Our new hobby: keeping track of literary doppelgangers. Because much more than a book's content is prone to unoriginality.

Spotted some doppelgangers of your own? Contribute to GC's upcoming installments.

The NY Post just can't get enough of Judith Regan. Yesterday, the Post lovingly traced out the full narrative arch of the "titian-haired publishing titan"'s affair with Kerik, right up to Regan's initial reaction to Kerik's nomination ("In shock," "she ran out" of a business meeting). Today, the Post sympathizes with Regan's plight by comparing her to Amber Frey, Scott Peterson's ex, whose memoir ReganBooks has reportedly acquired.

December 16, 2004 -- AMBER Frey, the young woman who fell for and then turned on her creepy married boyfriend, may now be ready to tell the whole story -- to an editor who did the same thing.

Then again, from Regan's perspective, there may be truth to the comparison. According to Judith Newman's Vanity Fair profile (previously quoted on GC here),

Divorce is wrenching for almost everyone, but in the melodrama of Judith Regan's life, it was something more. It has informed her worldview and her publishing agenda. Regan could always be counted on to be interested in books "about women who have been victimized," says Kristin Kiser.

Earlier in Newman's profile:

Regan's critics say she's a self-dramatizer who's constantly portraying herself as a victim of predatory males, and that may be partially true. But at the same time, from an early age she seemed to be a magnet for the troubled and troubling. Over the years, Wolff and others would hear so many bizarre stories that, at a certain point, they just couldn't believe that they had all happened to one woman. In fact, much of Judith's life reads like a ReganBooks best-seller.

(And, one day, you know, it probably will be.)

A historical snippet, from Ali Smith's review of Rosemary Dinnage's Alone! Alone! in the current Times Literary Supplement:

"Flaubert wrote to his (occasional) mistress Louise Colet that it didn't matter whether the two of them actually met: the important thing was that she was there. In the margin of this letter she put several exasperated exclamation marks."

If I die famous, please inform my biographers that Tillie, sweet bitch though she was, did not inform the meaning of my work. Thanks.

English professor turned psychologist Maureen Adams' MY SHAGGY ALLY, taking a unique approach to re-examining the life and work of a handful of our most important female authors via their relationships with their much-loved canines, describing the close bonds that Emily Dickinson -- whose description of her immense Newfoundland serves as the book's title, -- Virginia Woolf, Emily Bronte, and others had with their dogs, giving new insight into these writers' emotional and creative lives, to Susanna Porter for Ballantine, by Deborah Ritchken at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency (world).

[Publishers Marketplace, sub req'd]

• Collins Word Exchange: an online forum for discussing the English language's newest permutations. (Related fun: Washington Post's "Style Invitational.")
• BookLust presents The Complete Franzen. Awesome.
• Michael Betcherman and David Diamond introduce a new storytelling genre: the "e-pistolary." Mainly, I just hear the word "piss."
• If "Gay" headlines can swat a Booker winner's sales into a tailspin, does a book about a gay President Lincoln really stand a chance?
• Over at Slate, Ursala K. Le Guin reveals the consequences of living in an alternate reality: among them, not expecting the Sci Fi Channel's "wrecking" of her books.
• The Telegraph speaks with Richard Ford, on the road promoting The Lay of the Land, a novel-in-progress. "He speaks fluently, with occasional rising emphases, and slips in a word such as 'heretofore' without blinking."
• Someday soon, every book worth marketing will have a weblog. Until then, though, GC will sing the praises of the idea's pioneers.

Some say my inability to recognize sarcasm reveals a chronic underestimatation of others, but I tend to think my inability results from persistent overestimation. While I mistook Buzz Girl's excitement for Yas Yas in Bloom as bad taste, the less generous option -- in my opinion -- would have been to assume a bad sense of humor. Either way, though, I think I understated my enjoyment of Buzz Girl's weblog, an enjoyment recently intensified by Buzz Girl's note on The History of Love, a May 2005 offering from Norton:

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. BIG NOVEL for Norton that [publicity director] Louise [Brockett] says is "astounding." A many-stranded story about a long-lost book that survives and a love that survives with it and through it. Krauss is the wife of Jonathan Safron Foer--though they are not making much of the connection.

It's a discovery 70% as good as realizing, like I did two years ago, that Lydia Davis is Paul Auster's ex.* You can read more about Ms. Krauss here -- and see that, despite the anti-aging tank Houghton Mifflin's marketing dept. requires JSF to sleep in, the obnoxious and permanently prepubescent author of Everything is Illuminated still scored a hottie.

*Previously, I'd discounted their separate references to time spent in France, housesitting villas, as a coincidence made plausible by Auster's, if not Davis's, pretentions.

Update: Sarah emails us what she can find from the Foer & Krauss backstory:

Short of finding a wedding announcement (I shouldn't care, but what the hell) there's this mention in a July 26, 2004 article about Foer in the Evening Standard:

"THERE have been other changes, too: moving from his Jackson Heights apartment into a house in newly gentrified Brooklyn, he recently wed fellow author Nicole Krauss. Both have second novels due next year, Foer's based around a 10-yearold New Yorker named Oscar (a movie omen?)."

And going way back, the NY Observer article by Rebecca Traister in June 2002:

***
"Foer + Krauss = ?

At the Border's bookstore on Park Avenue and 57th Street, 25-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer's critically successful novel Everything Is Illuminated is prominently displayed just below the work of New York's newest literary Wunderkind, 27-year-old poet Nicole Krauss, whose first novel, Man Walks into a Room, has just been published by Doubleday.

According to sources familiar with the writers, their display-floor proximity accurately reflects Ms. Krauss' and Mr. Safran Foer's current romantic situation. Sources familiar with the couple say they've been dating for several months, and were "cozy" at the after-party at restaurant L'Acajou following Mr. Safran Foer's recent reading at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble.

Representatives for Ms. Krauss and Mr. Safran Foer did not return The Transom's phone calls.

Everything Is Illuminated interweaves a fictional account of a young man's journey to uncover his family history in the Ukraine with a magical tale of his grandfather's imagined village.

Ms. Krauss' Man Walks into a Room is about a college professor who has irretrievably lost his memory. Ms. Krauss' grandparents are also Holocaust survivors. She lives in Manhattan. Mr. Safran Foer lives in Queens. Given the commute, things must be fairly serious."

USA Today's Whitney Matheson names her top 100 people of 2004. Occupying spot 82: Bookslut's Jessa Crispin. "When it comes to literature, sometimes it's OK to be slutty." Do that pole dance, Jessa!