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition."

The cast of characters, according to the release, includes "a young nurse of Cuban ancestry married to a famous French-émigré sex doctor, a freshman journalist on the trail of a Russian-mob-comes-to-Miami story, his wary editor, a second-generation Cuban police officer, a woman of Haitian background who passes for Anglo, and dozens more."

Mr. Strachan, Ms. Nesbit, and Mr. Wolfe could not be reached for comment.