Saturday, October 20, 2007

"So yada yada yada, my cookbook looks just like hers."

Elaine: Yeah. I met this lawyer...we went out to dinner...I had the lobster bisque...we went back to my place, yada yada yada. I never heard from him again.
Jerry: But you yada yada'd over the best part.
Elaine: No, I mentioned the bisque.


Anyway, what does Seinfeld have to do with books, you ask? Well, you may have seen Mrs. Seinfeld, erstwhile socialite and current Friend of Oprah, on all the TV shows plugging her new book, Deceptively Delicious. She's made chocolate pudding with secret avocado in it for Al Roker, and be-squashed mac and cheese for Oprah. And the book itself is cute, not to mention a good idea.

Too bad it's awfully similar to The Sneaky Chef, which just happened to be pitched to HarperCollins TWICE before they jumped on Jessica Seinfeld's proposal. The ideas contained aren't so novel (can recipes even be copyrighted?). But I do feel bad for Missy Lapine and Perseus Books on the timing. It's pretty clear that HarperCollins wanted the book, but turned her down because they wanted a celebrity author (or an author married to a celebrity, anyway).

The New York Times has a good article on the whole thing: Sneaky Food Books: Hot and a Hot Topic.

Book publishing is fun, isn't it?

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

"We were fractious and overpaid."

Okay, so if you didn't go out and read Then We Came to the End because I liked it, you should go out and read it because the National Book Award committee liked it! I'm just sayin'....

I'm glad to see it getting the props--it was easily one of my favorite books of the past year. Had I not heard about it beforehand, I never would have guessed it was a first novel. And I find myself hearing echoes of the prose whenever I'm doing something banal at the office, which is to say every day. Maybe this should be required reading for all new hires at any office job. I hope the special sales people at Little, Brown are all over that.