Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced the seven guest editors for its Best American series. Shelf-Life offered the complete list:

The Best American Short Stories: Geraldine Brooks
The Best American Essays: Edwidge Danticat
The Best American Comics: Alison Bechdel
The Best American Nonrequired Reading: Dave Eggers (with an introduction by Guillermo del Toro)
The Best American Travel Writing: Sloane Crosley
The Best American Science and Nature Writing: Mary Roach
The Best American Sports Writing: Jane Leavy

The Sun Herald has more details about the guest editors’ backgrounds. In years past, the series has also published in the categories of mystery stories, recipes, and spiritual writing.

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After deciding to leave her post as a publicist at Vintage and Anchor, author Sloane Crosley has been hired to write a weekly column for The Independent Magazine, a Saturday supplement at the British newspaper, The Independent.

The first column will be published on December 11th, the day after her tenure ends at Vintage and Anchor. The weekly column will also be available online.

Crosley (pictured, via) had this statement in the release: “I am consistently amazed and delighted when any American humour translates. Either we’re all outrageously funny or Independent readers are the most generous and forgiving people on the planet. Either way, I am honoured to publicly take advantage of the situation by contributing to a publication I so admire.”

Last night, Steve Hely (pictured with Keith Olbermann) was pronounced this year’s winner of the Thurber Prize. His win includes $5,000 and a crystal plaque. Magazine journalist Jancee Dunn and memoir writer Rhoda Janzen were the other finalists; they each received a Thurber print.

Hely’s resume boasts an extensive career in comedy television writing. He has writing credits from his work on 30 Rock, The Office, The Late Show With David Letterman, and American Dad. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University where he served as president of The Harvard Lampoon. The Thurber Prize honored his debut novel, How I Became a Famous Novelist.

The event was held in New York City’s Algonquin Hotel. MSNBC personality Keith Olbermann made a quick appearance to read from a Thurber volume of fables. Judges for this year’s Thurber Prize include two 2009 finalists, Laurie Notaro and Sloane Crosley. Joining the finalists as a judge is writer-editor Bruce Tracy, who in the past served as editorial director for at Doubleday and Random House. Past winners of the Thurber Prize include David Sedaris, Christopher Buckley, Jon Stewart, and 2-time honoree Ian Frazier.

Vintage/Anchor Books has announced two promotions and a new hire.

Author and publicist Sloane Crosley has been promoted to deputy director of publicity. She joined the imprint in 2002, previously working at HarperCollins and a literary agency. She has worked with a long list of writers, including Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Haruki Murakami.

Kate Runde has been promoted to associate director of publicity at the imprint. She joined in 2004, left for a stint at Picador, and returned to the company in 2007 to serve as senior publicist. She has worked with a number of authors, including Julia Glass, Sue Miller, Richard Russo, and Jeffery Toobin.

Finally, Vintage/Anchor Books hired Dan Ozzi as a senior publicist. Earlier in his career, he had worked at Public Affairs and Oxford University Press.

At the 2009 National Book Awards, Gawker cornered some of the literary world’s brightest writers, having them sign a copy of Sarah Palin‘s memoir, “Going Rogue.” Now they are auctioning the book on eBay for charity.

Signatures now include NBA Fiction winner Colum McCann, actor and Columbia MFA graduate James Franco, and author and publishing figure Sloane Crosley. On a semi-related auction note, the handwritten Bible we so carefully covered sold for over $15,400.

Here’s more about the auction: “All proceeds from the auction will go to Save The Children. They’ve done great work bringing literacy programs to kids in need across the country, among other great things they’ve done for kids that otherwise don’t get things done for them that should be.”

Last night the inaugural winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor repeated his funny-writing win–Ian Frazier won the 2009 Thurber Prize for his book, “Lamentations of the Father.”

Frazier–a longtime New Yorker writer–won the prize in 1997 for his book “Coyote vs. Acme,” and has now become the first writer to win the prize twice. The runners-up were: Sloane Crosley for “I was Told There’d be Cake,” Don Lee for “Wrack and Ruin,” and Laurie Notaro for “The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death.” In the photo are pictured, from left to right: Notaro, Frazier, and Crosley.

Here’s more about the award, from the release: “The annual prize is
presented by Thurber House, the national literary center for writers
and readers, based in the boyhood home of author, humorist and New
Yorker cartoonist James Thurber in Columbus, Ohio…it is the nation’s highest recognition of the art of humor writing. The award carries with it a $5,000 prize and a commemorative crystal plaque for the winning author.”

In an age of digital press releases and paperless publicity, Vintage Books has released this coffin-shaped release to support Otto Penzler‘s paperback original, “The Vampire Archives.”

Next week media types around the country will receive copies of the cardboard cutouts and plastic glow-in-the-dark fangs to celebrate the book’s release. The creators, Vintage/Anchor’s associate director of publicity Sloane Crosley and her assistant assistant Sarah Cantor also built a tombstone release for “The Book of Dead Philosophers” by Simon Critchley.

Here’s more about the vampire anthology: “Vampires! Whether imagined by Bram Stoker or Anne Rice, they are part of the human lexicon and as old as blood itself. They are your neighbors, your friends, and they are always lurking. Now Otto Penzler–editor of the bestselling Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps–has compiled the darkest, the scariest, and by far the most evil collection of vampire stories ever.”

This October, the adaptation of Maurice Sendak‘s classic storybook, “Where the Wild Things Are,” will also include a unique tie-in: Dave Eggers will publish a 300-page loose adaptation of the book.

The NY Observer points out that HarperCollins’ Ecco Press editor Daniel Halpern first acquired the book in 2006, but now the Amazon page lists McSweeney’s as the publisher. All the parties involved with the book kept mum about why the title changed publishers.

Here’s some paperback intelligence from the article: “Moreover, the paperback edition, originally slated to be published through Ecco’s paperback line, will, like all the paperback editions of Mr. Eggers’ previous books, come out through Random House’s Vintage Books imprint. According to Sloane Crosley, Mr. Eggers’ publicist there, Vintage has been in talks to publish the book since this spring.”

The NY Times will soon close the stand-alone City Section–home to quirky, elegant essays about different corners of the city. In a NY Observer article, writers around the country mourned the passing including Thomas Beller, Sloane Crosley, and David Hajdu.

While the stand-alone section is gone, some of the reporting will be included in the paper’s Metro section. Many of these great stories were collected in “New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times,” which can be found here.

Author Phillip Lopate had strong feelings about the section: “The prose style was on a higher level than that kind of excessively casual, ‘We’re all fascinated with rap stars’ kind of writing …. Part of the problem is, looking at it from a larger perspective, that The Times has so much talent in these slightly older editors. They’re just so scared of a graying demographic that they keep wanting to get younger and hipper.”