EXCLUSIVE! MUST CREDIT BEATRICE!
(With Apologies to Matt Drudge)

So there I was at the book party for Dave King, celebrating the great (and deserved) success he's had with The Ha-Ha, when I ran into another great Little, Brown author, Julian Rubinstein, who had just won the Borders Original Voices prize for nonfiction with his first book, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, and he tells me...and this is the breaking news, which you haven't read anywhere else yet...he's just signed a film deal with Warner Bros., and Johnny Depp's attached to star. Woo hoo! (UPDATE: Apparently all those folks who subscribe to Publishers Marketplace actually heard about this yesterday. At least I still beat Page Six by a few hours...)

Several other writers who were in the Columbia creative writing program with King were at the party to cheer him on, including Lauren Grodstein and Felicia Sullivan of Small Spiral Notebook introduced me to a classmate who's now one of her poetry editors, Jane Carr. They were joined by Emily Chenoweth of Publishers Weekly (and, at one time, of the KGB Reading Series), who might also be a Columbian, but I didn't quite find out for sure. I'll have to ask her the next time I'm down at the PW office.