The Paper Clip

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for the Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

—The Guardian

 American Idol judge and former fat guy Randy Jackson will be sharing his diet tips with us this fall with his diet book, New You Plan: The No-Nonsense Guide to Getting Fit, Eating Better, and Living Longer. The New York Post's resident bibliophile gushed out an early endorsement today:

Having tried every diet, every gym, even bypass surgery, Randy now has this figured out so that followers can even eat down-home Southern favorites. I mean, in terms of body mass he's no Keira Knightley, but the guy seems passionate and persuasive, like he knows what he's talking about.

[via Radar]

Hard times are upon us and book reviewers are not immune. Publishers Weekly has been an insidery book publishing magazine for, what the NY Observer calls, 136 years. It's the first to review books: it tells reviewers what to review. To be sure, a starred review will guarantee glances by people who read about writing and write about reading.

For over 80 years these reviews have been written by nameless reviewers, creating an air of authority.  But now PW has had to cut review rates by 50 percent, down from $50 per review to $25, so it's offereing bylines in exchange for even worse pay. Meet your influence makers:

Kate Axelrod graduated from Oberlin last summer and then attended the six-week Columbia Publishing Course. (It's very hard to get into! I had to go to NYU.) Rachel Bravvman has written for several magazines, including one geared towards people who have bipolar disorder and their friends and family. But Liam Brennen is the reviewer to behold though. He even responded to the Observer's email:

Well, I'm a 24 year old writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, having graduated just over a year ago with an English degree from the University of Manitoba. I started out writing for my student paper, covering Arts news and reviews and then managed to get a freelance job with the Winnipeg Free Press writing book reviews. In truth I hadn't actually heard of PW until I started reviewing really, and one day I noticed the review quote on the back cover of an old Stephen King book I was reading and thought that somehow I might be able to be the one who writes those! So I looked them up and within a couple of days I was reviewing for the fiction department. Shortly after that I got a job reviewing audiobooks (which is where I spend most of my time now) with PW and have since become a top reviewer in that section. And I suppose that's about it!

Well. I guess that is about it!

I'm reading a self-help book called The War of Art that applies the principles of Sun Tzu's Art of War to creating art, or say updating The Paper Clip every day. I have never read The Art of War, but when my last relationship began to, what I now call, end, my then boyfriend started comparing our interactions to its principles. He offered tips to be a better fighter, tips to fight him better. I suppose, I should have taken it for the bad sign it was, but what is love's decline without subtle emotional abuse?

Anyway, I just read a part on How to Be Miserable. The best lesson learned in the Marine Corps, says the author, was the importance of being miserable. Thriving on cold food and crappy equipment while enduring high death tolls. And, I couldn't help but think being in the Marines must be a lot like living in Greenpoint on $28,000 a year.

There is an acquired smugness you wear once you accept your utter lack rights. That your Hasidic Jewish landlords do not care that there is no heat or hot water on Friday night (and it's always Friday night). What do you want them to do? Post phone numbers in the lobby in case of an emergency? (Note, actually said to me.)

I cannot fathom why people in other cities, like say San Francisco?, expect something other than a roof in exchange for rent. Once I overhead this girl ask how a landlord call a kitchen full when it was obviously missing a dishwasher? I don't know but my last apartment was called a four bedroom and it lacked interior walls. We took charge. We built the walls. We paid a man to build them.

Today I went far the abyss of books and landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Atmospheric Disturbances is everything a book should be to catch my attention: It's a first novel written by a young (though at 32 not so young, according to her mother, who is embarrassed by her daughter's age printed in every review) woman. She is a nonpracticing psychiatrist, obviously a bonus in my forthcoming book.

Because words like "atmospheric" and "disturbance" so often cover the pink-gilded jackets of chick lit, the NYT's review clears up any misconceptions up at the get-go — "No, this is not chick lit."

And so this not-chick-lit novel begins with its 51-year-old psychiatrist narrator coming home to his much-younger, more-beautiful wife, who is not his wife. She looks and acts everything like her, but he knows implicitly, completely, that she is not. With me?

Capgras syndrome is rare. It's when a person holds a delusion that someone, usually close to him, has been replaced by a doppelgänger.

But all this is just a framework to discuss what the novel is really about: That one day a person you know, probably love, can do something unrecognizable. It will make you question the person they are and were 10 years, 10 days, and 10 minutes ago, only to be burdened by the realization that love can stop as quickly as it starts.

The author, Rivka Galchen, talks of depressing truths in nearly every interview. Like how the person you knew seven years ago, or any time ago, is as dead as the person who died. And in relationships, the every day, habits, blind us to personal transformations, so if we are to remain in love we need to constantly find new reasons to be there.

Sounds like a lot of work!

Well you'll have to wait until 2010 to find out!. Former editor of Gawker.com and author of a recent NYT Magazine cover article on her life online Emily Gould's AND THE HEART SAYS..."WHATEVER", called "an honest, searching and wry set of recollections that together weave a picture of what it's like to be a young person in New York City in the early 2000s," to at Free Press for publication in 2010.

[via Publisher's Marketplace]

I'm a trying to figure out what it went for! 

Oh. Low six figures. 

Get yours here.