Essayist David Sedaris will serve as a special guest host on the Selected Shorts radio show from April 28th to May 26th.

The organizers behind Sedaris’ segments plan to broadcast a tribute to David Rakoff, a celebration of Dorothy Parker, and one show focusing on the theme of “Family Values.” For New York listeners, the show airs on WNYC every Sunday on AM 820 at 1pm and on FM 93.9 at 10pm.

Here’s more about the radio show: “There is a theme to each Selected Shorts episode and performance. Several stories are presented around each theme. The stories are always fiction, sometimes classic, sometimes new, always performed by great actors from stage, screen and television who bring these short stories to life.”

The New York Observer broke the news this afternoon that Simon & Schuster has cut senior editor Sarah Hochman. Yesterday, Anjali Singh joined the publisher as senior editor.

Here’s an excerpt from the article: “publisher Jonathan Karp fired senior editor Sarah Hochman this morning, confirmed a source at Simon & Schuster…Her authors included literary forger Lee Israel, who wrote a memoir of her exploits in 2008, and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, whose next book Simon acquired at auction last summer.”

In 2008, the New York Times interviewed Hochman about her surreal job of editing a memoir by famous faker. Israel had forged a number of autographs and notes from famous writers, including Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. “We try to think about what the author is saying and how she is saying it,” explained Hochman.

In a world overloaded with 140-character tweets, it sometimes seems like the patient art of the long biography could become obsolete. Instead of complaining, one biographer took her subject straight to Twitter.

Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu (MP3 link)was Marion Meade, the critically acclaimed biographer of Dorothy Parker, Woody Allen, and Buster Keaton. She spoke about her new biography: Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney. During the interview, she talked about how she created a Twitter page for the dead novelist, wrote her biography proposal, and built a career as a biographer.

Follow this MP3 link to listen.

Here’s an excerpt about her Twitter page for the author: “I was looking for a way for people to remember West. So last year around June, he opened a Twitter account. He’s been Twittering ever since from his current location… in Mount Zion Cemetery [in Queens] … A lot of publishing people followed him because they got the joke. But a lot of people followed him who didn’t get the joke…I think he would have thought it was a lot of fun and crazy. He loved things that were crazy.”

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The long and grinding wheels of justice are finally about to find fruition in court, as literary editor Sam Leith reports on his blog for the Daily Telegraph. Back in 1994, Stu Silverstein decided to put together a miscellany of Dorothy Parker‘s uncollected verse. He selects and edits the book himself, gives untitled poems titles and does all the other things associated with editing a volume of poetry. After a round of submission to publishers, Penguin‘s offer comes in at $2000 and unsatisfied, Silverstein goes with Scribner. The book is published as NOT MUCH FUN.

Which is an apt descriptor of what happens next, for when Penguin’s Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker appears, the Uncollected section is essentially a verbatim copy of Silverstein’s book – down to editing errors and the titles he gave untitled poems. There’s not a whisper of attribution, either, says Leith, even though one of Penguin’s editors later tells the court she, quite literally, photocopied NOT MUCH FUN in preparing Penguin’s edition. A lawsuit is filed, and there’s much back and forth over the next 13 years, with Silverstein winning most of the battles but losing the most recent in the Court of Appeals.

And so, on July 17 at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse here in Manhattan, Silverstein will indeed have his day in court as his lawyers and Penguin’s face off in front of Judge John F. Keenan.