Among the fiction finalists was the late Roberto Bolaño's 2666. In nonfiction, The New York Times's Dexter Filkins was nominated for The Forever War.

In September 2008, Mr. Filkins told The Observer's Leon Neyfakh he wanted his book to show readers:

A full list of the finalists can be found at the NBCC's Web site.

Trouble was, no one at FSG thought to make a guest list, so every little culture worker in New York showed up expecting to get in. And none of them came fashionably late: the party officially started at 8 p.m., and according to several attendees there was a line stretching around the corner by 8:30.

FSG editor Lorin Stein, one of the evening's organizers, started bracing himself for an overcapacity crowd early in the day. "This is going to the most chaotic fucking book party ever thrown," Mr. Stein wrote in an e-mail. "You can put that in the bank. It will make all other book parties look like fucking well-oiled teutonic machines; and it will furthermore raise the question why it should be in the least bit difficult to establish and preserve a *guest list* like every other fucking publisher, in the history of time, who ever put together a party to launch a book. Something which simply DID NOT OCCUR TO ME. Because I AM AN IDIOT."

Mr. Stein told Media Mob this morning that he and a few assistants went outside when they realized how long the line was and sold copies of 2666 to the people waiting. "It was awkward seeing friends whom one couldn't let in," Mr. Stein said. "There was a delegation from Media Bistro who got very annoyed. I tried to help, but I think it was too late."

He said also: "Apparently some kids kept asking where Bolano was. They wanted to meet him. Which is rather sweet, no?"

Related: Jonathan Lethem apparently felt old while he was standing in line. Same with the literary agent Elyse Cheney, who you can see on the left in the photo above.

Also in the photo: Jon-Jon Goulian, who all but disappeared from public life earlier this year when Random House agreed to pay him lots of money to write a memoir. He's the one with the tattoos and the sunglasses on the right, next to all the ladies.

Felix Gillette checks in with WNBC where an "upheaval began back in May, when NBC executives announced that they would be restructuring WNBC’s newsroom. As part of the transformation, NBC would be creating a new 24-hour local news channel, a revamped local news Web site and increased services for mobile news consumers."

How are business magazines responding to the financial crisis, wonders John Koblin. Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman says, “We’ve had more meetings... And one of the things we did is we made a list of every writer we had and what stories they’re working on, and asked how their pieces are relevant, and has the landscape changed in a way to reshape their stories.” Plus: Times’ Beijing Bureau Chief Takes On India.

Plus: Elizabeth Banks... Power Lunchers... Election Madness.

Mr. Wylie discussed that material over lunch about two weeks ago with Barbara Epler, the woman who first published Bolaño’s books in the United States. Ms. Epler is the editor in chief of New Directions, the tiny independent press responsible for introducing to American readers such giants as Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka and W. G. Sebald. Ms. Epler, who has been at the head of New Directions for the past 12 years, first published Bolaño here in 2003, having acquired a tall stack of his books well before Farrar, Straus and Giroux turned him into a superstar with the 2007 publication of The Savage Detectives, a raunchy and hilarious set of testimonies about the lives of two rebellious, adventurous poets. Many of the Bolano books New Directions now owns exclusive rights to—among them seven short novels, two books of short stories, an essay collection and a volume of poetry called The Romantic Dogs—have not yet been published, and will be rolled out over the course of the next few years.

But Ms. Epler, whose advances tend to hover in the low five figures and whose print runs range from 1,500 to 8,000, is just about resigned to the fact that New Directions will not be able to afford any of what Mr. Wylie now has in his knapsack.

“Our pockets aren’t very deep, and you don’t want to be like, gimme, gimme, gimme!” Ms. Epler said in an interview. “Andrew knows we would totally buy them and pay more than we would usually pay for anything, but he’s representing the widow and the children, and I imagine he’s going to take it all to a larger house. It’s hard to say. It’s going to be his call. Like a smart agent, which he is, he’ll wait for the tsunami of 2666 to come. [Otherwise] it would be like selling a share on a racehorse before it wins the Triple Crown.”

Ms. Epler first heard about Bolaño from the novelist Francisco Goldman, who sometime around 2002 made her a list of foreign authors he thought she should consider publishing in translation. Shortly thereafter, Ms. Epler came upon one of Bolaño’s short stories in the now defunct quarterly journal Grand Street and loved it. When she heard that Bolaño’s British publishing house, Harvill Press, was putting out an English translation of his novel By Night in Chile and was looking to sell the American rights, she asked the house’s longtime publisher, Christopher MacLehose, if he might give her a look.

“I e-mailed Christopher and said, ‘Pretty please!’” Ms. Epler said, “because a lot of times we’re not first in the pecking order because our advances are so small. He said sure.”

That was on a Friday; Ms. Epler read the manuscript over the weekend, and in her excitement even sent it to her friend Susan Sontag, who some years earlier had played an instrumental role in propelling W. G. Sebald, another New Directions author, to great fame in the United States.

The following Monday, Ms. Epler made an offer, and was informed by Mr. MacLehose that Harvill—a distinguished literary house that had been folded into Random House UK—had two other Bolaño books available. Ms. Epler bought those, too.

In the meantime, according to Ms. Epler, Bolaño had really started “catching on” all over Europe, and a few years after her initial shopping spree, she decided to see if there were any other as yet untranslated works that she could get her hands on. Bolaño, at this point, was dead, and all of what he left behind was being handled by his Spanish publisher, Anagrama, in collaboration with his literary agent Carmen Balcells.

“As far as we knew, there were another 10 books,” Ms. Epler said, “and we were ready to say we want them all. We asked for everything.”

Everything, however, was not an option, as Anagrama and Ms. Barcells wanted to place Bolaño’s two biggest books, The Savage Detectives and 2666, with a major house. The estate took this “two-track approach,” as Ms. Epler called it, with almost every publisher they dealt with.

“[Carmen Balcells] felt both of those books could be sensations abroad, both in non-Spanish-speaking Europe and in America,” Ms. Epler said. “So she had to deliver the sad news that we couldn’t get it all. We said, ‘O.K., we’ll take all the small books!’”

At this point, though she’s sad to have missed out on Bolaño’s two final masterworks—“I have a funny relationship with that 2666 galley; I look at it and I just feel a pang!”—Ms. Epler has nothing but good things to say about the job Farrar, Straus has done with Bolaño. Indeed, last year’s publication of The Savage Detectives was nothing short of masterful: a rave from James Wood on the cover of The New York Times Book Review set the tone for its critical reception, and commercial success soon followed.

“I haven’t seen a better play for an author from abroad,” Ms. Epler said. “I of course wish that our colophon was on 2666, but we don’t have the marketing reach that FSG does. Playboy gave Savage Detectives four bunnies! I don’t think Playboy pays much attention to what we publish.”

Whether FSG will have to put up a fight for all those books Mr. Wylie is getting ready to sell remains to be seen.

“It’s a process that’ll take some time because there is some editing on some of the books that will be involved,” Mr. Wylie said. “And I don’t speak Spanish, so my ability to help intimately in this process is somewhat limited. But we’ll get there.”

He went on, vaguely: “Ideally I would like to figure out something that took into account the strength of both publishers’ positions so maybe if there are a few books to come, we’ll work with both, but I don’t know.”

For now, it might be worth noting that Mr. Wylie doesn’t officially take over the Bolaño estate until November 4th. Until then, the thing still technically resides with Ms. Barcells.

So what happens if she mischievously decides to just sell everything before Mr. Wylie gets there?

Won’t happen, Mr. Wylie said.

“The contracts have to be signed by Carolina [Bolaño’s widow], and I think she wants this transition to occur,” he said. “So, you know, it’s going to occur, and I don’t think anything would be gained by preemptive action on anyone’s part. Including our own.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

Sometimes, though even tired nicknames are apt. Mr. Wylie certainly lived up to that kitschy little epithet last week when he poached three huge writers—Chinua Achebe, Roberto Bolaño and Vladimir Nabokov—from other literary agents and added them quietly to the client list that is posted triumphantly on his Web site.

Of these three giants, only Mr. Achebe is still alive. And at 77 years old, he is apparently quite frail and unlikely to produce another major work. Rights to the books he has already written, however, including Things Fall Apart, will be in play before too long, and you can be sure that when the time comes, the Wylie Agency will be aggressive about selling them all over the world for maximum return. Mr. Achebe’s previous agent, Emma Sweeney, could not be reached for comment.

Fresh material could still come from Bolaño, however, even though he has been dead since 2003. According to Jonathan Galassi of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who acquired American rights to the Chilean author’s The Savage Detectives and 2666 from the estate’s previous agent, Carmen Balcells, it is possible that Bolaño left behind a substantial amount of work that has not yet seen the light of day. “Apparently, there are other manuscripts,” Mr. Galassi said, “but I don’t know what they are.”

It’s a different story with Nabokov, whose final novel, The Original of Laura, has recently become one of the most famous—even mythic—unpublished works of the 20th century. In April, Nabokov’s 74-year-old son, Dmitri (henceforth, Mr. Nabokov), announced his intention to publish Laura—which is written on 138 index cards—instead of burning it up, as his father had requested just before his death in 1977. The Nabokov estate, as a result, is quite a prize indeed.

Until last week, the honor of placing Laura with a publisher rested with the New Jersey-based agent Nikki Smith, who has been faithfully representing the Nabokov estate since 1986. Ms. Smith had already submitted Laura to Knopf when Mr. Nabokov decided to do the deal through Wylie instead; as of Monday afternoon, when Pub Crawl reached Mr. Nabokov by phone in Palm Beach, he still hadn’t made up his mind about where the book should go. “There are several possibilities,” Mr. Nabokov said. “Many people are interested.”

He is shopping the book not just in America but worldwide—not surprising, given Mr. Wylie’s robust international operation. According to Mr. Nabokov, the French translation of Laura will probably be published by Gallimard; the Italian by Adelphi Edizioni; and the German by Rowohlt. As for the American rights, at press time, Mr. Nabokov said, “There is no news yet. I suggest you call my agent, Andrew Wylie.”

Attempts to contact Mr. Wylie, who was traveling this week, were unsuccessful.

Knopf editor (and Vintage/Anchor publisher) LuAnn Walther, who apparently had been in talks with Ms. Smith before the Nabokov estate was moved to Wylie, did not return calls.

neyfakh@observer.com