Cindy Adams makes the rounds. (Photo: Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center)

INT. MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY — EVENING CINDY ADAMS is standing with a friend among a crowd of hundreds, surveying the black-tie attendees at the PEN Literary Gala, who include Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, Jay McInerney, Jennifer Egan, Candace Bushnell, Joanna Coles and Peter Godwin.

Ms. Adams is wearing a splashy, graphic print jacket and a bun atop her head. A stream of partygoers greet her. She is approached by the Transom and asked how to work a room.

MS. ADAMS
The first thing you do is ignore Salman Rushdie. Because there’s no party he’s not at.
THE TRANSOM
Oh my goodness. Okay. Did he do something?
MS. ADAMS
No. He’s just everywhere.
THE TRANSOM
You’ve been doing this a while. How do you identify celebrities in a room full of writers?
MS. ADAMS
I am hoping some of these people will recognize me.
I look for a few celebrities—Molly Ringwald is schlepping around here—and whoever else I see. I will tell you, however, that these writers do not dress well.
Take a look at this lady. (Points to a woman across the room.)
You see that big behind and the big arms?

LADY #1, a slender, attractive older woman smiles and heads straight for Ms. Adams.

LADY # 1
I could not believe that Nora died two months after she gave me that prize.
I mean, didn’t she look good that day?
MS. ADAMS
She did. She would not let anybody know.
LADY # 1
We were so close. We always celebrated our birthdays together.
THE TRANSOM
Were you close with Nora Ephron, Ms. Adams?
MS. ADAMS
I didn’t go to her place for Passover, but we knew each other.
THE TRANSOM
Nora Ephron is really having a moment.
MS. ADAMS
She will last for a little while. Everybody is ‘Nora! Nora!’
Which is why Tom Hanks will win something.
(Leans in toward The Transom.) I have no idea who this lady is.

In the background, writer Susan Orlean walks past New Yorker editor David Remnick, who is standing near Salman Rushdie. LADY #2, a brunette in a sparkly white dress, leaves Mr. Rushdie's side and approaches Ms. Adams.

LADY #2
Excuse me. My dad is such a big fan of yours. He’s got a King Charles Cavalier.
He told me, years ago your dog ran out, and he grabbed it, because he's such a big dog lover.
And you wrote him a thank-you note. Do you remember him? ...In a Bentley?

MS. ADAMS
Yes! Yes, I do! He never sent me a note!
LADY #2
You never gave him a return address. You just said, "Thank you, Cindy."
MS. ADAMS
I work at the Post! He could have found me there ... Whose dress are you wearing? It’s gorgeous.
LADY #2
This dress was made for me by Roberto Cavalli years ago. It fits. I’m shocked.
MS. ADAMS
Look at that figure! I hate you. Go away from me!
LADY #2
Let me tell you. I’m 45 years old. I have a 19-year-old. I’m disciplined. I’m a vegan...
I had to tell you for the sake of my dad. He’s not a public person.
He’s a private businessman. He lives in the Galleria. He’s in Fisher Island most of the time.
MS. ADAMS
When he comes back, he can buy dinner. I will have it with him.
LADY #2
He would love that... I know that Salman is my boyfriend.
He’s a good man. I'm a woman, not a child.
I'm not gossip. I'm a mother. (Disappears into the crowd.)
THE TRANSOM
That was Salman Rushdie’s girlfriend?
MS. ADAMS
I have no idea.

Ms. Adams then takes the Transom by the scruff of our silk jacket and walks us around the room.

MS. ADAMS
Look at that lady in green. With her breasts hanging out like anybody wants to touch them!
THE TRANSOM
Do you think people do or don’t want to touch them?
MS. ADAMS
No! Nobody does. I’d rather have a bagel than touch her things. Look at this one.
The pants don’t go down to the floor, and her crotch is very visible.
She’s got a bag that nobody would wear anywhere. On Pitkin Avenue they would refuse it.
THE TRANSOM
Pitkin Avenue, where’s that?
MS. ADAMS
It’s on the Lower East Side. Do you know Delancey?
Do you know Rivington? What are you, gentile?

Ms. Adams nods toward a guest in a loud summery print.

MS. ADAMS (CONT.)
Look at that one.
THE TRANSOM
It’s like Lilly Pulitzer died or something.
MS. ADAMS
Very good! That’s one in a row for you.
Look at that bag. They carried those during the war!
THE TRANSOM
What are you wearing, Cindy?
MS. ADAMS
It’s old Armani. It’s $4,500 three years ago. Look at my pearls.
I don’t believe in poverty. It’s not my thing.

Dinner bells begin to chime. Guests make their way to their tables. The Transom starts to part ways with Ms. Adams. We thank her for her time.

MS. ADAMS
Just don't quote me being too vicious!

Deepa Mehta and Salman Rushdie.

See banned The Satanic Verses author and now screenwriter Salman Rushdie premiere his film Midnight’s Children, adapted with director Deepa Mehta from his best-selling novel. Mr. Rushdie and Ms. Mehta will then discuss the movie, about a pair of kids growing up in an India that is gaining independence from Britain and is nothing like the country their parents knew, on a panel moderated by Navina Haidar, the curator of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is hosting the night along with 108 Media/Paladin.

The Grace Rogers Auditorium, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, (212) 535-7710, screening 7pm, by invitation only.

Neil Young waged heavy bullshit in a memoir that spent all of a paragraph describing hanging out with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and the Manson family in favor of slinging hundreds of pages of PR copy about the new sound system Mr. Young invented. The masochist in me kind of liked this book, the same way I like the most pointless of Mr. Young’s guitar solos. Passages such as this are the prose equivalent:

A funny thing happened at Woodstock. I didn’t want cameras onstage distracting me while we were playing. I hated the showboating atmosphere that surrounded the filming and thought it distracted from our music. The music was between us and the audience, and anything that got in the way was taboo in my opinion...On the Woodstock record, Atlantic Records used a song of mine recorded months later at the Fillmore East in New York called “Sea of Madness.” That was kind of misleading.

Okay, grandpa. Thanks for lunch, but I really gotta get going now.

Pete Townshend turns out to be a better writer than ol’ shakey—he devotes quite of lot time in his book, Who I Am, to his career as an acquisitions editor at Faber & Faber, a job he took a few years after the death of Who drummer Keith Moon. It’s interesting, but not as interesting as, you know, getting into a fistfight onstage with Keith Moon or throwing televisions out of hotel windows, details that get shortchanged.

Of all the music memoirs this year, my favorite is the one by Rod Stewart, the hilariously-named Rod. Mr. Stewart positions himself as a stately, Evelyn Waugh-esque narrator. (The chapters all have headings like “In which our hero throws in his lot with the damaged remnants of the Small Faces and is reluctantly made alert to the perils of trying to run two careers at once. With sundry meditations on graffiti, Ronnie Wood’s hooter, and the wearing of velvet in hot rooms.”)

The worst book of the year—and possibly of the past several—is Say Nice Things About Detroit by Scott Lasser, an insulting and entirely misguided fictional account of my dear, troubled hometown that manages to make one of the most complicated and evocative places in the world about as interesting as a conference call.

The runner-up was Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie’s third-person memoir of the fatwa issued on him by Ayatollah Khomeini. I took less issue with the author—who lived under the titular pseudonym Joseph Anton during those threatening years—casually placing himself in a lineage with Conrad and Chekhov, as well as comparing his novel to Ulysses and Lolita, than I did with his numerous attacks, almost in the same breath, on the “majestic narcissism” of Padma Lakshmi, his fourth wife, whom he might as well just refer to as “dumb slut.” Mr. Rushdie uses the third person as if it protects him from the offhanded misogyny of his assaults, not to mention his own preposterous self-aggrandizing. There is also prose in the book that makes Top Chef look like Joyce:

His biggest problem, he thought in his most bitter moments, was that he wasn’t dead. If he were dead nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of his security and whether or not he merited such special treatment for so long. He wouldn’t have to fight for the right to get on a plane … He wouldn’t have to talk to any more politicians (big advantage). His exile from India wouldn’t hurt. And the stress level would definitely be lower.

Yes, because the worst thing about having an international hit put on you is that it’s just so stressful.

A superior memoir is A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, which includes this description of Berlin: “Cigarettes marked off the time. For the few minutes one lasted, you knew exactly what you were doing: you were smoking that cigarette. When it was done, you would figure out what to do next, or you would just light another.”

Toni Morrison’s uneven novella Home, about an alcoholic veteran of the Korean War trying to rescue his sister from an evil eugenicist, felt both overwritten and unfinished; Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan’s humorless, entirely unsexy novel about Cold War-era British espionage, made Moonraker look smart; and Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her was like a teaser for better things to come.

Of the year’s failures, Zadie Smith’s novel NW was at least a very interesting one. Ms. Smith can make the description of a dumpy office feel dire: “Here offices are boxy cramped Victorian damp. Five people share them, the carpet is threadbare, the hole-punch will never be found.” But the novel is less a narrative than an unwelcoming environment to move around in at random. She bogs down her writing with a disruptive and schizophrenic style.

Speaking of interruptions, Laurent Binet’s HHhH was translated into English this year, and is nominally about Reinhard Heydrich—Hitler’s “Butcher of Prague”—but is much more about the difficulty of trying to write a novel about Reinhard Heydrich, including various William Gass-like digressions from the author himself.

A (slightly) less-tortured historical novel was Hilary Mantel’s very entertaining Bring Up the Bodies, about Thomas Cromwell.

Katherine Boo’s amazing reconstruction of life in an Annawadi slum beat out another of Robert Caro’s minute-to-minute biographies of LBJ for the nonfiction National Book Award. Louise Erdrich deservedly won the NBA for fiction with The Round House, her novel about a violent rape on an Ojibwe reservation, though the award felt like it was retroactively awarding a mostly consistent 25-year career. Let’s not even talk about how there was no Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Metafictional winks—for example, an author naming her protagonist after herself and her supporting cast after her friends—have always seemed dubious to me, so I picked up Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? with apprehension. The book stars Sheila Heti and seemingly includes transcripts of Ms. Heti’s conversations with her real-life friends, though that might be a fictional ruse. Ms. Heti is thoughtful in her exploration of the thin line between fiction and reality, especially in her examination of the ways in which the two bleed together.

Chris Kraus, an antecedent to Ms. Heti, also wrote a small masterpiece this year with a novel about the Los Angeles art world, Summer of Hate.

I can’t think of a better work of nonfiction in 2012 than Mark Binelli’s Detroit City is the Place to Be, an antidote to Scott Lasser’s atrocity. Nothing has come as close to realistically documenting the wackiness of contemporary Detroit. At one point, Mr. Binelli sneaks onto the set of the remake of the communists-are-coming smut movie Red Dawn, which was filmed at the author’s old high school. The city had been plastered with fictional propaganda posters that say things like YOU DESERVE TO BE HERE. Mr. Binelli overhears a crew member talking about how much he loved filming in Detroit: “We were setting off major explosions in the middle of downtown! Seriously, man, there’s nowhere else in the country they’d let you do something like this.”

It was a good year for poetry. Maureen N. McLane (full disclosure: a grad school professor of mine) wrote a brilliant poem-memoir that attempted to answer the question, “Why poetry?” (The answers range from “Poetry is connate with the origin of man” to “I have wasted my life.”) Having Louise Glück’s collected poems in a single volume is a gift. Michael Robbins published the most assured debut I’ve read in a long time. And any year John Ashbery publishes a book is A-okay with me, especially one with the lines, “No one expects life to be a single adventure,/yet conversely, one is surprised when it turns out disappointing.” Also, Frederick Seidel’s Nice Weather included some of the bleakest imagery of the year:

This is what it’s like at the end
    of the day.

But soon the day will go away.

Sunlight preoccupies the cross
    street.

It and night soon will meet.

Meanwhile, there is Central
    Park.

Now the park is getting dark.

Oh, and speaking of bleak, Fifty Shades of Grey saved publishing.

mmiler@observer.com

Photo credit: PowerHouse Arena Tumblr

The lights dimmed and mood music began to play as Salman Rushdie walked to the stage at PowerHouse Arena in Dumbo the other night as part of a week of events to launch his new memoir, Joseph Anton.

The title of the book is the pseudonym that Mr. Rushdie used while he was in hiding after Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for the author’s death following the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989. The book, which is written in the third person, focuses mostly on the period when Mr. Rushdie was in hiding before the fatwa was lifted in 2002.

Mr. Rushdie stood at the microphone in a slightly baggy, somewhat wrinkled gray suit and a blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck.

“This is more less the beginning,” he said, before mumbling “a little repetitive now.” He appeared to read a printout of the excerpt from the memoir that appeared a few weeks ago in The New Yorker. Since we had read the piece in the magazine, and then read the slightly different, longer version that begins the book, we couldn’t help but agree with the author.

It was odd to watch somebody talk about himself and his life in the third person. But somehow, with Mr. Rushdie, it seemed fitting. As he eased into his performance, lines that did not seem funny when we read them in The New Yorker or in the actual book got laughs. Maybe the third time is the charm for finding the humor in a book about being targeted by fundamentalists.

“Why now?” asked The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, during a Q & A.

“Why not?” said Mr. Rushdie. The audience chuckled. Mr. Rushdie admitted that during the years in hiding, despite himself, there was a “disgusting little writerly voice saying ‘good story.’”

“Oh gosh, I’ve never been asked that question before,” Mr. Rushdie said, after someone in the audience asked how the West looks at Islam.

Mr. Rushdie’s publicist had promised us a few minutes to talk with the author—provided we only asked about the book and didn’t ask “random” questions about the Middle East or the author’s personal life.

Since the book is about the author’s personal life—and deals with the Middle East—we were unsure what was left. It turned out not to be a problem, as Mr. Rushdie rushed away before we could ask him for deep textual analysis.

But between the 633-page memoir in our bag, Ms. Treisman's questions and questions from the audience (not to mention the fact that, post-fatwa, Mr. Rushdie is hardly a hermit in the New York literary scene), we felt pretty sure we'd heard plenty.

Salman vents on Twitter about Facebook

Poor Salman Rushdie: there seems to be a social networking fatwa against his digital presence. First there was that incident where he tried to claim his Twitter handle, only to find out there was someone already squatting on @salmanrushdie. Humiliated, the Satanic Verses author was forced to claim @salmanrushdie1 until he gained enough support to push out the faker and reign over his rightful tweets.

To add insult to injury, Facebook deactivated his account yesterday, thinking he was an imposter. Then they refused to let him back under the name "Salman Rushdie."

But never fear: Despite no one at Facebook's HQ immediately responding to Mr. Rushdie's request for his personal page to feature his real name (an odd request, seeing as how many celebs try to hide their identity on Facebook, as opposed to Twitter), it was restored less than an hour ago. Along with an apology.

(Did Mark Zuckerberg email him personally? We hope so.)
Crisis averted, thanks to Mr. Rushdie's new pals over at Twitter, whom he rallied to his identity-defining cause. Now, if only he'd make his page public so we could find him...

Rushdie rushed in.

As support for Occupy Wall Street grew in recent weeks to include all kinds of professional associations and trade unions, the writer Jeff Sharlet thought that some writers might eventually band together and circulate a statement -- and maybe even sign it.

"I was waiting for the letter to happen," said the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. "I was thinking probably somebody will do this."

He watched as gatherings of nurses and teachers and machinists and service workers marched on Wall Street. And while lots of writers were there too, the letter never came. "It didn’t happen because writers are lonely, selfish people and they don’t do this sort of thing,” he said.

So Mr. Sharlet decided the time had come to wield his pen on behalf of his melancholic profession. He wrote to Salman Rushdie, who had been expressing enthusiastic support for Occupy Wall Street on Twitter. "I said, 'Hey Salman, if there was a letter would you sign it?'” said Mr. Sharlet. “He wrote back immediately yes, and with enthusiasm and ideas."

With his former research assistant and fellow journalist, Kiera Feldman, and Mr. Rushdie’s seal of approval (along with help from writers like Francine Prose, who sent the letter to all her writer friends) Occupy Writers, as the formerly preoccupied group came to be known, soon gathered more than 200 signatures. In addition to Mr. Rushdie, the list as it stands so far includes everyone from Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist Jennifer Egan to New Yorker writer Elif Batuman to short story writer George Saunders. There are well-known activists (Barbara Ehrenreich, Naomis Klein and Wolf, and academic Judith Butler), fantasy writers (Neil Gaiman and China Miéville) and a lengthy roster of heavyweight novelists, including Ann Patchett, Allan Gurganus, Jonathan Lethem and Donna Tartt. Even children’s writer Lemony Snicket signed on, along with the editors of n+1, Tin House, The Awl, Lapham's Quarterly, The Nation, The Onion and Guernica.

"Samuel R. Delany signed on because he was in Jonathan Lethem's office when I e-mailed him, and Lethem replied with an e-mail with the subject line 'Absolutely yes, and Samuel R. Delany too,'" wrote Ms. Feldman in an e-mail to The Observer.

"Having corresponded with a good number of the folks on that list,” she continued, “I'll tell you they are beyond inspired and excited by the creativity and imagination they see happening down at Occupy Wall Street and around the country.” She described the response as "diluvian."

Last night, as writers across the city set their alarms for a 6:00 a.m. gathering in Zuccotti Park, Mr. Sharlet and Ms. Feldman launched a web site, Occupy Writers. The site was designed by Nathan Schneider, who is covering the occupation for Harper’s magazine.

Mr. Sharlet and Ms. Feldman opted for a relatively oblique statement of support rather than listing specific demands. The statement reads, “We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.”

Mr. Sharlet said that this approach “speaks to what’s been effective about the protestors having resisted the drive to come up with the list of demands.” He pointed out that while a lot of politically active writers are on the list, it also includes writers not known for politics. “It’s something broader, more emotional and something a lot of writers can identify with.”

The inevitable question among onlookers is who is missing. Does Michael Lewis want to stake a claim? "Great American Novelist" Jonathan Franzen expressed his support for Occupy Wall Street at The New Yorker Festival, but his name is not yet on the list.

“I was holding out hope for George Will,” joked Mr. Sharlet, referring to the crusty conservative newspaper columnist. “He wrote me a long nice e-mail saying he’d been sleeping in the park but he’s just not there yet.”

Self-published writers are also welcome to add their names, although Mr. Sharlet said some Dartmouth students are vetting queries to weed out imposters of famous writers or people trying to add the names of deceased literary figures. As for outcomes, one thing has made itself clear: “So I was wrong,” said Mr. Sharlet. “Writers are not lonely and selfish.”

From the looks of the new verified account logo, the author of The Satanic Verses has driven the squatter off his digital property, and is now tweeting from the @SalmanRushdie account.  Friends include Mia Farrow, Bret Easton Ellis, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman. His last tweet from two hours ago:

Luckily, there is no fatwā on Mr. Rushdie in Middle Earth.

Update: Mr. Rushdie has responded to The New York Observer regarding his new status: "I'm happy to have lost my 1.”

Rutherford.

On a rainy Thursday, guests braved the traffic mess created by President Obama’s visit to New York and streamed into Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater in a blur of gowns and tuxes. High-profile attendees from the worlds of fashion (Hamish Bowles, Donna Karan), literature (Salman Rushdie), rock ’n’ roll (Ric Oscasek, Paulina Porizkova and their two teenage sons) and society (Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia) all rubbed shoulders with a bevy of stooped Asian grandparents eager to see a traditional dance performance. The Observer was there along with them to see the first of five performances by Shen Yun—a performing arts troupe that showcases traditional Chinese dance and art forms.

We were seated next to a harried Ann Dexter-Jones, mother of the three Ronson siblings. “Can you believe the president’s shut down half of Manhattan?” drawled the Brit. “I had to walk nearly half an hour to get here!”

Associated with the Falun Gong movement, the spiritual group that has been harshly repressed by the Chinese government since the 1990s, Shen Yun aims to show the world the rich and oft-forgot cultural heritage of China while also exposing the country’s current political brutalities.

As such, the show included acts featuring ancient Chinese dance as well as more unsettling modern interpretations of the Chinese political atmosphere. In one dance piece titled “Our Story,” a teacher writes a proverb on the blackboard, at which point Chinese police wearing black shirts emblazoned with the hammer and sickle in communist red beat the teacher to death. Fortunately, the unlucky teacher is revived by the ever-present Chinese deities. While these overtly political messages were rather unexpected for first-time viewers, the more traditional dances were nothing short of a triumph.

In “Chopstick Zest,” inspired by a folk dance from the outer reaches of Mongolia, men danced, jumped and beat handfuls of chopsticks against their chests in perfect rhythm. “I hate these guys who make me look out of shape,” quipped Patrick Harvey, a board member of the Shen Yun organization.

The Koch Theater added much to the atmosphere. The red velvet seats were made even more sumptuous by the giant chandelier, which gleamed like a disco ball, and the crystalline lights planted within the balconies. “It reminds me of Swarkozy,” one guest mused. “Swarovski?” another sought to clarify. “Or Sarkozy?”

After the performance, guests ambled up the marble staircase for the after-party, chatting about the spectacle they had just taken in. Various coteries gathered around tall tables and a variety of Chinese delicacies were presented—including a particularly mouth-watering chicken dish. (We went back for seconds.) Revelers temporarily set down their wine glasses to throw back shots—of tea, that is. A tea-tasting station featured exotic leafy blends from Radiance Tea House.

The Shen Yun dancers also made their way to the reception. The female performers were readily identifiable in traditional Chinese garb, while the men wore suits and blended with the crowd. Although most of the troupe were born in China, the majority were raised abroad. Walking around the party, The Observer noticed several dancers prattling in perfect French with other guests.

We caught up with Kelly Rutherford, wearing a white Nanette Lepore dress, who raved about the performance. “We get so inundated with a sort of intensity and things that aren’t beautiful all the time. You know I think it’s so nice to see something that is almost innocent and beautiful and good dancing,” said Ms. Rutherford wistfully. “It made me crave Chinese food for sure,” she added.

Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell similarly expressed her appreciation of Shen Yun. “I’ve seen the New York City Ballet perform so many times,” said Ms. Bushnell. Shen Yun, however, was something wholly different. “The great thing is that you can really be transported,” gushed Ms. Bushnell.

Averell Fisk—grandson of former New York governor and U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union William Averell Harriman—chatted with his wife, Kirsten, about the hairy political issues surrounding Shen Yun. The Fisks were shocked that the Chinese authorities had attempted to stymie Shen Yun because of its ties to Falun Gong. “It’s just nice to put it to the Chinese a little bit,” said Mr. Fisk of attending the evening’s performance. “You think they’d be proud of their culture!” exclaimed Mrs. Fisk. “Remember the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Fisk said in a knowing, muted tone. “They brainwashed everyone essentially,” concluded his wife.

Ms. Karan—whose nonprofit organization, Urban Zen, underwrote Shen Yun’s opening night—wore an arresting wooden necklace with large carved faces. “This is from Senegal, and these are from Haiti,” she said, gesturing to her many wooden bangles. “Part of Urban Zen is the preservation of culture and which it really links East and West together,” explained Ms. Karan.

Before long the younger set grew tired of standing around indoors and adjourned to the balcony. Dragging on cigarettes (is that even legal anymore?) socialites including Nora Zehetner, Zani Gugelmann and Alexandra Slatina chatted, fraternized and generally cordoned themselves off from the rest of the party.

After consorting for an hour or so, guests began to make their way back down the grand staircase where Jimmy Crystal gift bags were being distributed. The designer’s website doesn’t lie when it claims to “crystallize almost anything you can imagine”; the goodie bags included a crystal-covered letter opener. (We’ve been looking for one for ages!)

And so, after a week of highly favorable reviews and highly fashionable audiences, Shen Yun must once again bid farewell to New York. Provided they can evade Communist party censors, doubtless the company will be back next year. —Elise Knutsen

The version of Selasi's Ghana Must Go that Andrew Wylie sold this week to Ann Godoff at Penguin Press consisted of a hundred or so pages plus an outline. Even so, Wylie was wooing publishers by saying he would deliver blurbs from his client Rushdie as well as Morrison. Considering that an agent might typically mention a writer's "very supportive" teacher as someone who "would be open" to blurbing, that's a bold move with some big names. 

Perhaps the endorsements explain why Godoff swooped up the unfinished novel in a two-book deal. Ghana Must Go reportedly opens with a scene of a father who's about to die, and traces the saga of his disintegrating family back to Africa. Selasi's second book, with the working title Generations, will be a fantasy novel.

Neither Wylie nor Godoff could be reached for comment.

“It’s very tough right now wherever you look with the arts,” he told the Transom, citing Conde Nast’s closing of Gourmet magazine.

“You just have to hope that the bottom has been hit. I think there is some reason to believe that it might have been, actually.”

Mr. Rushdie said that among upcoming cultural events, he is most looking forward to seeing the new Coen brothers film. “I’m a huge fan,” he said.

As for his ex-wife Padma Lakshmi, who announced last week that she is pregnant? “I wish her the best,” Mr. Rushdie said.

Later in the evening, he was presented with the Kitty Carlisle Hart Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts. “Certainly it’s always nice to win,” he said. The crowd chuckled.

Also present was actress Kerry Washington, wearing a long black Dior frock tipped with crimson. The actress will make her Broadway debut in David Mamet’s new play, Race, this December. “That’s the extent of my art world for the next few months at least,” she said.

Billionaire art collector and philanthropist Eli Broad, a co-chair of the event, told the Transom he thinks the current administration could take a cue from FDR’s. “Roosevelt’s WPA did a great deal for the arts,” he pointed out.

Actor Robert Redford was later presented with a lifetime achievement award from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, upon receiving an award for Artistic Excellence, joked that the honorees should team up, pooling their talent on one project. “We could make a movie of The Satanic Verses,” he said.