THE literary event of the year may have been the bash at the home of New Yorker Fiction Editor Bill Buford on Friday night.
Even Grove/Atlantic president Morgan Entrekin, no stranger to the literati, enthused that it was the “best party I’ve ever been at.”
By the end of the night, everyone was covered with a thin veneer of perspiration, but nobody seemed to mind. The event, staged as part of the opening-night celebration of The New Yorker Festival this weekend in Manhattan, put some of the highest-profile fiction writers of the era under one roof.
Thrill writer Stephen King, standing with the help of a cane as he slowly recuperates from being struck by a van last year, said he has already finished his next work for Simon & Schuster – but it won’t be a thriller. “It will be a nonfiction work to be called ‘On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.'”
“That was a compromise – I just wanted to call it ‘On Writing,’ but they wanted the title to be a little more personal,” says King, who had earlier done his first public readings since the tragic accident last year that nearly derailed his writing career.
Famed Irish novelist Edna O’Brien stopped by to chat before he took off. “I’m not writing at the moment,” she says. “My most recent book ‘Wild Decembers’ is just out.”
Also on hand was “Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie and his new main squeeze, Padma Lakshmi.
After hiding out for years because of a death threat from Muslim militants, he says he’s happy to be “just quietly resuming a normal life – well not exactly like everyone else, but close.
“A writer’s average day is when nothing much happens. For a while, too much was happening in my life.”
His next work? “It’s kind of a thriller murder story set in America, England and India. It will be a lot shorter than the last one,” he promises. “Shorter books more often, that’s my motto,” he says. He now hopes to crank out one book every 18 months but adds, “It’s easy to say at a distance.” From Britain came a hot young writer and one of her elderly countrymen: new novelist Zadie Smith, the 24-year-old author of the critically acclaimed “White Teeth, and “Death in Summer” scribe William Trevor.
Men who have parlayed their books into hot movies were also present in the form of “Independence Day” writer Richard Ford and “High Fidelity” novelist Nick Hornby.
Rounding out the literary heavyweights were Annie Proulx, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer for fiction for “The Shipping News,” and Alice Munro, author of “The Love of a Good Woman.”
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Late update on Rick Bragg, the Miami bureau chief for the New York Times who said the Elian Gonzalez story was the “dumbest story” he’d ever covered. Bragg’s headed to the Big Easy – New Orleans, insiders say. Sources say he was really not trying to get himself fired when he made his impolitic remarks to the weekly Metro Pulse, based in Knoxville, Tenn., several weeks back.
But he has not recanted the statement either – which was said to have angered editors back in New York. Bragg was quoted as saying he definitely “made a mistake” in accepting the Miami assignment and that “hell” was not waking up on a bed of coals but “waking up and finding you’ll be covering Elian for the next 643 days.” The brass are angry enough to pull him out of Miami-but not so angry that they’ll fire their Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.
In fact, high placed sources say that sometime in the next few months, Bragg will be allowed to move to New Orleans, where he will be an editor-at-large covering feature stories all over the South. But no replacement has been named yet in Miami.
Times National Editor Dean Baquet dismissed speculation that he had made a trip to Miami two weeks ago specifically to reprimand Bragg. “I was in Florida, but for reasons that had nothing to do with Rick,” he tells Media Ink.
As to the New Orleans move that some sources say is now in the works, Baquet says only, “I’m uncomfortable talking about anything before all the details have been worked out.” Not exactly a denial is it? Bragg is still on vacation in Alabama and couldn’t be reached.
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Another bus must be pulling up in front of The Wall Street Journal to drive away all the people who are quitting.
Despite efforts to lick the turnover problem by offering free gifts on the fifth anniversary of employment, insiders say people are still fleeing in droves.
“There is still a brain drain,” an insider says, “and they’re not just leaving for .coms – some of them are leaving for competitors.”
Sources say at least eight more people have jumped ship or about to jump. On the list are investigative writer Michael Moss, who is said to be talking to The New York Times, and Frances McMorris, who is becoming an assistant managing editor at The Daily Deal.
Carol Gentry is heading to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, where she’ll be director of the Knight Public Health Journalism Fellowship program.
Felicia Paik is jumping to Forbes.com. “This was just too good an opportunity to pass up,” she says. Karen Hube is heading to Family Money, a new Meredith magazine edited by former Money executive editor Caroline Donnelly.
Glen Berkins has resigned from the Washington office but couldn’t be reached to discuss his new plans. Dean Takahashi has picked up a signing bonus and stock options to be a senior writer at Red Herring magazine in San Francisco.
Joe Mathews is also leaving – only three months after arriving from The Baltimore Sun. He’s headed to the Los Angeles Times, following new editor John Carroll.
“I feel kind of bad leaving after only three months,” says Carroll. “I like the Journal, it’s a great paper, but this kind of hit me in the head.”
Health columnist Marilyn Chase is taking a one-year leave of absence to write a book for Random House on a public-health crisis that hit San Francisco in 1900. Random House Editor Ann Godoff is supervising the project.
Despite the stampede for the exits, Dow Jones Spokesman Richard Tofel says the turnover is normal. “I think there is constant turnover at any large organization. I think we continue to both attract and retain the best business journalists in America.”
In fact, Tofel says he’s made four new recent hires: Ted Bridis from the Associated Press; Ann Zimmerman from the Dallas Observer; Jim Vande Hei from Roll Call; and Pulitzer Prize-winner Joe Hallinan from the Chicago Tribune. (He originally had Joe Mathews’ name on the list but found out from Media Ink he had already resigned.)
But at least one insider is not convinced the turnover is normal. Referring to the bar where many of the going-away parties are held, he says, “It’s getting so we might as well just rent a room in Saint Charlie’s every Wednesday night.”
*Please send e-mail to
kkelly@nypost.com