Reagan Arthur, the editorial director of Little, Brown’s Reagan Arthur Books imprint, will be the next publisher and senior VP of Little, Brown. She will assume her new role on April 1st as Michael Pietsch becomes the new CEO of Hachette Book Group.

The release included this news: “In stepping into the role of Publisher, Arthur will retire the Reagan Arthur Books imprint she has led for three years.”

Arthur has worked at Little, Brown since 2001, earning her own imprint in 2008. She has edited Tina Fey, Joshua Ferris, Kate Atkinson, George Pelecanos and Ian Rankin.

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Actor, director and Girls creator Lena Dunham has sold the book proposal for her book Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned to Random House. According to The New York Observer, she inked a $3.7 million deal.

The New York Times had the scoop: “Ms. Dunham, the writer and star of the HBO comedy Girls, circulated a 66-page proposal with color, illustrations and a humor that publishing executives predicted could produce another best seller like Tina Fey’s blockbuster memoir, Bossypants.”

Random House is reportedly comparing Dunham’s style to Helen Gurley Brown, David Sedaris, and Nora Ephron. Dunham has published “First Love” in  The New Yorker and a short essay in Rookie.

Mitchell Zuckoff’s World War II epic memoir Lost in Shangri-La is the best book of the year so far, according to Amazon.

Today the retailer published its annual Best Books of the Year So Far list, which highlights the “best books” released in 2011 between January and June. The list includes a number of different genres from memoir to thriller.

Tina Fey’s Bossypants, the comedienne’s hilarious memoir of how she climbed the ranks of amateur improv groups and madeit to Saturday Night Live, is No. 6 on the list. The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel by Arthur Phillips, a faux memoir conceived as an introduction to a long-lost Shakespeare play, is No. 5.

Follow this link to the complete list, and to see lists by genre. Is there anything missing from the list?

Actress Julianne Moore will play former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in HBO’s adaptation of John Heilemann and Mark Halperin‘s book, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jay Roach will direct and Danny Strong will write the script. Here’s more from TVNewser: “HBO optioned Game Change last January. No word yet on who will play the other TV news personalities mentioned in the book.”

Anybody wish they picked Saturday Night Live veteran Tina Fey? Heilemann and Halperin interviewed more than 300 people to write Game Change (2010). The book had three parts: part one covered the Democratic primaries, part two looked at the Republican primaries, and part three examined the race between Barack Obama and John McCain.

The cover for Tina Fey‘s first book, Bossypants starred at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Flavorpill has a photo: Fey’s face superimposed on the body of a large man with a tie and a white-collar shirt. In the video embedded above, Fey talked to Zap2it about the eye-popping cover.

Fey said: “I shot it with this great, great photographer named Ruven Afanador, and it was an idea he had that I really liked. It’s funny to me that some people think it’s funny, and some people, it makes them furious. I can’t figure out why. It’s not dirty or mean… it’s a memorable image, at the very least.”

As a writer, Fey is best known for her comedy writing on Saturday Night Live. Bossypants comes out in hardcover on April 5, 2011 from Reagan Arthur Books.

This year’s $5,000 Thurber Prize is down to three contenders. They are: Why is My Mother Getting a Tattoo: And Other Questions I Wish I Never Had to Ask by Jancee Dunn, How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely, and Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (a Memoir of Going Home) by Rhoda Janzen.

This group of authors is a diverse bunch. While in college Hely served as president of the Harvard Lampoon, the university’s famous humor magazine. He currently writes alongside SNL veteran Tina Fey on her series, 30 Rock. Dunn has had an extensive career in magazine journalism having worked on Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Jane. For five years, she wrote under the pseudonym Dr. Sooth as a sex columnist for GQ. Janzen holds a PhD from UCLA and is currently an English professor at Hope College.

The Thurber Prize is now in its 26th year, named after the humorist James Thurber (pictured). The winner will receive $5,000 and a crystal plaque. GalleyCat reported when the 2009 Thurber Prize was awarded to Ian Frazier for his work, Lamentations of the Father. He is a two-time winner of the prize; in 1997 he won for the title, Coyote vs. Acme.

Celebrity book deals have multiplied this year, as everybody from Sarah Palin to Tina Fey inked contracts. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. To ease your frustration, GalleyCat has compiled a Celebrity Book Toolkit.

For all the writers in the audience, mediabistro.com has some advice about how to find work co-writing a celebrity book. In the feature, attorney Robert Barnett (who represented Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney) had this advice: “Potential collaborators should make themselves known to editors, agents, and attorneys. [...] I receive applications from many candidates each year.”

For all the publicists in the audience, today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was former Page Six reporter Corynne Steindler (pictured), talking about her new senior reporting job at Bonnie Fuller‘s Hollywood Life. She gave advice for publicists looking to get celebrity books attention in the gossip world.

“Give me an exclusive,” she said. “I think it’s a bit of a misconception that all gossip stories come from publicists. That’s something that I’ve been trying to fight down for awhile now,” she explained. “At Hollywood Life we don’t have a quota or a column to fill, we post continuously all day. So our stories can come from anyplace–a celebrity Twitter account, a news story that’s already breaking … we can do it in real time. I don’t think there’s anybody who just talks to the Post or just talks to the Daily News.”