Mr. Bowden at Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.

In a bit of holiday-appropriate news, The Atlantic national correspondent Mark Bowden has sold a book about the death of Osama Bin Laden to Morgan Entrekin at Grove/Atlantic, reports Publishers Marketplace. The book, to be published in October 2012, is "an account of the Bin Laden strike written in Bowden's signature 'you are there' style, going inside the war room as decisions were made and onto the ground as directives were executed." It's titled The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden.

The Finish seems ripe for cinematic adaptation—as Mr. Bowden's career-making book, Black Hawk Down, was—but any movie version would likely have to compete with The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal's film on the same subject.

Their adaptation of President Obama's greatest military victory, due out in December, has been the source of political controversy since Rep. Peter King alleged that the White House gave the filmmakers access to classified information. Documents obtained by Judicial Watch in May showed that the filmmakers were given access to a member of the U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 and the C.I.A. Vault.

Here's hoping Mr. Bowden's been treated with similar hospitality.

The departures, along with the widespread knowledge that Bloomsbury’s parent company in Britain had become dangerously unstable when the hyperlucrative Harry Potter series came to an end, moved many in the publishing industry here to wonder whether the leadership over in London might just shut the American colony down, letting history remember it as a bold but finally botched experiment.

Instead, Bloomsbury USA is headed into 2009 with George Gibson, its optimistic and well-respected new publishing director who believes that the painful convulsions his industry suffered this year could actually give his damaged outfit an advantage over its larger competitors, as the scrappy editors who’ve chosen to stay there turn up the dial on acquisitions and work energetically towards renewal.

“The combined talents that we have here now have allowed us to regain our footing as a publisher,” Mr. Gibson said. “I actually think we're publishing better than we ever have right now. It took a while, but how could it be any other way? We had a lot of challenges and we were scrambling a bit, but I think now we have really found our footing again.”

One of the reasons Mr. Gibson has to be optimistic, he said, is that the prices agents are asking for books appear to be falling, which means houses of Bloomsbury’s size—not tiny ones like Graywolf or Akashic Books, but not enormous ones like Random House either—might soon see a leveling of the playing field that would allow them to compete for books that less than a year ago would have been out of their price range.

“There are indications that prices for books are coming down,” Mr. Gibson wrote in an e-mail. Big publishers have grown more risk-averse than they used to be and so they're more likely to save their money in anticipation of a Tina Fey or a Sarah Silverman proposal than to spend it incrementally on a bunch of risky books that might hit but probably won’t. As a result, according to Mr. Gibson, big publishers “take their eyes off certain mid-list titles,” giving Bloomsbury has an opportunity to swoop in and stake out interest in them with less interference than they used to expect. “I do think we'll be able to buy some books ... that would otherwise have gone beyond our comfort level,” Mr. Gibson said, “and those books will become lead titles for us.”

Mr. Gibson finds himself in the role of Bloomsbury’s surrogate sort of by accident. Originally, he was just in charge of Walker & Company, a tiny house founded fifty years ago that Bloomsbury USA bought in a fit of expansionism for a reported $6.5 million during a bullish winter in 2005. For the first forty or so years of its life, Walker published mainly to the library market, but the 1992 passing of its founder, Samuel Walker, set in motion a chain of events that would, a year later, conclude with his son, Ramsey Walker, giving Mr. Gibson control of the publishing program with a mandate to clear away the spiderwebs and bring it in line with contemporary publishing realities.

For Mr. Gibson, that meant turning Walker into an underdog destination for an idiosyncratic sort of narrative non-fiction and popular history, and during the 12 years he ran Walker prior to Bloomsbury ravenously swallowing it in 2005, the company made a name for itself by publishing titles like Dava Sobel’s Longitude, Mark Kurkansky’s Cod, and Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma. The house became the laboratory for the subgenre that would come to be known as “microhistory,” since become the cloying playground of bored journalists looking for book ideas.

One must assume that that legacy was at least part of the reason Karen Rinaldi and her boss across the Atlantic, Nigel Newton, were so keen to integrate Walker into Bloomsbury’s American publishing program. And yet, Walker did not own paperback rights to any of its biggest titles, as Mr. Gibson had sold them for cash to other houses without realizing how lucrative they would later turn out to be.

“Had I to do it all over again, I wouldn't have sold any of the rights,” Mr. Gibson said. “The leverage of paperbacks is huge. If i knew then what I know now I would have held on to them.”

It’s unclear, in light of the fact that he didn’t, what exactly Ms. Rinaldi and Mr. Newton thought they were going to gain from the acquisition of Walker, or how they saw it helping Bloomsbury to grow the way the parent company’s shareholders expected it to.

Mr. Gibson, for his part, said the Bloomsbury people knew full well while they were evaluating the potential sale that while the paperback rights to most of its top titles had been sold to other publishers, in due time those contracts would expire and Walker--and thus Bloomsbury-- would get them back. Just this year, Mr. Gibson said, that very thing happened to Longitude, an international bestseller that has been making money for Penguin for years.

Considering, however, the pressure that Ms. Rinaldi was under from Bloomsbury’s parent company to grow, grow, grow at the time of the Walker acquisition, the notion that she was looking for a long-term investment is highly improbable. Much more likely: Ms. Rinaldi knew that no matter what anyone else said, expanding one’s borders was the only surefire way to increase revenues quickly and mechanically, and at the end of the day, it only mattered so much what was used to do that.

Something along those same lines probably moved Ms. Rinaldi to hire Petter Ginna, a distinguished editor formerly of Oxford University Press who was awarded his own imprint when he started at Bloomsbury in the summer of 2006. In some ways the hiring of Mr. Ginna was an even weirder play for Ms. Rinaldi than the Walker acquisition: granted, Mr. Ginna’s first list did end up generating a New York Times bestseller in Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming, but there’s little about his sensibility or interests that should have led anyone to conclude he could stoke the sort of commercial growth the company was going for.

By the beginning of last year, it was clear to Ms. Rinaldi that despite her efforts to grow the company, Bloomsbury was not making its numbers. None of the new books the house had published in the U.S. recently had taken hold, and the parent company in England was still struggling to fill the revenue gap left by the lack of a new Harry Potter sequel. Write-offs from unrecouped advances were piling up, meanwhile, and though almost none of them were for huge sums, taken together they added up to a substantial loss that required some correction. None of the company’s three adult divisions, it seemed, could succeed in generating anything resembling a hit as convincing as some of those early successes, like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Dorrell and Kitchen Confidential, which really established the Bloomsbury USA brand during its first few years on earth.

This dry spell did not come cheap, as was made clear with the firing of Ms. LaFarge and five others last January. Not long after that, Ms. Rinaldi and the rest of the eventual refugees could sense that Bloomsbury’s fun days were over, and so had one foot way out the door, preparing to escape as soon as the opportunity arose.

Losing Ms. Rinaldi in particular proved a disorienting blow, as she was such big reason for the reputation Bloomsbury USA enjoyed as an inventive, adventurous outfit with an uncommon taste in both fiction and non-fiction. And as far as everyone who worked at Bloomsbury was concerned, it was largely Mr. Rinaldi’s glamor and commanding presence in the office that determined the mood of the place. She was the company’s heart and soul, in other words, as several people who knew her told the Observer back in March when she announced that she was leaving her post for a job atop Rodale Books.

Ms. Rinaldi’s absence, most agreed, would render Bloomsbury USA unrecognizable.

For about five months, there was reason to hope for a soft landing, as Mr. Dickerman, who had been Ms. Rinaldi’s second in command, took the reins from his old mentor and made a go of driving the wagon on his own. He did not last long, however, and at the end of July announced that he would be following Ms. Rinaldi to Rodale. In so doing Mr. Dickerman gave Bloomsbury its second devastating decapitation in a row, effectively extinguishing any hope that some part of the old company would live on even though Ms. Rinaldi was no longer there.

Mr. Gibson, whom Bloomsbury's worldwide president Richard Charkin immediately asked to replace Mr. Dickerman at the top of the US operation, said this week that he is confident that literary agents have mostly stopped mourning the dissolution of the old Bloomsbury and are ready to do business with the new one.

“We’ve made a big effort in the last few months to have meetings with agents as a group,” Mr. Gibson said, noting that he’s brought his whole editorial team over to the offices of major agencies like Inkwell Management, William Morris, Writers House, and Stanford Greenberger, for meetings during which everyone who is acquiring titles for him n 2009 has gone through and explained what kind of projects they want agents to send them.

“It's important to do this to allow agencies to know who we are, and who the new people here are,” Mr. Gibson said. “It’s resulted in a number of submissions we wouldn't have had otherwise.”

It is Mr. Gibson’s view, once again, that such submissions might also be the result of changing marketing conditions, which he thinks might give houses like Bloomsbury, Grove, Norton and Public Affairs a chance to acquire books that six months ago would have gone for more money than they could afford.

More importantly, a number of top New York agents agree with him.

"It could be a good time for mid-sized companies,” said Larry Weissman, an independent agent who has two books publishing with Bloomsbury this year, one about French culture called Au Revoir to All That and the other on the real estate bubble called Our Lot. “They don't have the massive overhead and they're not going to be going after Tina Feys of the world, so they can publish just as well as anybody."

"If they played their cards right,” Mr. Weissman said, “I feel like they could definitely take advantage of the moment. The playing field is being leveled a little bit. If they're on the field, they can play. The books that would have gone for say, 250,000 a year ago might go for 150 now, and at 150 any of those houses can get in.”

Ira Silverberg, of Sterling Lord Literistic, said he’d just sold to Norton a biography of Sam Wagstaffe that would have probably gone to one of the bigger houses if December hadn’t seen as much carnage as it did.

“It sold just as these firings were going on, and I think under different economic conditions it easily could have been a Random House book,” Mr. Silverberg said, referring to layoffs resulting from the radical recent reorganization of Random House Inc. “With non-fiction, it'll be easier for the Nortons and the Groves to pick up things that they might not have been able to get before because of bidding wars."

Part of the reason for this is that people just don’t feel as secure in their jobs anymore, Mr. Silverberg said. “The minute people saw the writing on the walls, it became much easier to pass on a project than to bid on it inappropriately.”

Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove, said that for now he can only hope that Mr. Gibson, Mr. Weissman, and Mr. Silverberg are right in their predictions.

“I think the books with an obvious hook or the authors with strong sales tracks will continue to demand very high advances,” Mr. Entrekin wrote in an e-mail. “But the less obvious books and the books from authors with less than stellar sales tracks will be tougher for them.”

“So far,” he said, “the main thing I have experienced in the last 6 or 8 weeks is that when I make a fair offer the agent and author are quick to accept. I think that will be true for everyone--large or small. There will probably be less pushing to get the very highest advance. If a good publisher makes a fair offer the agents are going to be more likely to advise their clients to accept.”

As he waits to see whether 2009 actually brings such change or not, Mr. Gibson is mulling the possibility of bringing in a new body to oversee the editorial team, and thinking also about how many books he should be trying to publish every year. For now, he has resolved to try to keep the adult list to 100, scaling it back from where it was under the old guard so that his editors, publicists, and marketing people can spend more time on each title.

“I'm just not sure how many books you can publish well,” Mr. Gibson said. “You've gotta compete for your books out there, and when you publish a lot of books you can't always compete as well as you'd like. More breathing space allows us to stay with books longer, and as they start to work we can stay with them and keep pushing them and pushing them. Sometimes you go back and try again.”

He went on: “My colleagues are sick of hearing this, but I've said to them on numerous occasions—there are going to be books that break out next year and some of them are going to be ours. There's no reason why several of them can't be ours.”

The reason he couldn't: "I have a 3-year-old! I'm tired, man. I'm old."

Mr. Entrekin used to party. Hasn't in a while. Mostly focused now on running his publishing house, Grove/Atlantic, and hanging with the wife and their little boy.

He seems genuinely fulfilled, a fact he was forced to forget last night when his colleagues in the publishing industry turned to him to reinvigorate the annual dinner known as the National Book Awards and make it fun again.

Like Gene Hackman in Hoosiers or, what the hell, Sylvester Stallone in that last Rocky movie, Mr. Entrekin had some steps to relearn.

With the help of veteran literary agent Lynn Nesbit, Mr. Entrekin did the thing the only way he knew how: by moving the dinner from a tacky hotel in Times Square to Cipriani's Wall Street; spiking the normal guest list of editors and agents with boldface names like Anna Wintour, Jann Wenner, and Candace Bushnell; and throwing a late-night after-party at a club on the far West Side that would be attended mostly by the very young.

"I dunno if they did it consciously but it certainly is a lot more glam than it was last year," said the 33-year-old agent Jud Laghi, while getting a drink at the open bar on the banquet floor toward the end of dinner. As many others did throughout the evening, Mr. Laghi noted the irony of capping this tumultuous year in book publishing at a regally decorated restaurant in the thick of the Financial District.

"Lush opulence" was how Collins publisher Steve Ross described it on his way out of the restroom, gazing with theatrical disbelief at the gold columns and the arches and the elaborate floral arrangements hanging from the walls. "So many adjectives come to mind," he said. "It's so totally inappropriate. But, you know, we get so few opportunities to have anything to celebrate."

Mr. Ross said he was glad the publishing industry and the economy in general are collapsing now rather than when he was first starting out in the early 1980s.

"It'd be absolutely terrifying to be starting out now, to be young and to not have the benefit of years, if not decades, of perspective," Mr. Ross said. "I would have seriously considered leaving book publishing."

What would he have done instead?

"Law school," he said. "Or worse, I would have gotten an MBA."

Later, Jeff Seroy, the director of publicity at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, made fun of his counterpart at Knopf, Paul Bogaards, for coming to the dinner without a tux. "I had to sell my tux to get a ticket, that's how bad things have gotten," Mr. Bogaards said. But was he having fun? "Oh, you know."

Mr. Wenner walked by alongside the expansive British literary agent Ed Victor. Mr. Entrekin, who was pacing nearby and speaking chaotically into a cell phone, came over and said hello. "Thank you for coming," Mr. Entrekin said. "Good to see you, man! How's your family?"

Mr. Wenner said he was having a great time. He was at a table with Harry Evans, the painter Brice Marden, the writer Gita Mehta (wife of Knopf head Sonny), and "a couple of Vanity Fair editors."

Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, explained later that Mr. Wenner had been invited because the board wanted the National Book Awards" to be a "bigger experience." "Mainly, we've had people from the industry here for years and now the two chairs, Morgan Entrekin and Lynn Nesbit, are trying to move it out a little bit for people who are interested in books but aren't necessarily in the business." Hence Ms. Wintour and Ms. Bushnell. "They might not have been at the National Book Awards in the past but they're literary people, and we want to bring them in our community. We shouldn't be saying you're not part of this because you don't exactly do the type of writing that we give awards to. There's a lot of good writing out there."

"They're trying to make it fancy and fun," said literary agent Ira Silverberg. "They're invited people from other fields—in fact, I thought I saw a friend of mine who's in fashion!"

Not everyone noticed the outsiders as immediately.

"I'm not aware of them," said Viking publisher Paul Slovak, who said everyone at his table was either an employee at Penguin Group or an author who publishes with them. Regarding the non-publishing people in attendance: "I couldn't tell you who they are or what they do."

Just before the awards were announced (real quick: fiction to Modern Library's Peter Mathiessen, nonfiction to Norton's Annette Gordon-Reed, poetry to HarperCollins' Mark Doty, children's lit to Scholastic's Judy Blundell), the chairman of the National Book Foundation, David Steinberger, brought up the after-party that Mr. Entrekin—and Harvey Weinstein, who was in London last night—were hosting at Socialista. The National Book Awards had never had an after-party before, Mr. Steinberger said with delight.

His remark was greeted by silence, as if no one at the dinner had been invited.

"I don't know if you're as excited as I am about this," Mr. Steinberger said, clearly surprised by the crowd's cold response. "I'm actually not allowed to tell you where it is, because, if you can believe this, our first after-party is already apparently oversubscribed. So if you want to go to the party, you have to find Morgan and see if you can get him to tell you."

About that: Socialista was basically full by the time the National Book Awards let out. Editorial assistants, magazine editors, young agents—all came at the announced start time of 10 p.m., and by the time Mr. Mathiessen and the rest of the adults showed up, there wasn't that much room for them.

From 10 to 12 Socialista was an anthill on the verge of revolt. The bouncers had been forced to close the list. Only people who were obviously coming from the awards were accommodated; those who weren't waited outside in the cold even if they'd been invited. Inside, guests pushed and shoved their way through the stairwell connecting the main floor and the smaller downstairs bar. The coat check stopped taking bags around 10:30 because there was not enough space. Most people found themselves incapable of discussing anything but how crowded it was.

"I hope never to return, except possibly to get my coat!" said literary agent Jim Rutman of Sterling Lord Literistic. "It was scarring. This is what happens when publishing tries to get cool. It's a horrible mistake!"

One of Mr. Rutman's clients, Beautiful Children author Charles Bock, was forced to put his pregnant wife into a cab and send her home. "We were in here for 10 or so minutes, man, but it was just too much for her," he said.

The novelist Jessica Hagedorn, a board member of the National Book Foundation, made her way down the stairs in a huff. "There's no place to sit, it's ridiculous!" she exclaimed. "I'm leaving!"

A severe woman standing by the door noted, "There are a lot of people here who were not at the National Book Awards."

Jessica Joffe, one of the fashionable youngsters Mr. Entrekin asked to "co-host" the evening, lit a cigarette after finding a seat at the bar. "Hi!" she said to a friend who was walking up to greet her. "Why does this party suck?"

Note: Ms. Joffe seemed to be wrapped in a sleeping bag made from several snow leopard carcasses.

The 24-year-old novelist Nick McDonell was one of Ms. Joffe's co-hosts (along with Vanity Fair staffer Claire Howorth and essayist and Vintage publicist Sloane Crosley). Mr. McDonell, you might remember, had his first novel published when he just 17. Twelve was, broadly speaking, about Twelve, something of the Junya Watanabe of day-school designer drugs, a mysterious and totally new powder, the first sniff of which sends a 17-year-old senior accepted Early Decision at Wesleyan sprawling off her (parents') toilet in ecstatic, convulsive recitation of the Gettysburg Address.

Michiko Kakutani, praising the book, but obviously also the drug, called it "as fast as speed, as relentless as acid," suggesting Mr. McDonell's imagined substance was experience distilled to its essence: i.e., both a dopamine reuptake inhibitor and a strong partial agonist at 5-HT_2A serotonin receptors. And we all know how experience, and Twelve, ends: in an incredible sex party where all those willowy, druggy teens are shot dead at their physical and literary primes, never to fade away.

Six years later, Mr. McDonell wore a tuxedo—long (not bow) tie the ensemble's sole nod to modernity—and chatted with a group of classmates from Harvard College. This party, it was clear, would neither begin nor end with a bang, even if at the moment it was hugging-room only. Come tomorrow, about three-fourths of the aggressively partying partiers here would be trudging to work; half would be facing the private terror of a white screen and hangover-cum-writer's block. The truly unfortunate would suffer both.

As it turns out, Mr. Entrekin, evangelist of a literary scene more youthfully hip, published Twelve on his Grove Press imprint. Which is to say, he's Mr. McDonell's brother's godfather. (Mr. McDonell's father is longtime Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell.) And even if he discovered last night that 24 is not quite as seductively doomed a number as 12, Mr. Entrekin did deliver on at least one psychopharmacological novelty: Everyone could smoke inside, and most —even the young ones old enough to be less interested in transcendence through chemistry than stress relief—did.

After Ms. Joffe, and the tuxedos, and the more bewildered blond socialites left, a strange sort of tribal frenzy took over. Upstairs and downstairs, an expertly curated playlist turned a place called Socialista safe for the bookish: "Love Will Tear Us Apart," New Order, "Common People," "Paper Planes."

Dancing commenced, on furniture, on bodies, even on the books laid out as party favors by Grove and Weinstein. Things had gotten fun, and as the hour sailed towards 3am, people started talking about how they didn't want to go home. It wasn't fiction, but it wasn't half-bad, either.

No, they're here-year after year after year-to "build relationships" with their global publishing brethren, to "share ideas" and, oh yeah, to make some money. Unlike BookExpo America, the four-day-long orgy of American publishers courting retailers in the spring, Frankfurt is a hopped-up dollars-for-pages affair. But the fair's appeal survives for another reason, too: because it has all the makings of the kind of story publishers like to sell. It has history, it has drama, it has characters.

This year's fair was no exception.

The Buchmesse officially runs from Tuesday to Monday in an enormous German version of the Javits center at the other end of town, but the heart of the fair is the Frankfurter Hof, a five-star Kaiserplatz hotel where all business starts and ends, beginning as early as Monday. You can stay here, too-for $500 a night, unless you call up at the last minute and get an already-paid-for but canceled room at a reasonable rate-but it's not necessary. This year, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins execs checked into the Hilton, AOL Time Warner folks took over the Hessischer Hof, and a lot of Random House honchos prowled the Arabella Sheraton Grand (where the annual Bertelsmann dinner is held).

Summer Camp Meets Boot Camp

But all of them sooner or later-and usually until an impressively late hour-ended up at "Hof." This is where rights directors and agents and journalists can get to know the very people who won't take their calls in New York, from S&S's David Rosenthal, in a garish tie one night and a leather jacket the next, to AOL Time Warner honcho Larry ("They're not selling off the book division") Kirshbaum, to William Morris Agency literary co-head Suzanne Gluck, back for her first Frankfurt in years. (She spent several years in foreign rights at International Creative Management; today, she co-heads William Morris literary.) And yes, Morgan Entrekin usually does show up, with cronies in tow, from Knopf's Gary Fisketjon to Canongate Books' Jamie Byng, who some call "the mini-Morgan" for his resemblance to Mr. Entrekin. The two have similar shoulder-length sandy hair and late-night rock 'n' roll lifestyles, and both are true believers in and passionate salesmen for their books. Their joint Saturday-night dance party is always the most discussed event of the fair.

But despite the nonstop partying, Frankfurt is not quite summer camp for publishing grown-ups. Well, O.K., agent John Brockman did accept a pre-emptive offer from Penguin Putnam's Susan Petersen Kennedy for A Life Decoded by Craig Venter, a personal story of decoding the human genome, by cell phone in the Frankfurter Hof lobby on Monday afternoon, but it's not like he didn't work for his 15 percent. Actually, boot camp is more like it: The publishers and agents here put in long days. Publishers set up shop in luxurious, carpeted booths whose shelves are stocked with books and whose walls are lined with floor-to-ceiling photographs of their jackets and authors. Agents rent unadorned tables and entertain foreign publishers. Half-hour meetings-which are planned as early as July-are scheduled back-to-back, beginning (if you've gotten the Frankfurter Hof thing down) at 10 or later, and going on well into the evening. Everyone gets behind schedule, and occasionally appointments don't show up, thus providing the only opportunity on most days to grab a sandwich or a trip to the water closet. Then it's dinnertime (usually with more clients), a couple of cocktail parties, then a nightcap or six. No wonder half the campers end up back in New York with laryngitis and the Frankfurt flu.

What is everybody talking about in these meetings? Why, books, of course-though no one who ever sat in on a pitch meeting would confuse the conversation that goes on during them with literary criticism. "Frankfurt isn't about writing," says one agent. "It's about the deal."

The Hunt for This Year's Big Book

Speaking of money, nobody has any, by the way. The Frankfurt 2002 mantra-"My economy is worse than your economy"-made poor-mouthing the most effective strategy for European publishers negotiating with hard-nosed agents and pesky foreign-rights directors. Until recently, Germany was the largest buyer of American books-even ahead of the U.K.- but is now, according to agent John Brockman, "on a par with, say, Belgium." Citing diving stock prices, changes at the top of Bertelsmann, even recent revelations about the publishing giant's connections to Nazism, the Europeans all manage to start the bidding low-but when a publisher really loves something, well, he just has to have it. Take Daniel Goleman's Social Intelligence , his follow-up to his best-selling Emotional Intelligence . Bantam Dell Publishing House (a division of the Bertelsmann-owned Random House) paid $2 million for the North American rights to the book, based on a very slim proposal, right before Frankfurt; on Wednesday, German rights went for $300,000.

Theoretically, American agents don't submit English-language projects to American editors at Frankfurt-that they can do back in New York-but making a "big buy" for your own list at Frankfurt, or right before, can provide just the right amount of buzz to get the foreigners interested. That's what happened a couple of years ago when Knopf bought-and then sold the global rights to-a "big book" called Memoirs of a Geisha . Last year's big book was Grove/Atlantic's Twelve by Nick McDonell, a.k.a. "that Less Than Zero thing by the high-school kid," as one agent remembers the title that some say sold as many as 60,000 copies in the States, was snatched up around the world and recently was sold to the movies.

So naturally, a good portion of gossip time at the fair is spent on the subject of "big books," which publishers keep insisting don't exist, but which they frantically run around trying to find. ("I think the news this year is that there are fewer big books," one publisher predictably told me, "and more smaller, literary novels.") "Big book" fiction candidates this year included Amagansett , a debut mystery- cum -love-story that the William Morris Agency sold pre-fair to Jennifer Hershey at Penguin Putnam for what was said to be about $750,000; a Canadian novel, Deafness , from Grove/Atlantic; and the hands-down favorites, a novel and a short-story collection by twentysomething former agency assistant Hannah Tinti that went to Dial Press. Ms. Tinti's stories-"Animal Crackers" in particular-have good word of mouth, but it's their provenance that has wags predicting success: Ms. Tinti is represented by the charismatic Nicole Aragi, who regularly manages to unearth smallish literary debuts that make a big impact-like Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges , Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu and, most recently, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated -and turn them into mini-blockbusters. Ms. Aragi not only has a good eye: She herself has buzz.

Buzz counts, big time. Look at Jonathan Burnham, President of a Tina Brown–less Miramax Books, for example. Mr. Burnham just received a glowing profile in New York magazine, has the No. 1 nonfiction book in America ( Leadership by Rudy Giuliani), and has ponied up a whopping $625K for Plum Sykes' Brit chick-lit novel, Bergdorf Blondes . He and his house are not just "hot," as Tina herself might say, they're "hot, hot, hot." Which may explain all the chatter about his buying Fatima's Good Fortune , a fable about a Tunisian ugly duckling who moves to Paris and becomes a swan. Fans say the Lynn Nesbit–agented debut-by writing duo Joann and Gerry Dryansky-is reminiscent of the sleeper cult film Amélie ; detractors mutter something about Chocolat and magical realism lite.

The Celebrity Count

In addition to the standard New York buzz-magnets-"Is that Nan Talese wandering Hall 8 alone with an ice-cream cone?" "There's Sonny Mehta! He's wearing regular pants, not jeans!"-publishers sometimes import talent to Frankfurt, too, as evidenced this year by the appearance in the bar of scraggly-actor-turned-scraggly-author Ethan Hawke, clad in a guayabera shirt even as the temperature hovered around freezing. (Maybe a couple of drinks with a European editor would yield the William Morris client some foreign-rights sales.) Superchef author Anthony Bourdain was there, too, presumably as a guest of one of his European publishers; he may have finally found the one place where his nicotine habit seems mild. Early in the week, Bloomsbury Publishing fêted its Berlin-based star author, Jeffrey Eugenides, at a special dinner. Jonathan Franzen came to town on behalf of his German publisher and even spoke, humbly, to the press. And while nobody seemed to have seen her, rumor had it that Hillary Clinton showed up to promote her $8 million–plus memoir, due from Simon & Schuster next summer.

By Saturday night, you could feel the Frankfurt energy dissipate. A lot of the big wigs, like Ms. Gluck and Warner Books' Jamie Raab and the agents Sarah Burnes and Bill Clegg, had left, either for home or for a few days of R&R elsewhere. It was the junior people who stayed to do cleanup as late as Monday. At 11:00, the lobby of the Frankfurter Hof-which was so crowded two nights earlier that David Rosenthal called me a "brave woman" for trying to infiltrate it-looked like Michael's in the evening. You could even get a seat on one of the lobby couches.

This was postmortem time. Visitors greeted each other by asking, "Did you have a good fair?" Then they inevitably began to compare this year's fair to previous ones. "This was the quietest I've ever seen it," scout-turned-agent Jenny Meyer had said earlier. "Except for last year."

America the Unpopular

Ah, yes, last year: the fair that almost wasn't, at least for the dozens of Americans who-paid-up hotel rooms or no-pulled out at the last minute amid terrorism fears. That was a weird time, those of us who were here agree, but it was also kind of nice. There was a sense of global solidarity: Just about every gathering began with Europeans inquiring after New York's well-being and soliciting memories about "that day." There wasn't much talk of Sept. 11 this year, though; in fact, it was as if everybody was following their mothers' advice and refusing to discuss politics. "Now that we seem to be moving headlong into war," said Public Affairs publisher Peter Osnos, who was here in 2001, "they seem warier about us."

The conversation turned to the question of whether, in five years' time, say, there will even be a fair here at all. The London Book Fair (held in March) seems to be gaining on Frankfurt as an international-publishing meeting place, somebody suggested. Besides, the Buchmesse brass is threatening to find a new site, according to Publishing News , the daily broadsheet published here. It seems that those $500-a-night rooms and minimalist catering stands are becoming a fatal annoyance to everybody.

But most believe the hardy, 50-plus-year-old fair is here to stay. A couple of years ago, an insurgent group tried to mount a global book fair stateside, calling it "Frankfurt in New York"; there was such a hue and cry among American and non-American publishers that the plans were quickly scrapped. Frankfurt may not be Paris or London (or even New York, for that matter), and mail and fax and e-mail will surely continue to push business through-but to publishers worldwide it remains a destination, a home away from home for one long week every fall. "People will always come back to Frankfurt," one American publisher said, suggesting that it's not the books or the buzz or the Frankfurter Hof or even the money that draws them here after all. "We like seeing the same people year after year, eating with them and drinking with them and telling them how glad we are to see them."

In other words, to paraphrase a writer who probably wouldn't have been caught dead at a book fair, the rumors of Frankfurt's death are greatly exaggerated.

Sara Nelson, a senior contributing editor at Glamour , is writing a book about reading for G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Finally, last June Ms. Kim answered a want ad in the Village Voice from Ultra-V, a band signed to RCA that plays amped-up, derivative funk rock. Ms. Kim, 26, sent her picture and a tape and beat out 25 other female bassists for the gig.

The band may or may not make it. Ultra-V just sent out its first single, "Playboy Mansion," to radio stations across the country. According to Ms. Kim, it's already a hit in Texas. Whether Ultra-V gets big hardly matters. You just know Ms. Kim will be a star.

"You know what I really want?" Ms. Kim said recently over sushi at Nobu. "I say this with, like, all the hubris and, like, naïveté of, like, Madonna when she started out and she said, 'I want to rule the world.' I would like to be the only person that has a Grammy and a Pulitzer. How's that? How awesome would that be? Yeah, although I think the Pulitzer will come around much later in life."

Ms. Kim was wearing tight designer jeans, Jimmy Choo ankle boots with stilettos and a coral-colored, satiny tank-top camisole. One strap of the tank-top camisole was falling off her shoulder.

Ms. Kim is beautiful, determined and full of precious life energy. Wherever she may be, Ms. Kim is the object of attention and desire. Celebrities make passes, old men wink and young men cower. Once, Ms. Kim said, a crazy guy on the subway started openly pleasuring himself in front of her.

Ms. Kim's last boyfriend, a writer for Details , just couldn't keep up. Ms. Kim was having nightmares.

"I have really violent visions," Ms. Kim said. "Like, of getting scalped or something. Isn't that terrible? Things like that. Or that someone's just going to come and, like, kill me horribly. Over the past month and a half, like every few nights. A lot of times it's not even dreams; it's like waking visions."

The boyfriend was just too blasé, so she broke it off.

"We were just talking, and this is sort of when Fashion Week had just started," she said. "He's like, 'I don't know, I'm feeling really down because, you know, I feel my week was too fabulous and too much Lotus and too much Spa, and I'm just wondering what it's all about now'–that's what he said! And I'm like, 'You asshole!' And he's like, 'I feel so empty.' I was like, 'I can't sleep at night! You know, my single's going to radio in two weeks. It could change. We could get dropped, you know?' Shit like that and so, 'Do you even care ?'"

Ms. Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in Philadelphia. Her dad plays the clarinet for the Seoul National Philharmonic. Growing up, Ms. Kim attended Catholic schools and studied cello. But in high school, she got sick of the cello and discovered pot. She became a punk–not a rehab, cutter-type punk, but a down-to-earth punk. She listened to the Cure and went out to nightclubs. She studied a lot, too, got 1330 on her SAT's and attended the University of Pennsylvania. After college, Ms. Kim moved to New York and started dating a rock star, but she wouldn't say who. She said he "defined, in a sense, the early 90's." She said it wasn't Perry Farrell, Bono ("Ewwwww!") or Tommy Lee ("Really hot!").

During the day, Ms. Kim wrote fashion articles for Glamour . "You feel really cool when you work there when you're young, because you get to go to all these great parties and hang out with cool people," Ms. Kim said. "You get free clothes and free shoes and all that. And free makeup. I don't know–then again, it's such bullshit."

At night, she played rock. Her first show was at CBGB's with a band called the Cogs. "It was old-school," she said. "They were older. They were, like, 30. One guy must have been in his late 30's, like 40 with gray hair. It was just so not-me."

After the Cogs, she was in an all-girl glam-rock outfit called Trixie Belden. That ended when Ms. Kim and the lead guitarist clashed over creative control.

One time during her days at Glamour, Ms. Kim and her friends were at a benefit when she met a tough guy New York actor known for his portrayal of lecherous, violent men.

"He had his little daughter with him at the time, who was maybe like 5 or 6, so she's going 'Daddy, daddy,' you know, whatever," Ms. Kim said. The actor and Ms. Kim saw each other a few times during the evening. Finally, the actor made his move. "He's like, 'If I give you a special number, like, will you call me, so I can, you know, take you out to dinner?'" she said. "I was like, 'Ohhhh.' So then he's like, 'Here, why don't you give me your hand and I'll pretend I'm giving you my autograph, but I'll be writing my number on your hand'–like, he really is the character he plays, let me tell you. And I was like, 'O.K.' And then he's like, 'How old are you?' And I was like, 'Well, how old do you think I am?' And he's like–all hopefully–he's like, 'Seventeen?'" They never got together.

Outside Nobu, Ms. Kim stole a cab from under the nose of a lady in stilettos and took it to Grand Street, to a fourth-floor apartment above Lucky Strike belonging to the music producer Roger Greenawald.

Inside, there was a jam session going on. Five musicians were playing "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" with great energy. Thirty young people with goatees, knit caps and nose rings were singing along, dancing, slapping tambourines, drinking beers and smoking pot. On the coffee table, there was a copy of John Seabrook's Nobrow . A sitar lay against a wall. Above it, there was painting of a woman playing with herself.

Every now and then, the musicians switched instruments. An 18-year-old guy, Ben, got up from the drums and strapped on a guitar. It was whispered that Ben had received a million-dollar advance from Mercury Records when he was 15. Someone yelled for some Neil Young, but they got "Good Lovin'" instead.

Ms. Kim sat on a sofa and watched the musicians play. Ex-Blondie member Nigel Harrison, who along with Frank (the Freak) Infante sued the rest of the band when they were left out of the reunion tour, was on bass. Ms. Kim leaned forward, like she wanted in. A tattoo of a camel just above the small of her back became visible.

Ms. Kim played a few songs on drums and guitar. Then she grabbed the mike and took over the room. She sang Sheryl Crow's "My Favorite Mistake." Then she did a straight version of Madonna's "Material Girl." Everyone cheered. She sang loudly and passionately. Then she sang it slow and sultry. That didn't go over as well. It was 1 a.m. People started leaving.

We went to Marylou's on Ninth Street. Morgan Entrekin, the long-haired publisher of Grove-Atlantic Press, was sitting two tables over from us with a blond woman and two other guys.

It seems everyone in New York has an interesting subway story. Ms. Kim told me hers.

"I was actually just going down to meet my friend to have brunch," she said. "I'm just sitting there, and this weird guy got on and he's whispering to me under his breath. And I'm like, 'Whatever.' I try not to pay attention to the crazy people. So I'm still kind of spaced out, and then all of a sudden I hear his pants unzip and he starts whacking off in front of me! Huge! Nasty! And I started screaming at him, 'You fucking pig!' I was like, 'You're fucking disgusting!' And there are people all on the train and I was like, 'This guy is jerking off!' and I'm screaming this, and then he turns around and says, 'What are you talking about? You're crazy!' And I was like, 'You belong in a fucking mental institution! Go fuck yourself, loser.'"

I asked Ms. Kim if there was anything she wouldn't do to become famous.

"Obviously, there are so many things I wouldn't do, otherwise I'd already be famous," she said. "Like, sleep with all the people who are like, 'Baby, I'm gonna make you famous!' Please! I wouldn't kill my mother to be famous–there are lots of things I wouldn't do to be famous. You know, I used to think being famous was the be-all end-all, and I'm learning that it's really not. You know, as long as you're doing what makes you happy–hey, and it's so trite."

Across the room Mr. Entrekin gave Ms. Kim a big, boozy thumbs-up. "Thumbs-up? That's a first. Who does that ?" Ms. Kim thought. She gave him a thumbs-up back anyway.