Ms. Doll's agent, Ryan Fischer-Harbage, sent out the proposal during the Hurricane and sold it to Alexandra Cardia at the Penguin literary imprint  just before Thanksgiving, Ms. Doll told us. The book, tentatively titled I Bought You a Kitchen Aid, chronicles the endless series of weddings that Ms. Doll has attended. Ms. Doll has been to a lot of weddings--over twenty, she elaborated when we reached her this afternoon.

"I started thinking about all of the different ways in which we live out this weirdly formal, weirdly pressurized, often amazing, often hilarious, and sometimes grueling event, like it's some kind of Wedding Groundhog Day," she said.

But really, it's a book about the way we live now. And what that says about us.

"As modern people, we go to wedding after wedding after wedding, and there are no signs of that stopping as we marry later, don't marry at all, or marry and divorce," Ms. Doll explained. "What does the wedding cycle mean about how we view the institution—and about how we view love?"

Last April, Ms. Doll wrote an essay recounting the weddings she had been to for The Hairpin. Although she said she  had the idea for something  book-length on the topic before The Hairpin piece, writing the essay--and the reaction to it--"cemented [her] desire" to do the book.

And like all memoirs, it is ultimately a book about the author--and the author finding herself.

"Ultimately it's a book about finding yourself, and what you want, in an evolving marriage culture. Oh, and it's funny!"

Once inside, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, sipping beers, while New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary asked a panel of editors and writers to talk about moxie.

Why was it, Ms. O’Leary wondered, that as a young freelancer she had spent months refining every pitch while her male peers tossed off story proposals from every statistic or idea they encountered?

“You have to understand that rejection is part of the process,” Times metro editor Carolyn Ryan said. “It really is part of the engagement with ideas.”

Ms. O’Leary’s younger self would have worried that one bad pitch could get her blacklisted from editors’ inboxes.

“You’re not going to remember in a pejorative way someone who’s just eager,” Ms. Ryan said. “We have a reporter at our paper, Sarah Maslin Nir—she was a lunatic when it came to pitching. She was relentless.” (After freelancing across 11 sections, Ms. Maslin Nir was hired full time.)

Attendees jotted it all down in notebooks made by Muji and Moleskine.

The event was put on by “female nonfiction storytellers” group Her Girl Friday, but a handful of men dotted the crowd, either in solidarity or simply sensing a networking or hook-up opportunity. The mood alternated between J-school seminar and group therapy session (even The Observer found herself involuntarily pumping her fist as panelist Katherine Lanpher cried, “No is a bump on the road to yes!”), but the evening’s mission seemed grander.

“This estrogen halo in this room—it’s really wonderful, it’s really powerful,” said Ms. Lanpher, a public radio host. “But we’re here because those byline counts matter.”

She was referring to the annual tallies put out by The Op-Ed Project, a nonprofit that shepherds women and minority writers onto newspaper op-ed pages, and VIDA, a two-year-old organization for women in the literary arts best known for throwing the wildest party the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference has ever seen. (There were burlesque dancers and roller-derby girls.)

In the last three years, the groups have become a fixture in Manhattan media circles for their end-of-year counts, which distill the nebulous boys-clubbiness of publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker into easily rebloggable bar graphs and pie charts.

As a result, a conversation previously relegated to once-a-decade university research papers has become an annual media event, a regular and cathartic articulation of a long-running internal monologue.

“We call the count ‘The Count’ from our experience of quietly counting to ourselves every time we read The New York Times Book Review,” VIDA co-founder Erin Belieu, a poet and professor at Florida State University told The Observer. “We were always looking to see how many and what kinds of books by women are being reviewed.”

In addition to counting female-authored articles, stories and poems, VIDA keeps tabs on the number of books by women reviewed by tastemakers like the London and New York Reviews of Books. Less than 20 percent of the titles reviewed by the NYRB were written by women, a problem novelist Meg Wolitzer wrote about in The New York Times earlier this year.

Ms. Wolitzer told The Observer the statistics had validated a suspicion she and female novelist friends had long shared. “You just had that feeling there was excitement around male work,” she said. “That was something I couldn’t quantify but I felt.”

It’s hardly a new discussion. Katha Pollitt reportedly devoted a Nation column to the problem more than a decade ago. TIME online editor Ruth Davis Konisberg had her own byline count site in the mid-aughts, called Women TK. But for the same reason, VIDA’s numbers are shocking. How is it that in 2012, The Nation (helmed by a woman, Katrina vanden Heuvel, since 1995), is still 73 percent written by men?

There are a couple of theories. The most popular is that women pitch less, or less aggressively, than men. Harper’s editor Ellen Rosenbush said as much when confronted with her dismal statistics, calling the “dearth of female bylines” an “industry-wide issue.”

“When I saw the VIDA counts I thought, I don’t know why that is. I’m not in the right position to theorize,” Ms. O’Leary said. But having mentored young journalists, she knew pitching was a perennial concern, and one piece of the puzzle that could be solved. “I just thought, well, hey, why don’t we do something really practical?”

According to a blog post by former GOOD magazine executive editor Ann Friedman, the gender makeup of a magazine reflects the genders of its editors and their professional networks of writers. Shortly after the first VIDA count, Ms. Friedman started Lady Journos!, a curated feed of quality, nonservice articles and essays written by women, in the hopes of keeping female bylines fresh in the minds of assigning editors.

The token male on Tuesday’s panel, The Atavist founder Evan Ratliff, agreed that editors should take responsibility.

“We have had a really bad gender byline balance,” he said sheepishly. The Atavist, which publishes very long form nonfiction, has only published two pieces by women, out of sixteen total, since it was founded in 2011.

Boos, though polite ones, rose from the crowd.

“I knew I shouldn’t have come here,” he joked.

He explained that after the first two stories The Atavist assigned to women fell through (a total coincidence, he assured the crowd), they never managed to correct the ratio.

“There are a lot of male writers who just have a natural sense of entitlement to them,” Mr. Ratliff said. They just pitch and pitch until something sticks.

“It’s not a question of gender as much as it is a question of who feels entitled to take up the space,” Ms. Lanpher said, pointing out that Wikipedia has no editor and is 75 percent written by men. “They feel they can do that. It’s really not an ovary thing.”

With Jill Abramson at the top of The Times and Tina Brown at the top of Newsweek, it’s easy to forget that the publications were embroiled in landmark gender discrimination cases as recently as 1978 and 1970, respectively.

“The system at Newsweek was women researched and men wrote,” Gloria Steinem recalled at Monday night’s Women’s Media Center benefit. “It was absolutely airtight. So considering where we started I’m not surprised it’s still a problem.”

Whatever the causes, the gender awareness stoked by the VIDA count has added a new, political layer to the ritual grousing over National Magazine Award nominees. Ms. Friedman divvied up the count by gender this year and found no women had been nominated in prestige categories like feature writing, columns and commentary, essays and criticism, and reporting. (They fared better in the personal service category, home to “Would You Get a ‘Mommy Tuck’?”)

Meanwhile, election news analysis site The 4th Estate found that women contributed just 15 percent of the quotations in political articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and even named the worst offenders (will anyone volunteer to introduce Jeff Zeleny and Dan Balz to some chicks?), something VIDA has heretofore avoided.

“Shaming people has never really changed anyone’s mind,” Ms. Belieu explained.

VIDA was born from a viral email manifesto written in August 2009 by Cate Marvin, a poet and professor at the College of Staten Island. The AWP had just rejected a panel she had proposed for its annual conference, on the transgressive in female poetry, and she faced an absurdly large pile of infant laundry to fold. Writing to a handful of writerly friends, she likened herself to the narrator of Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.”

Ms. Belieu stayed up all night forwarding the email to like-minded women, who flooded Ms. Marvin’s inbox. They were frustrated that the conversation about women in the literary arts had devolved, in Ms. Belieu’s words, into “a retrograde, touchy-feely, moon-goddess-y, groovy” sort of thing.

Ms. Marvin and Ms. Belieu co-founded VIDA in part because, as established poets with professor gigs, they could speak freely about inequality in a way that made full-time poets and fiction writers more anxious.

“You undermine your ‘special woman’ status,” Ms. Belieu said, referring to those, like Louise Glück and Kay Ryan, who have been admitted to the literary boy’s club. “What happens when you go on the record as someone who doesn’t like this club?”

Few know better than Jennifer Weiner, the bestselling Good in Bed author. She has publicly fought the literary establishment on Twitter, even as her massive commercial appeal underwrites her publisher’s more artistic ventures.

Ms. Weiner first called attention to the disproportionate amount of attention paid to male authors in 2010, with the hashtag “Franzenfreude,” which she used to describe The Times and other publications’ slobbering over Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

The keynote speaker at BookExpo America’s Blogger Conference on Monday, Ms. Weiner said her publicist had urged her not to speak out against The Times again, fearing they would take it out on her next novel.

“What else can they do to me?” Ms. Weiner asked. “Can they quote Jonathan Galassi—who is Jonathan Franzen’s editor—making fun of my made-up German? That happened.”

Now Ms. Weiner thinks that The Times may be misrepresenting her book sales. She said that her current paperback, Then Came You, was the eighth-best-selling book on Bookscan, but only ranked 22 on The New York Times Bestsellers List. When her publisher has called to contest her rankings in the past, she said, The Times said it doesn’t disclose its methodology.

In VIDA, there’s a third party that can hold The Times accountable, by one measure, without risking seeming whiny or paranoid.

“What ‘The Count’ is really doing is, whether they like it or not, editors are in a position of having to think about this,” Ms. Belieu said. “The volume just keeps getting louder.”

On June 18, VIDA will make its formal debut in New York literary society—well, Brooklyn literary society, anyway—with a fundraiser thrown by Riverhead Books at Brooklyn Brewery.

“My goal is: Everyone in publishing should be ashamed of themselves if they didn’t go to the VIDA fundraiser,” said Riverhead head of publicity Jynne Martin. (According to a 2011 count produced by The New Republic, Riverhead’s catalog breaks down 45 percent female and 55 percent male, compared with a 30–70 split elsewhere).

The fundraiser will help VIDA fund its first two program goals: creating a network of mentoring workshops and putting together an endowment that will allow it to offer no-questions-asked grants to writers.

“As a writer you’ll often want to apply for these projects and you’ll have to come up with some grand proposal,” Ms. Belieu said. “‘I’m going to go to Italy and study the saints blah blah blah.’ There are very few organizations where you can say ‘I would use the funds for this award to take care of daycare.’”

“It goes back to Virginia Woolf,” Ms. Belieu said, of writing. “You need enough money and you need a room to do it in.”

kstoeffel@observer.com

Robert K. Futterman, seen here with Vanessa Williams at the Young Audiences New York's 7th Annual Children's Arts Awards Gala at Cipriani Wall Street on March 10, 2008 (courtesy of Getty Images)

As part of his punishment, Mr. Futterman must complete 1000 hours of community service in Suffolk County with "conditions including alcohol and narcotics counseling and regular testing," said Robert Clifford, a spokesman for the district attorney, in an email earlier this afternoon.

"His final sentence will be determined at the completion of the community service and the pre-sentencing report by the department of probation, " said Mr. Clifford. "If at any time there are any violations of the law during his community service, or prior to sentencing, he will be sentenced to state prison."

He pled guilty in Suffolk County Criminal Courts Building in Riverhead, Long Island, last Friday.

The charges stem from an August 21, 2011 incident in which Mr. Futterman was pulled over by Southampton Town Police for failing to maintain his driving lane while driving southbound on the Sag Harbor Turnpike, according to published reports at the time.

There were four children in the car with Mr. Futterman in the car during the traffic stop. Mr. Futterman was reportedly on the sleeping aide Ambien at the time of the incident, reported The Real Deal, which broke the news of Mr. Futterman's guilty plea.

Among the charges he faced were several violations of The Child Passenger Protection Act, or Leandra's Law, which places tougher sanctions on adults who drive impaired while a child is in their car.

The law is named after Leandra Rosado, who died in 2009 after the woman who was driving her and six other girls crashed the station wagon they were in while intoxicated, killing Leandra.

First-time offenders can face up to four years in state prison.

Mr. Futterman is best known as the founder of Robert K. Futterman & Associates, a successful retail brokerage firm with headquarters in New York City and Los Angeles.

His guilty plea most likely will not lead to a revocation of his broker's license, The Real Deal reports.

Drosen@observer.com

Kloske in action.

We usually don't watch book trailers but this one is kind of like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and also stars Riverhead publisher Geoff Kloske! It also has the actor Timothy Hutton and the author Julie Klam, who has written a book about a dog called Love at First Bark. We didn't know that until the end of the trailer though.

Mr. Kloske has remarkable screen presence and really steals the scene away from Mr. Hutton. Maybe it's time for a reality show set in Penguin's offices?

She wore a fetching strapless dress, carried a flashdrive of music from a friend (which she threatened to use as a switchblade, or maybe a Taser), and urged guests to try the deviled eggs distributed throughout the room (like Easter eggs, sort of, she said).

When Moby arrived, he greeted her like an old pal. David Schwimmer also put in an appearance: He was overheard outside the party saying that he had only come to retrieve his girlfriend, which he swiftly did. He wore a hat pulled low, presumably to shield partygoers from the glare of his celebrity.

In general, though, the boldfaced names skewed more internet-famous than I Love the Nineties. Lockhart Steele (Curbed), Alex Balk (The Awl), and Jessica Coen (Jezebel) all came. As The Observer caught up with Crosley, ur-Gawker Elizabeth Spiers sat across the room, threatening to share embarrassing stories.

"Is this a free book party?" asked Steele, prompting a half-serious dispute with Coen over the ethics of getting friends' stuff for free. Shouldn't you be willing to support their efforts, Coen wanted to know? Steele said he just wanted a copy with Crosley's signature and her number. Crosley liked this idea: for the last book, she'd drawn cakes when giving autographs, but the recipients tended to think the pictures were little houses or something.

Drawing is not among her talents, but throwing parties is no problem. The Vintage/Anchor publicist assessed the gathering with a practiced eye.

"I underplayed the ratio a little," she said, explaining the bustling-but-not-oppressive crowd on the restaurant's second floor. If it had been someone else's party, she'd have invited 30 percent more people than she expected to actually come. This, she noted, was the same factor by which one should overstate Bookscan figures.

How did it feel to be promoting her sophomore collection?

"You don't take lots of pictures of the second baby," said Crosley.

But she swore she did not mean this in a negative way! She wasn't jaded or anything.  Besides, there are advantages to having a bestselling debut (I Was Told There'd Be Cake) under one's belt. The Times, which had "ignored" her first book, paired this one with Emily Gould's for a review in last Sunday's paper. And while others objected to the pairing, Crosley claimed not to mind--it wasn't like the paper had panned one and loved the other, after all.

Her only reservation was the large, glinting cuff bracelet she wore to the photo shoot.

"I look like I'm She-Ra, Princess of Power," Crosley said.

Ms. Saletan, who resigned early last month from her position atop the troubled publishing company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is quoted in the release as saying, "I feel lucky beyond measure to be joining Riverhead, an imprint whose books I have long admired and whose success I have long envied, and to be joining a company whose strength, forward-thinking, and commitment to the business of books are a model to the industry."

More on this later, hopefully.

Why did they do it? Wouldn't they have made a lot more money if they'd published the paperback edition themselves?

According to editorial director Katie Deblinski, it was not an easy decision, but it came down to the fact that Riverhead, a publisher with corporate resources and a proven track record with paperbacks, is better equipped to market the book now that its profile is so much greater than it was before the NBA nomination.

"We felt it would be an advantage for the book to have the deeper pockets of a bigger house," Ms. Deblinski said. "It becomes a matter of printing a lot of copies and really doing a ton of advertising, and we just have smaller budgets."

The deal with Riverhead will look like an especially smart bet for Graywolf if the book doesn't win the National Book Award. If it does, though, Riverhead will have gotten a bargain.

Director of publicity Mary Matze said it's likely that a win at the NBAs would have meant big paperback profits for Graywolf, but that the risk involved in holding onto them instead of taking one of the many offers being thrown at them since the nominations were announced was too great.

"It's a sticky situation, and we really went back and forth with the author on it because he was like, 'Why are you doing this!'" Ms. Matze said. "We had a lot of hesitation but I think ultimately it will be the best thing for the book, which is what we want."

She went on: "We felt like if he doesn't win, then Riverhead is probably going to be the best home for him and for this book in the long term, and if he does win, we still have a good deal worked out with Riverhead, though of course it would have been more beneficial for us to keep the paperback rights. Even in that case, a publisher like Riverhead is going to have advertising dollars that a press like Graywolf doesn't really have."

This way, Ms. Matze said, "it's a guaranteed profit both for us and the author." The advance Riverhead is paying Graywolf is money they can count on regardless of what happens Nov. 19th.

"There is some risk involved... whether he wins the National Book Award or not," Ms. Matze said. "There's a little bit of a bump in sales right now because he's nominated, but if he doesn't win, the focus is going to go to that winner."

Under those circumstances, according to Ms. Matze, Riverhead will be able to give the book more exposure and offer it a longer shelf-life.

According to a press release, Mr. Mosley's first book for Riverhead, where he will be edited by Sean McDonald, will be a mystery novel that centers around an African-American private investigator named Leonid McGill living in present day New York. The book, scheduled for 2009, will be the first installment of Mr. Mosley's new series, the second installment of which will also be published by Riverhead. Mr. Mosley's third Riverhead book will be a "literary novel," says the release.

Riverhead publisher Geoffrey Kloske declined to comment on the amount Mr. Mosley would receive for the three books.

UPDATE: Asked to comment on Mr. Mosley's move to Riverhead, Little, Brown publisher Mitchael Pietsch said in an e-mail, "Walter Mosley is one of America's greatest writers and I wish him success in everything he does."

UPDATE: The literary novel referenced in this morning's press release will be the second book Mr. Mosley will write for Riverhead, according to Mr. McDonald. Mr. McDonald said the tentative title for the novel is The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. 

Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group, has acquired a biography of Walter O'Malley—the man who in 1957 infamously moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles—written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael D'Antonio.

News of the deal comes just days after O'Malley was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. According to Riverhead publisher Geoffrey Kloske, who acquired the book in a preempt from agent David McCormick of McCormick & Williams, Mr. D'Antonio has interviewed scores of people, including O'Malley's son Peter, who owned the team through the late 1990s. Mr. Kloske said Mr. D'Antonio "has access to literally hundreds of never-before-used documents and a trove of letters, records and memorabilia totaling more than 35,0000 pieces."

The book, tentatively titled The O'Malley: The Man Who Broke Brooklyn's Heart, Won LA's Love, and Changed Baseball Forever will be published in early 2009.

As it happened, Mr. Vachon wasn’t sipping cocktails but herbal tea, and he was reclining at a table at the 1990’s trend-spot Balthazar—a restaurant that is, in theory at least, not a private club. It was an intriguing choice for a young scribbler whose first novel, Mergers and Acquisitions, is being promoted as the spiritual and stylistic heir to Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney’s coke-powered chronicle of early New York yuppiedom.

Back in his woozy Bright Lights days, Mr. McInerney had made a nightly crash pad out of restaurateur Keith McNally’s Tribeca brasserie Odeon, even honoring it with a picture on the book’s cover. Now Mr. Vachon had chosen Mr. McNally’s second hot-boîte, Balthazar, as his interview spot—a move that, depending on the motivation, was either an affirmation of Mr. Vachon’s latter-day McInerney status or else just messianically cheesy.

When asked, Mr. Vachon said he had chosen the restaurant quite simply because it has “the greatest breakfast.”

“I can’t find scrambled eggs like they have here anywhere except at the Coffee Shop, which is a trek,” he said in a voice that oscillated between the pinched vowels of an Eton boy and the breathy consonants of Bill and Ted. “I read that Julian Barnes book [A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters] where the last chapter is set in heaven and every meal is breakfast, and I think Balthazar is just a goddamn good breakfast.”

Mr. Vachon has a yen for such literary allusions—to the works of Mr. Barnes one moment, to Ernest Hemingway and the ancient Roman scribe Petronius the next—which is perhaps only appropriate in a novelist who is in the process of being crowned this season’s “Lit” Boy. Each book season seems to have one: a comely and precocious young thing who is hailed as everything from an avatar of his generation’s angst and aspirations to “a compelling young literary voice,” as the Mergers and Acquisitions publicity materials put it.

On several occasions, Mr. McInerney has even been known to get in on the coronation, penning praise-filled reviews as he did for Benjamin Kunkel’s debut Indecision—which he described as “the funniest and smartest coming-of-age novel in years”—or offering back-of-the-book benedictions, as he did for Mergers and Acquisitions, which he blessed as a “witty and entertaining immorality tale which should earn Vachon many fans.”

All of which raises the question: How many heirs can a single man have? And can a Lit Boy’s published product ever live up to the Everests of hype?

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS IS THE STORY of Tommy Quinn, an overeducated but underperforming young banker from the land of S.U.V.’s and country clubs (Westchester, that is) who finds himself adrift in the big, imperial city after college. Set in the “Late American” present, it is a satire of upper-class excess that quickly turns to farce as it follows Tommy through the absurd highs and many lows of his Wall Street baptism. Along the way he encounters silly socialites, sadistic bosses, an artist named Yves Grandchatte (that’s “Bigpussy”), a band of Zapatistas, Jesus, a bastard friend with a knack for failing upwards, and a fifth-generation Rockefeller who is so inbred he is, yes, mildly retarded. There are also enough high-end references stuffed into the book to fill a September issue of Vogue magazine.

When asked about the inspiration for all this insanity, Mr. Vachon paused and hemmed a little, then confessed. He cited Satyricon, the ancient picaresque novel by Petronius, alluded to Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, mentioned classical ring structures. And then he brought up his peers, the ones he played with during his banker days, who share his penchant for cufflinks and Rolexes—and who flit through his novel as thinly disguised versions of themselves.

“I felt like I was living with a bunch of people who had wrongly identified themselves as a post-9/11 generation,” Mr. Vachon said. “And I felt like I they were one of the most gilded and privileged groups to ever land into anything, that nobility no longer obliged but sort of entitled.

“I wanted to set down a portrait of this generation. Period,” he continued. “What’s the great Flaubertian quote? ‘All it takes for a member of the bourgeoisie to be happy is good health, selfishness, and stupidity, but the first two will get you nowhere if you don’t have the third’?” he said, slightly misquoting the author. “I love that.”

Whether others will love it, however, is ultimately the more important question—one that will be answered after April 5, the day Mergers and Acquisitions finally goes public.

Mr. Vachon can certainly write. He can scratch out a sentence and scratch it out well, with flashes of alchemy, chemistry and even poetry. But there is something tired in his tales of silicone-pumped trophy wives and smarmy banker-barons, an obviousness that gives his book the quality of one of the designer dresses that clutter his book: a piece of fine, even at times shimmery, fabric cut into a predictable shape.

But this is a first novel. And the Greenwich-born, Westchester-bred Mr. Vachon has certainly managed to walk a charmed path so far.

Even by Lit Boy standards, his ascent has been a heady one, the kind of rapid and seemingly twist-free climb that makes you wonder whether some lives don’t really follow a Euclidean logic after all.

Mr. Vachon’s brief but accelerated career began much like his protagonist Tommy Quinn’s did, with a job at the investment bank J.P. Morgan that he took after graduating from Duke with a less-than-dazzling grade-point average (Tommy graduated from Georgetown and took a job at “J.S. Spencer”). He won the job after doing two star-turn summers as a college intern—a position he landed, in turn, through a friend of his father, “which is how basically 50 percent of those internships get handed out,” he said.

“I always loved American history, loved biographies,” he recalled. “And at the end of every Theodore Roosevelt biography, J.P. Morgan showed up. And my father had a friend who was like, ‘Do you want to intern?’ And I was like, ‘Sure, this is an American institution!’ Would I want to work on the Roosevelt Bull Moose campaign? Hell yeah!”

That early enthusiasm had made Mr. Vachon “like the No. 2 intern.” But despite this pre-professional promise, he found that he was “pretty miserable” as an actual analyst—the kind of guy who, like Tommy, managed to convert the dollar into itself within his first weeks on the job. So he began dabbling at writing, returning to one of the college pastimes at which he had excelled.

From there, things moved pretty fast. He began by freelancing for magazines like The American Conservative, which led, at the suggestion of his B.B.F. (best blogger friend) Elizabeth Spiers, to a blog about the “life and adventures of a 26-year-old investment banker,” which led to his discovery by power-agent David Kuhn, which led, in the spring of 2005, to a deal with Riverhead Books. A big deal. Mr. Vachon would get $650,000 to produce two novels for the imprint. That he was a first-time author who sealed the deal on spec, with just a 70-page taste of his novel-to-be, made him irresistible to lit gossips.

“Basically, what I saw in the first things of his that I read was that he was a true writer, meaning a beautiful prose stylist and a real writer,” Mr. Kuhn told The Observer. “And he had a point of view—which not everyone has, including beautiful prose writers—about life, about the world, about society, about culture, about his generation.”

NOW, LESS THAN TWO YEARS LATER, Mr. Vachon has turned this “point of view” into a finished book, a 290-page hardcover that is getting a decidedly swanky Riverhead rollout.

“We’re putting in a lot of resources,” said Riverhead publisher Geoffrey Kloske. “Right now, it’s our lead fiction title of the moment, and a lot of care and energy has gone into developing the publicity campaign and marketing and everything else.”

“Everything else” apparently includes a lot. Along with all the usual promotional fare, there are the launch parties at Manhattan’s new, nasty-named hangout, The Box, and at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont—the latter hosted by Anonymous Content, the production company that has already optioned Mergers and Acquisitions (and most recently produced Babel). There is the “exclusive excerpt” in this month’s re-relaunched Radar. There are the publicity packages (sent in bankerly file folders), the splashy J.S. Spencer “Web site” and, of course, the galleys that come stamped with pictures of Mr. Vachon’s fetching face: his perfectly disheveled hair, his Oxford-blue eyes, and the nose that stands in strong and pert salute to his resolutely nonethnic ancestry.

“I have a face for print,” Mr. Vachon joked as he squirmed—oddly, it seemed, for a man who has probably never known an unfortunate photograph—before the Observer photographer who was snapping his picture. “I feel you should get hazard pay.”

More likely, though, Mr. Vachon will find himself increasingly on the bright side of the flashbulb in the next few weeks, as the book parade begins. And then, at some point, it will be over, and it will be time for him to turn to his second novel—perhaps even to return to the family beach house where he finished the first one. (“The stress got so bad this summer I was drinking two bottles of Cab-Sav a day—or Sauvignon Blanc, rather,” he joked.) He said he already knows what he wants to write.

“It’s a book about space tourism, Westchester County, instant unwanted fame and, um, the possibility of a new beginning, maybe? Of renewal?” he said, his voice ticking upward with excitement. “I mean, I feel the book I just wrote is so much about cities built on cities built on cities, and this one is not.”

He smiled. His teeth were strong and straight.

“I’m either going to call it Barrett Sumner,” he said, “or The Mexican Tornado.”