​Well, there goes your dream of living like Truman Capote, or at least in his former dwelling. The Brooklyn Heights home where Capote wrote his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's sold for about $12 million, an amount that constitutes what the Daily News calls the "highest price for a single-family home in borough history." Holly Golightly must be impressed.

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American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis, who is only the second most annoying novelist on Twitter, doesn't mince words. He's generally full of Very Definitive Opinions about movies, TV, and other culture stuff, and last night he cottoned onto a new subject: bullying.

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Contentious, isn't it, in the age of "It Gets Better"?

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​The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie is an enthusiastic tweeter. He often prompts his followers to play games like "Literary Smackdowns" (Joan Didion vs. Susan Sontag, for example), and today he started a new one: blasting Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook deactivated Rushdie's page, thinking it wasn't real. Rushdie sent in a copy of his passport to prove it was him and Facebook reinstated the page with his first name, Ahmed, instead of Salman.

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​Ralph Richard Banks is the author of the new book Is Marriage for White People? While Banks, a Stanford Law professor, was in town for an event at Cardozo Law School, we met him for lunch in the West Village to talk about why black folks marry so much less often than whites, why black women are the least married demographic, and why white dudes seem to be more accepting of a black woman wearing natural hair than black men.

(And, even though the book is largely about heterosexuals, we squeezed in some queer questions on Prop 8 and Tyler Perry.)

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​Remember the crazy Times Square billboard announcing Jeffrey Eugenides' new book The Marriage Plot? How could you forget. And how could you forget Jeff's glorious vest, blowing in the wind as the author strides purposefully towards you.

The Marriage Plot is out, Eugenides has an essay about it in The Millions, and his vest has its own Twitter account. All's right with the world.

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via @peterlattman

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The smoldering glamour shot of Middlesex author Jeffrey Eugenides in Times Square left a lot of people scratching their heads. Not because it's not awesome, but because it's almost too awesome. Since when do people who aren't reality TV stars or professional athletes get to be on billboards? Gives us hope for the current state of American culture.

Now WSJ has gotten to the bottom of the Eugenides billboard, which was made to advertise the author's new The Marriage Plot:

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Is Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides and the new The Marriage Plot, a heartthrob? We've already seen him attempt to defend a woman on New Jersey transit -- it was ill-fated. Now he's swashbuckling away in Times Square, on a huge billboard for his new book:

via @peterlattman

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70 Willow Street

​Run, don't walk to go buy Truman Capote's former home in Brooklyn Heights. The property at 70 Willow Street where Capote once drank martinis all afternoon long has been on the market for some time, but as Curbed noted today, the asking price has taken a dive from $18 million to $14,995,000. For mere mortals that's still obviously way too fancypants, but we supposed that for some of the uber-rich out there this reduction represents some cheapo-depot prices.

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​In what makes for one of the kookier Page Six items of recent days, it appears that The Virgin Suicides author Jeffrey Eugenides got into a physical altercation last week with a "drunken lout allegedly obsessed with his own genitalia" on the train in New Jersey. Eugenides surprised people by showing up at a Paris Review party for his upcoming novel The Marriage Plot with a black eye on Thursday. Earlier in the week, he'd taken the train home from Manhattan one night and two drunk guys were talking about their penises, or something, and a woman asked them to stop. Eugenides intervened and one of the guys punched him in the face. Later he had a photo shoot for Vanity Fair, black eye and all; the trick is to pull an Amy Sedaris and just own it.

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[@_rosiegray]

The original memoirist, St. Augustine.

​Sometimes, the most boring people are the most effusive. The person who traps you on the other side of their monologue at a party; the person shouting into their cellphone on the bus. The constant tweeter. The teenager with 5,000 Facebook photos of her and her spray-tanned friends grinning in a line. These people are a fact of life, and well, whatever -- except that now, as Neil Genzlinger points out in an article in the Times' Book Review, they're all writing memoirs. Bad ones.

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