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Today's Hits: oprah calls it quits. new moon rises. lost in february. and more.

Au Revoir, Oprah: In news that's guaranteed to send publishers into convulsions of horror, Oprah Winfrey is announcing on today's episode that she is folding up her talk show.

Wipe away those tears, Oprah fans: she's turning her attention toward an entire cable network.

Today's Hits: national book award winners. nabokov's last book. (and his old ones redesigned.) sex and the city goes back to school. and more.

Let the Book Awards Spin: Last night Colum McCann won the National Book Award for fiction with his novel Let the Great World Spin.

In accepting the award, the Irish-born Mr. McCann, now a teacher of creative writing at Hunter College, said, "As fiction writers and people who believe in the word, we have to enter the anonymous corners of human experience to make that little corner right."

Today's Hits: the dictionary gets unfriendly. palin's rogue facts. from here to eternity too gay? a graphic demise for coffee table publisher. and more.

The Unfriendliest Year: The New Oxford American Dictionary has selected its Word of the Year — which seems a little unfair, as a truly awe-inspiring new word still has about a month and a half to seize the public's imagination in 2009.

Anyway, the word they chose might be hard to top: "unfriend."

Today's Hits: sarah palin goes rogue. stephen king ducks under the dome and climbs back up the dark tower. a. s. byatt does it for the children. and more.

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Rogue If You Want to: Sarah Palin's memoir, titled I Should be Crowned Queen of America, Darn You All to Heck! (retitled Going Rogue: An American Life for publication), roguely goes on sale tomorrow at mavericky bookstores everywhere.

As you might expect, much is made of the book in the news this week. NPR examines Palin's media tour, noting that she's kicking off the publicity with an appearance on today's episode of Oprah, which will continue such nuggets as this:

Winfrey: "Let's talk about the interview with [CBS News anchor] Katie Couric."

Palin: "Ha, ha, must we? Ha, ha. OK."

I hope she really said "ha, ha" instead of laughing. Like those people who say "LOL" with a straight face when they're clearly not laughing, and definitely not out loud.

Just Review It: In the New York Times, Janet Maslin rules that tennis superstar Andre Agassi double-faulted in his memoir, Open: An Autobiography.

The ease with which Mr. Moehringer slips into telling someone else's story is both consummate and spooky. As for Mr. Agassi, he uses his writing partner in the same way he uses his tennis support staff: as talented individuals in a universe where he, Mr. Agassi, is the one and only sun.

[...] Welcome to Mr. Agassi's world. As described in "Open" it is lively but narrow, since Mr. Agassi's curiosity does not extend far beyond tennis, more tennis, the misery of tennis, the way sportswriters misunderstand tennis and the irritating celebrity that tennis stardom confers.

I just hope Maslin doesn't write anything like the above for books by John McEnroe or Serena Williams. She's liable to get a tennis ball jammed somewhere really uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, USA Today interviews Agassi about his book, tennis, and his other favorite subject (according to Maslin): himself.

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The Wonder Year: Publishers Weekly released its list of the ten best books of 2009 (remember?), and the editors probably clapped their hands and collectively thought, Welp, that's all 'til next year!

Little did they realize they had unleashed an earthquake of controversy that would drown them in a tsunami of outrage. See, the thing is, all ten of their books... are written by men!

The New York Times' ArtsBeat blog notes:

Cate Marvin, a founder of the group Women in Letters and Literary Arts, told The Guardian, "The absence made me nearly speechless." She added: "It continues to surprise me that literary editorsare so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture."

In her introduction to the year-end lists, Louisa Ermelino, the reviews director of Publishers Weekly, wrote, "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz," adding: "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

What's this? I hear some among you shouting, "Well, so what? Maybe this is the one year ...

iSanta 2.0: The Washington Post takes a look at the publishing industry's hopes and prayers for a very eBook holiday season.

This holiday season will be a crucial test of whether e-books can cross over from geeky novelty to mass-market must-have. Major retailers are pushing the format — and, of course, the gadgets they've developed to display it. Barnes & Noble unveiled its first electronic book reader last month, with access to all of the retailer's titles and then some. Amazon and Sony, which make the two best-selling e-readers in the country, have introduced new versions just in time to stuff your stocking. And this holiday, for the first time, Best Buy is devoting store space to educating shoppers about e-readers.

All told, about 1.2 million e-readers are expected to be sold in the last three months of the year — roughly 40 percent of the entire year's stock. By the end of 2010, industry experts predict, 10 million people will be carrying e-readers. As for the number of e-books that people have read, they've lost track.

Fortunately, parents will no longer have to sit by the ...

A Load of Bull-ano: An essay by Horacio Castellanos Moya, reprinted in Guernica magazine, disputes the North American romance of the late author Roberto Bolaño.

Moya's argument isn't entirely clear to me — it seems to be something along the lines that Bolaño's U.S. publishers (and, by extension, readers) are buying a manufactured image of the author as iconoclastic, youthful rebel rather than the family man he later became when he wrote his acclaimed novels The Savage Detectives and 2666.

American readers, with The Savage Detectives, want to confirm their worst paternalistic prejudices about Latin America...like the superiority of the Protestant work ethic or the dichotomy according to which North Americans see themselves as workers, mature, responsible, and honest, while they see their neighbors to the South as lazy, adolescent, reckless, and delinquent.

Lacuna Matata: NPR is launching a new feature called "What We're Reading" and they want you to weigh in....

The Literary Lives of Jess Walter: The Oregonian has a profile of former Powells.com guest blogger (and author of the forthcoming novel The Financial Lives of the Poets) Jess Walter.

More ghostwriting followed while Walter wrote his first two novels, Over Tumbled Graves and Land of the Blind. Both were set in Spokane and marketed as thrillers, much to his surprise. He thought he was writing literature with crime elements, like Pete Dexter or Richard Price, and saw his third novel, Citizen Vince, as a breakthrough in style and sophistication. It had enough criminal elements to win the Edgar but attracted praise from Richard Russo and Nick Hornby, and moved Walter out of the regional thriller ghetto and into the mainstream.

The Zero, a moody neo-noir set immediately after 9/11 without directly referencing it, put him over

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The $40 Million Question: Bestselling novelist Patricia Cornwell is suing her accountants and business advisers to find out how it's possible that she could have lost $40 million. I only wish she'd lost it a little closer to my house.

The famed crime writer claims that Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP — a blue-chip New York financial-management firm that specializes in "privately held businesses and high net worth individuals," including such celebrities as Robert De Niro — mishandled not only her own money, but that of her spouse of two years, Harvard neuroscientist Staci Gruber.

Her new Kay Scarpetta book, The Scarpetta Factor, is available now.

State of E-mergency: Hold the (cell)phone on that e-reader boom business we've been hearing so much about. Bloomberg sizes up the current e-reader situation, and finds it sadly lacking:

Everyone from desperate publishers to techno-lusting consumers knows what an e-reader should be: a thin, light, affordable tablet with a bright color touch screen, decent battery life and fast wireless access to books, magazines, newspapers and work documents.

A flood of new e-readers

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