Malcolm Gladwell has a new book coming out next month, have you heard? Outliers, for which Little, Brown reportedly paid $4 million, may be his most ambitious book or his least, according to New York, which takes a look at the cult of Gladwell in this week's issue. Among the things that you may be surprised to hear: The "rock-star" staff writer at The New Yorker has an "aversion to midtown" (which is where the Condé Nast-owned title happens to be located), but the magazine happily uses a courier service to correspond with him.

Let the procession of post-election Obama books begin! Michael Calderone of Politico.com reports that Newsweek reporter (and frequent Keith Olbermann guest) Richard Wolffe just signed a deal with the Random House imprint Crown. The book, Renegade: The Education of Barack Obama, is scheduled to be published in June 2009. [Politico]

As Candace Bushnell continues promoting her latest novel One Fifth Avenue, more unsuspecting journalists are emerging from interviewing her vaguely traumatized, wondering what she has to be so temperamental about (other than the fact that her obsession with glitz and shopping is suddenly anachronistic) and especially now that the whole will they-won't they make the SATC sequel juggernaut is underway. But as an Independent reporter discovers, there's not much you can ask Bushnell without getting a testy reaction.

You have to feel a little bit sorry for Tatiana and Natasha Boncompagni, the two sisters embroiled in a nasty spat over the rights to the forthcoming novel Hedge Fund Wives. (If you've missed the action thus far, see here, here and here.) Both women have seen their reps damaged as a result, and Tatiana's career as a journalist and novelist will probably be overshadowed by the incident for many years to come. (Fortunately, she married into money. Or so she says.) Yesterday Natasha took down the website that hosted pages from the disputed manuscript. (We have a copy of the judge's ruling here, in case you're interested.) One party, we hear, that is not all that unhappy about the flurry of press that has followed in recent days? HarperCollins, not surprisingly. Hedge Fund Wives is now available for pre-order and the book's sales rank has edged up ever so slightly from 500,000 to 132,377. The messy feud has also boosted Boncompagni's first book, Gilding Lily: It dipped below 10,000 earlier this week before losing some ground today. It's now ranked 19,921.

HarperCollins appears to be standing by Tatiana Boncompagni as she battles her sister, Natasha, over who actually authored the forthcoming novel Hedge Fund Wives. At least for the moment! We just heard back from Erin Crum, director of corporate communications at HarperCollins: "We hope that they can work it out amicably, and we will still be publishing the book on May 5th."

The feud between Tatiana and Natasha Boncompagni rages on. As you may recall, Tatiana is the author of the chick lit novel Gilding Lily and the forthcoming book Hedge Fund Wives; Natasha, her sister, claims she co-authored Hedge Fund Wives and says the book is based on her career on Wall Street. Earlier this week, Tatiana filed suit against Natasha, claiming her sister had stolen a copy of the manuscript and posted it online. Natasha countered her sister's claim with the assertion that Tatiana had tried to pay her to go away and had lied to her publisher, HarperCollins, on numerous occasions, most notably about being the daughter of an Italian princess. (She also said her sister had installed a "keylogging" device on her computer so she could spy on her.) Yesterday a judge issued a temporary restraining order forcing Natasha to take down the site that had previously hosted several sections of the novel. But Tatiana's already-battered reputation is about to take another blow. It turns out that she's not even named "Boncompagni" and her vacuum heir husband had a very similar legal run-in of his own not so long ago.

♦ The battle over Project Runway rages on: Harvey Weinstein is now claiming that Bravo intentionally undermined the success of Season 5 by changing the show's airtime, running "mundane and unappealing" ads, and "revealing spoilers about future episodes." [THR]
♦ Barack Obama will appear on The Daily Show tomorrow night. [AP]
♦ The New York Times is not running out of money, say execs at the paper. [NYO]
♦ MSNBC moved into second place in the primetime cable news race, beating CNN for the month of October. [THR]

The feud between Tatiana and Natasha Boncompagni gets messier, and nastier, by the minute. Just in case you've missed the story thus far, Tatiana Boncompagni is the author of the chick lit novel Gilding Lily and has been working on a new book called Hedge Fund Wives. Natasha is her sister and claims she co-authored Hedge Fund Wives—in fact, she says the story is largely based on her own Wall Street career—but was then cut out of the deal by Tatiana, who she says has "a history of lying." Tatiana is insisting it was solely her work and that her sister simply offered "input," and has filed suit against Natasha for claiming partial credit, and for copying the manuscript from her computer and posting part of the manuscript online in an act of retribution. Natasha, for her part, is upset her sister has denied her role in writing the book, and is countering with various—and potentially very damaging—claims. Following so far? Good. After the jump, more from the Boncompagni scandal and a few scandalous emails, too.

Natasha Boncompagni is responding to the lawsuit filed against her by her sister, Tatiana, who claims she authored the forthcoming HarperCollins novel, Hedge Fund Wives, without any help from her sister. Natasha claims Tatiana's lawsuit was an attempt to "preempt" a lawsuit of her own, and says Tatiana couldn't have written the book by herself since it was based on her "Wall Street career" and "insider's knowledge of the social workings of the hedge fund community." There's more: Natasha also says her sister's "history of lying" is a "well-known fact both within our family and with her current publisher, HarperCollins," and that she only landed her first book deal after she lied about being descended from an Italian princess. Thanksgiving dinner at the Boncompagnis is going to be a blast this year, huh? Natasha's full response after the jump.

Socialite novelist Tatiana Boncompagni (Gilding Lily) might write about frothy stuff like clothes and parties, but don't think she's sentimental when it comes to family: She's suing her sister Natasha over a forthcoming HarperCollins novel, Hedge Fund Wives, which Natasha apparently claimed co-authorship of following her "input" during the writing process. Tatiana has filed a copyright infringement suit—she says her sister secretly copied parts of the novel during family visits—and is asking for monetary damages as well as a court order declaring her sole author.

You certainly saw this one coming. Keith Olbermann reported last night that Joe Wurzelbacher ("Joe the Plumber") is now negotiating a book deal. Another Republican who is even more in demand with agents right now: Sarah Palin. "As more and more polls cast doubt on the McCain-Palin ticket, producers and agents across the entertainment world are discussing possibilities for capitalizing on her fame, ranging from an Oprah-style syndicated talk show to a Sean Hannity-like perch in cable news or on radio." [THR]

The financial crisis is having some unexpected effects on the American people, but now things are getting disturbing: Instead of doing the sensible thing and searching for answers at the bottom of a glass, people are turning to reading, of all things. Both Borders and Amazon, reports Reuters, continue to see a trend towards finance books "from biographies of key players to books about past financial crises."

Every author knows that seeing your work adapted for the screen is a mixed blessing: The money and exposure is fantastic, but there's always a risk that those Hollywood philistines will fail to capture the essence of your storytelling or, worse, change your carefully-drawn characters. And why should Gossip Girl author Cecily von Ziegesar, who created her series at bastion of artistic integrity Alloy Entertainment, be any exception?

The innocent victims of the financial crisis just keep piling up! The latest: LeveragedSellout blogger Amit Chatwani, whose book lampooning Wall Streeters, Damn It Feels Good To Be a Banker, was published by Hyperion in August and, not surprisingly, isn't exactly flying off the shelves. "Basically, I'm making fun of a class of people who most of the world still hates," Chatwani tells the Times, "but it's just not the same to kick them when they're down..."

Like everyone else, people who work in book publishing are bracing themselves for tough times, reports the Observer's Leon Neyfakh. According to an anonymous publishing exec, there's going to be an inevitable domino effect due to the economy: Newspapers (for as long as they actually exist, presumably!) will be carrying fewer ads and therefore fewer book reviews, so potential readers won't know about new titles, so bookstores will order fewer copies, so publishers will get increasingly nervous about signing up unknown authors, so unless you're Lourdes Ciccone Leon pitching a memoir about your mother's divorce, you might as well forget it, basically. It sort of sounds plausible, except for one thing.

It's almost impossible to imagine now, we know, but there once was a time when cultural lynchpins Blair Waldorf and Serena Van der Woodsen existed only in the pages of YA novels, and as such their corrupting influence of superficiality, decadence and greed was limited to young girls (and a few girlish boys), rather than an across-the-board, if small, section of the TV-viewing public. But will the supposed literary antithesis to the Gossip Girl books make it to primetime? Let's hope not.

Elizabeth Wurtzel made a name for herself in the 1990s as the author of Prozac Nation and Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, and resurfaced in the aftermath of the Sept. 11th for controversial comments she made about the attacks. ("It was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance... It was just beautiful.") Wurtzel is back in the news: She graduated Yale Law School last year, took a job as an associate at David Boies' powerhouse law firm, Schiller & Flexner, and is now working on the sale of Wachovia to Wells Fargo. [WSJ/Law Blog]

Last month, when Penguin Books spent over $2 million on signing up three books on the Wall Street crisis, it seemed they might have been over-estimating the public's hunger for reading about the financial meltdown. Not any more: As the Wall Street Journal reports today, bookstores can hardly keep up with the demand for financial titles, as people scramble to try to understand what the hell just happened.

Tina Fey has sold her first book—a collection "of humorous essays in the style of Nora Ephron"—to Little, Brown. [NYO]

What with the economy dangling on a thread and one of the scariest election run-ups in history, you'd be forgiven for not remembering that it's National Book Month! But Sony is kindly reminding us with a less-than-inspired stunt to promote its E-Book device: Dave Farrow, a "speed-reading guru," will be sitting in the window of the Datavision electronics store in Midtown reading for 14 hours a day for the next 30 days.