From NY Stories' interview with literary agent Molly Friedrich:

CK: How do you recognize a good manuscript? What qualities about the work make you think that a particular story or novel will be successful?

Friedrich: The first thing is that the first page has to be very good. I receive around 200-250 sub-missions a week, which means just the act of reading a letter can be punishing due to the volume of over the transom or unsolicited submissions, but I do believe in over the transom, which means a query letter blind. I've been successful with these kinds of submissions many times.

(link via Nipposkiss)

Tom Shone reviews Gloria Vanderbilt's It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir for the Observer:

Again and again, Ms. Vanderbilt achieves intimate physical congress with someone, only to write about them in such a way as to suggest a quick five minutes spent in the company of their press clippings: Sinatra is "On the one side Mafia-dark, on the other Clark Kent light"; Howard Hughes is "handsome as a movie star," while Ms. Vanderbilt has repeated recourse to italics in order to convey the unique quiddity of the soul in question: "It was him ... Him and me." I don't wish to cast any doubts on Ms. Vanderbilt's credentials, but is she absolutely sure she slept with these people?

Good job, Publishers Weekly! Birth announcements should always be so industry-incestual:

A Future Regional Executive Director Is Born
by Staff, PW Daily for Booksellers -- 9/23/2004

Thom Chambliss, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and his wife, Diana Wells, once an executive director of the old New York/New Jersey Booksellers Association, are the proud parents of Lucy Jean Chambliss, born yesterday at 11:51 a.m. Lucy weighs seven pounds, four ounces, is 21 inches long and dark hair, and, says PNBA, she "has already read a couple of books." Mom, Dad and future bookseller are all doing well. Congratulations!

GC reads the BookBabes whenever she needs to heave up hairballs. Fortunately, that need occurs rarely. And, anyway: GC can keep up on the Book Babes' wacky, intellectually spastic, antics via every other book blog. Book bloggers love to hate them.

But today, we're reading the BBs again because -- of all things -- they've written their column about blogs, perhaps because they haven't read enough of them to know how much blogs hate them.

For those not familiar with the BB columns, here's how we'd explain their vibe: in 1962, two girls with very different personalities met at summer camp and bonded over Nancy Drew and simultaneous first periods. Since then, they've been fiercely loyal penpals, publishing their exchanges about books at Poynter Online, and saving their more personal exchanges for an epistolary Bridges of Madison County-type debut. Though any real literary success would tear them apart (people who adore leopard print tend to hog the spotlight), their friendship has so far been a wonderful opportunity for both women to play "intellectual" the way grade school girls play house -- ie, with much conviction, but little commitment.

Today's column begins with Ellen writing to Margo that "blogs are now doing for books what Drudge, Andrew Sullivan, and David Horowitz have done in the political and cultural sphere: Complementing and questioning the judgments of the traditional outlets." What follows is an alternately clueless and duplicitous examination-cum-endorsement of book blogs' place in the publishing industry.
Here were some of my quibbles and questions along the way:

• I don't think Ellen would be writing about blogs if she'd read all that they've said about her. So, it makes sense that her list of popular book blogs is, with two or three exceptions, ridiculously out-of-touch. BookBlog? eJournal? 800 CEO READ? Boing Boing? Is that the best Google could turn up for her?
• To know how important book bogs really are, it makes sense to ask after the size of their readership. Ellen, though, either bungles the question, or misphrases the answer; "Blogs' audiences are not immense," she writes, "but established blogs like Bookslut claim a respectable 3,000 hits a day." "Hits," however, is a nonsense term. When a browser loads a page, each graphic or file on that page is a hit. (For example: My other website, Cup of Chicha, gets about 30,000 hits a day, probably because each drawing -- and there's many -- registers as a seperate file. But, when looking at the more important stats, daily "page views" and daily "unique visitors," the numbers are much lower, about 5,500 and 2,000, respectively.)
• Ellen's main source on book blogging is, throughout the column, TEV's Mark Sarvas. I wonder if she knows that Mark was the mastermind behind last year's, "Replace the Book Babes!" petition ... Or, is Ellen, perhaps, a bit smarter than she seems? Has she been building up book blogs only to passive-aggressively shame them in the column's last paragraph? My hunch: is yes.

  Spreading the power is good. Challenging the powers that be is even better. But I don't think the already beleaguered audience for literature needs to be minced and diced into too many small pieces, to the point that we're all having our own separate conversations and losing sight of the larger cause, which is a commitment to the beauty and value of the written word. For all the Internet's interactivity, it seems like more people than not are on send mode. The narrowness and meanness that pervades American politics has shown us how a good idea can devolve into name-calling. I wish better for books.

The New York Times talks to Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, who's in New York promoting both the 11th installment of the "Series of Unfortunate Events" -- this one's titled The Grim Grotto -- and the adults-only indie flick, Rick, based on his contemporary adaptation of Verdi's Rigoletto. The film's press release describes its plot as a "fairy tale of New York, all about internet porn, carnivorous capitalism and cold-blooded murder," and a Variety film critic called Rick "one of those films that makes one want to take a long shower afterward."

Also in the Times: Dave Kehr reviews Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, based on Bataille's "notorious 1928 pornographic novel." Eye is "a strange, beautiful, disturbing and at times literally painful work," Kehr writes. "We look, but we also look away ... Every spectator will have his or her own limits, and when we instinctively glance away, we learn where those limits are."

(Blogger Beverly Tang points out that the full text to Story of the Eye is available online at Supervert's Bataille eLibrary.)

We've been holding off on devoting a full post to Rachel Donadio's new job, but -- for those who didn't see the news in last week's Publishers Lunch (sub. req'd for archive access)—we thought we'd relay Maud's post from earlier today: "The New York Observer's Rachel Donadio sends an email announcement that she has taken a job as a writer and editor at the New York Times Book Review, effective today. "

Sadly, GC would have more to report if, after crashing Rachel's birthday party last weekend with a list of NYTBR-related questions, a hawk-like lawyer-friend of hers hadn't swooped in and traded us a NDA for a free beer. But, from a less bankrupt friend also at the party, we've learned that Rachel's duties at the NYTBR will consist mainly of reporting—which gives us a slightly better idea of what the Review's October relaunch might be all about.