Even though it’s highly likely that a memoir from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is years in the offing, that doesn’t mean there can’t be stories about every permutation and combination relating to such a possible step. To wit, the Bookseller’s Katherine Rushton reports that Blair will meet publishers in London at the start of October, together with Robert Barnett, the Washington lawyer he has instructed to sell his memoirs. Random House and HarperCollins are expected to make bids for the book, and Bloomsbury (in a partnership with Miramax) and Simon & Schuster have confirmed they are also entering the fray. Hachette is understood to have ruled itself out of the competition, although CEO Tim Hely Hutchinson declined to comment to the Bookseller.

As already speculated, Blair’s approach direct to the US is seen as an attempt to bag the biggest deal possible by capitalizing on his popularity there, Rushton explains. Securing Barnett, who won big money for Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan advance-wise (and also represents James Patterson now) is also likely to inflate Blair’s advance. Rushton also has more in the Telegraph today about the pre-Frankfurt plan for Blair.

Just when we think Marisha Pessl can finally find some peace and quiet and work on her next novel, along comes yet more news. First there was that recent New York Times article on her propensity for painting in her spare time (“Painting is wordless. It’s so nice to have the silence, to just express things visually”) and now comes word from Variety that SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS has been optioned for the big screen by Miramax and Scott Rudin. I’m actually surprised it took this long, but a movie version seemed almost inevitable from the time the book deal was inked way back when…Ron just wants to know if the finished product is going to be saddled with an erudite-sounding voiceover in order to replicate the novel’s most celebrated qualities. But then Ron hasn’t been a fan of cinematic narration at all this century except for the Lemony Snicket movie and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (which, now that we think of it, were both adaptations as well).