The hissing of summer blondes

Really funny NYT article on what is expected to be this summer's gossippy best-seller, The Right Address. For some reason, it's common for two people to write books like this (cf.The Nanny Diaries) -- thus the reporter mentions two names.

Ms. Karasyov said she and Ms. Kargman never intended to write a great literary novel, even though they both graduated from Ivy League colleges and Ms. Karasyov studied Russian literature. In the — ahem — original Russian.

"Well, sure, I would have loved to have written `War and Peace,' " Ms. Karasyov said. "But this is not a book we're spending 10 years writing while we live on grants from Yaddo. There's always that one book every year that everyone talks about, and it can be really dramatic and heavy — you know, like the one with the dead girl watching down on us from above."

Ms. Karasyov, who was referring to Alice Sebold's literary novel, "The Lovely Bones," made an impressed-sounding "woo-ooh!" noise. She continued: "But our book is what you read between oiling up and then hopping back into the pool."

Also, be sure to look for the word trough toward the end of the story, and the image that it conjures.