Spencer Morgan at the New York Observer writes weekly about a particularly annoying person or trend. Today he truly outdoes himself, with the definitive article on freaky penis foreskin restorers. Fancy penis synonyms, too!

Finally, Wasilla resident Sarah Palin has taken a concrete step towards "telling her story" without the distorting filter of the mainland media and mousy comedians. She's looking for a big fat book deal!

Richard Seaver, a lifelong publisher and editor, died yesterday at the age of 82. He helped bring Samuel Beckett and lots and lots of kinky sex writing into the world.

Victoria Blake told NPR today that she started her own publishing company when she realized she was just wasting her free time reading Gawker. Have trashy websites like ours killed literature? Au contraire, yall!

Friend of the commoner Tom Wolfe is all white on the outside. But don't judge. The Observer caught up with the fancy author and had him explain what the rappers are talking about (SEX):

Your Gmail sponsored link that will make you hate Democrats of the day: "Mama Voted For Obama." It's precisely the idiotic indoctrinating garbage you think it is, except for this awesome scene of cartoon Obama reenacting the My Pet Goat incident as, presumably, the nation burns. Good work, Mama. The terrorists won. [Little Democrats]

Oy, chto budet! Sad young literary novelist Keith "Konstya" Gessen, self-exiled to his motherland of Russia, usually confines his rantings to n+1, little-read novels that we make fun of, and his Tumblr. But today, he wrote a Diary column about how the financial crisis is affecting Russia for the London Review of Books. And guess what—we can't even tease him for being pompous and self-important, as is the custom, because we know nothing about how the financial crisis affects Russia. So! We'll publish an excerpt, snark-free, because although we might have an understanding of advanced capitalism as it relates to blog networks or diminished tipping at strip clubs and dive bars, we have no idea about the ruble. Keith, consider this your lucky day.

Famously cranky Golden Notebook author Doris Lessing is 89 and frankly doesn't give a rat's that she won last year's Nobel Prize for Literature. She likes to talk about how she's burned out on writing and loves to complain—and is therefore our favorite Old. This Sunday, Lessing wrote an essay about her typical day for the Times of London: "When I’m not talking, I read." And everyone, irritatingly, thinks she knows the meaning of life:

Last week, Nobel Prize secretary Horace Engdahl sniffed that the prize for literature most certainly would not go to an American, as we are "too isolated" and don't "participate in the big dialogue of literature." He was right: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, an "'author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy," won. He is French obviously. [GalleyCat]

The New Yorker festival culminated in a rockin' dance party. (Our publisher offered us his spare tickets, which we sniffily rejected. "The New Yorker dance party?" snorted a friend.) IvyGate went, though, and they were scared for their future social life. "This could be you in eleven years," warned the headline. "It was mostly professionals in their late 20s to early 30s talking and grinding." Oh, no, not that! Yep, that's how us post-collegiate Olds party. And then we stumbled home, drifting off to sleep imagining what type of hit our Roth IRA took with the latest crash. [IvyGate]

Nobel Prize secretary Horace Engdahl told the AP that Europe still rules when it comes to great literature: the U.S. is "too isolated, too insular." We also don't "participate in the big dialogue of literature." (He did not elaborate as to what those important big dialogues were.) Meanwhile, will reclusive Catcher In the Rye author J.D. Salinger receive the Nobel Prize for Lit? Writes a tipster, "I work for PEN in Britain, and there is a rumour here that [the above comments are] an attempt to cover up J.D. Salinger's being on the shortlist for this year's Nobel." [AP via Breitbart]

WHAT'S GOING ON WITH EMILY BRILL? We can scarcely contain our curiosity; "Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray" to Emily. The idle, wealthy daughter of a media mogul—supporting herself with only a trust fund and a blog—has transformed into New York's ultimate narrator. Only she seems able to capture in prose the throbbing, relentless pulse that underlies this great city. We have so many questions: What did she have for dinner? How long did she wait to get in that bar? And what year was that terrorist attack, again? Come on New Yorkers, let's rock: Emily's literary style is informed by a lifetime of urban experience:

The Kenyon Review published a long, musing piece on the many forms of the rejection letter. What does it mean? Well, it means "nothing" as well as "no." How do various magazines reject you—and how has the New Yorker's rejection slip evolved?

Maybe being a professional poet isn't a romantic escape from the drudgery of work and intellectual boredom. Being the Poet Laureate of the United States is kind of a pain in the ass—full of events and obligations, you're lucky to find time to write. But being Britain's Poet Laureate is even worse: the current one, Andrew Motion, is counting the days 'til his term is up next year because he's miserable:

Len Downie was executive editor of the Washington Post for years and years and years. Now he is the Vice President At Large. We don't know what that means except that it maybe gave him time to finish his novel, The Rules of the Game, which is a story of political intrigue, of fucking course. Also of fucking course: there is a newspaper editor in it! Uh oh! Time to name the thinly veiled real-life Post figures involved! The problem is there is like one easy-to-identify thinly veiled real person, and it's former Post editor Ben Bradlee, and the Bradlee character is a big brave hero, which is how everyone already publicly idolizes him. Actually it looks like all the journalists involved are big heroic hero types!

Robert Giroux, who helped build one of the most important publishing houses of the 20th Century, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, died in his sleep yesterday morning at an assisted living facility in Tinton Falls, NJ. He was 94. The legends that he published amount to a stunningly daunting list that includes T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Seamus Heany, Bernard Malamud, Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, and George Orwell."'The single most important thing to happen to this company was the arrival of Bob Giroux,' [Roger] Straus, who died in 2004, once said."

Biggie Smalls was one of the greatest rappers of our generation. Way nicer lyrically than the more iconic Tupac, his fellow murdered MC. Another point in favor of Biggie: he had a crazier wife. That would be Faith Evans, the Bad Boy R&B singer who is most famous for-let's be honest-being Biggie's wife. Now Faith has written an autobiographical book, and although I'm sure there's lots in there about empowerment, mourning, etc., check out this part where she sneaks into Biggie's house, pulls Lil Kim out of his bed, and beats her ass!:

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.'" — The winning entry of the 26th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the object of which is to write the worst possible opening sentence to a novel. The winning author has two master's degrees, a job in corporate communications and I am guessing a few prospective literary agents, given it is August. [Washington Post]

Franz Kafka wrote dark, brilliant, surreal works of souls in crisis, bureaucracy run amuck, dehumanizing class systems-and a lot of dirty, sexy smut. Researches have discovered a bounty of porn in the great writer's notebooks, and they mean for you to read it. "Experts have unearthed a stash of explicit pornographic material belonging to German [he was Czech, actually] author Franz Kafka. The erotic material has been ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the writer's image. James Hawes, an academic and Kafka expert came across the material in copies of Kafka's journals in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford. Hawes said that the author's stash shows him as more human than a popular quasi-saintly writer. 'These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark. It's quite unpleasant.'"

"There are 8,000 nerve endings in the clitoris and this son of a bitch couldn't find one of them." Sound like an opening sentence to a trashy beach novel that aims to be read by thousands of housewives lolling on the Jersey shore before becoming landfill refuse? That's exactly what it is! But since it has such a killer first line, the people promoting the book (Tan Lines, obviously) made a video of all types of random people reading it. Just that line. It's all downhill from there. This is like the far, far less literary version of the video of random blogger types reading from the Keith Gessen FSU remix book. I bet the Tan Lines people wish Julia Allison had showed up to put some flair into it. Aw! Watch the strange clitoris festival, below: