The inscrutable logic of Amazon.com's targeted-marketing emails, as manifested in a friend's inbox yesterday:

A headline from today's Sun:

In this week's installment of the Times' catty Sunday book club, a University of Chicago academic comes to the defense of Sven Birkets, who was heralded last week as poised to "replace Rick Moody as Dale Peck's 'worst writer of his generation.'" Plus, Birkerts has just been hired by Harvard, and it's nice to see someone finally stick up for a beleagured Crimsonette. Meanwhile, Erica Jong gets smacked by comparison to Joan Didion, leaving Intern Alexis stumbling on such an uneven playing field. That, plus some unerotic erotic lit, after the jump.

Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan has admitted to "accidentally" borrowing material for her first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, after the Crimson identified more than a few passages in Opal that mirrored Megan McCafferty's work in Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. In a statement issued by her publisher Little, Brown, Viswanathan admitted that she had read Megan McCafferty's books in high school and acknowledged the similarities:

We've always argued — long before we started this gig, even — that the first rule of being a smartass is that you have to be right. (The only thing more insufferable than someone smug about being correct is someone who's both smug and incorrect.) An obvious corollary to this idea, we'd imagine, is that if you're going to be a pretentious name dropper, you've got to at least drop the right names. Which is why we were so pleased to see in New York's glossary of names dropped in Plum Sykes' new roman-a-pretention, The Debutante Divcoree, this mention near the bottom:

What happens when you sign a high school kid to a $500K two-book deal? We wouldn't know, being reasonably untalented since elementary school. But ask the sad folks at Little, Brown — they signed Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan to that exact deal, and her debut, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, seems to feature plagiarized content. Currently at #32 on the New York Times bestseller list and optioned by Dreamworks, Opal Mehta contains "strikingly similar" (and, at one point, word-for-word) text to Megan McCafferty's 2001 novel Sloppy Firsts and her 2003 follow-up Second Helpings. McCafferty's people at Random House are taking the allegations "very seriously," but when contacted by the Harvard Crimson, Viswanathan said that she had "no idea what you are talking about."

Making its way to books publicists this afternoon:

Yesterday we reported that publisher Morgan Friedman had somewhat unceremoniously removed Michael "Malice" Krechmer* from his position as editor of Overheard in New York, the successful weblog that has spawned books and spin-offs. Today Friedman clarifies to us that he's the straight-up owner of the site, and explains why Malice-Krechmer was let go:

David Vigliano on Jayson Blair, in "Hey, Victim, Want a Book Deal? Jill Carroll's Post-Trauma Choice," by Sheelah Kolhatkar, NYO, today:

A Valley journalist sends in a self-promo from another Valley journalist. Which burns more, the incest or the onanism?

In her latest review of the New York Times Book Review, Intern Alexis is faced with the reality that Harvard students were not in tears while reading Madame Bovary. After accepting that crimson can be so cruel, Alexis notices a lot of "nah-nahs" going around amongst reviewers, which is especially painful when coming from a Pulitzer winner. This, plus the inexplicable anger of reviewer William Logan, after the jump.

Earlier: Gawker Reading Crash: Bonnie Fuller on the Upper West Side

• Hachette looks to trim payroll costs (huh, feel like we've heard that before someplace); and Time's Jim Kelly throws a party for Joe Klein. [NYP]
• Feeling you haven't been reading enough memoirs lately? (And, really, don't we all feel like that?) Not to worry: There'll be twice as many next year. [WSJ]
• And the newspaper business continues to slowly die. [NYT]
• In new Howell Raines memoir, only two chapters of 43 are about the Jayson Blair saga. [E&P]
• Jann Wenner's longtime assistant is set to leave the company, and, remarkably for that shop, everyone likes her. [WWD]

Today's Thursday Styles profiles Lucky beauty director Jean Godfrey-June, whose memoir, Free Gift With Purchase: My Improbable Career in Magazines and Makeup, comes out next week. To which we can only ask, free gifts? Indeed:

• CBS Evening News' current anchor Bob Schieffer takes his replacement, Katie Couric, to a very public lunch at Michael's. Nothing like a publicly staged lovefest to hide the violent animosity. [Lowdown]
• A New York call girl has penned a tell-all (of course), in which she tells of "crack-fuelled," kinky sex with West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin (of course). [Page Six]
• An anonymous friend worries that rapper Eminem may try to hurt himself. Better that than his estranged wife, we guess? [Media Takeout]
• Famed fabulist James Frey emerges from hiding just long enough to donate a batch of signed copies of A Million Little Pieces for an ASPCA auction to raise money for a Louisiana shelter. Aw, now those poor puppies will never survive. [Page Six]
• Actor Dennis Hopper admits that he voted for Bush, and yet he still prances about lower Manhattan, relatively unharmed. [R&M (2nd item)]

Bonnie Fuller — she's just like us! She has a kid!

• Problem-ridden ABC News hunts for GMA email leaker. This much we know: It wasn't Krucoff. [NYO]
• Howell Raines' new memoir is good. [WP]
• Is Conde considering moving publishers around? Perhaps. [WWD]
• "The Feds yesterday arrested two young Wall Streeters and a mole at a Business Week print shop for running a trans-Atlantic insider trading scam that enlisted investment bank colleagues and a stripper to rack up $6.7 million in ill-gotten gains." It's ledes like this that make it impossible to stay mad at the Post. [NYP]
• NYT names a new real-estate editor; Joyce Cohen has fun with capital letters. [HuntGrunt]
• 'Times' gets new ThuStyles deputy editor; remarkably it's not a gay man. She is, however, a former Observer m.e., which the Observer doesn't mention. [Media Mob/NYO]

Dude, they're still handing out blogger book deals?

In this week's installment of the Times Book Review, hell hath frozen over and left us with Alexandra Jacobs, who doesn't hate on Bonnie Fuller with the sass and ire we were kind of expecting. This left Intern Alexis in an extended state of emotional confusion, her copy of the review stained with tears. But redemption awaits in nasty reviews by Greil Marcus, Ken Kalfus, and Guy Martin — three men who takes the concept of "catty bitch" to admirable new levels. After the jump, Alexis gives you the weekly rundown of intellectual book-burning.

When Gawker mascot Andrew Krucoff came to us and asked if he could launch a blog book tour here for his "punk rock hero," we shrugged and scratched our heads and attempted to ignore him. (But, then, that's our regular reaction to Krucoff.) Apparently this hero of Kruc's, Frank Portman, has written the MySpace generation's Catcher in the Rye, and because we're intrigued by anyone Kruc has maintained an asexual crush on since he just was a little Kruci, we thought it wouldn't hurt to grant the request. After the jump, the two talk abut the book, King Dork, their long-unrequited love, about lots of other things about rock journalism. Future Lester Bangs — or even Chuck Klostermans — of America, take note!