Publishing companies may be cajoling their employees to scale back at lunch time, but they haven’t completely forgotten how to throw an old-school book party. Tuesday night, we went to the W Tuscany to meet Jodi Lipper and Cerina Vincent, the co-authors of How to Love Like a Hot Chick. It’s the followup to last year’s How to Eat Like a Hot Chick, which Vincent told us they came up with after some man on the Food Network was exasperating them with his ideas about low-fat diets for women. They decided they could do better, “and the phrase ‘how to eat like a hot chick’ literally flew out of our mouths,” Vincent recalled. The partygoers (very few of whom appeared to be from the book world) was as interested in the toys and other paraphenalia on display from Booty Parlor (which is sponsoring a hot chick makeover contest) as they were in the free cosmos and martinis; as the crowd milled around us, Lipper—who left a career in publishing to become a full-time author—talked about extending the franchise beyond the first two books. “We want to take women through their entire lives,” she said; their next topic will be marriage, then motherhood. (They’ll be writing from recent experience: Lipper was married last summer, while Vincent tied the knot just three weeks ago.)
From there, we went downtown to the apartment of Weinstein Books publisher Judy Hottensen, where she was hosting a party for Steven Rinella—whose new book, American Buffalo, had just been published by Spiegel & Grau. (Three years ago, when Weinstein Books was Miramax Books, Hottensen had published Rinella’s first book, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine; last year, he married the house’s publicity director, Katie Finch.) While Hottensen provided the space, Rinella prepared most of the food, including a summer sausage that combined caribou and antelope meat, a terrine of treet pigeon, willow ptarmigan, caribou tenderloin, beef liver and pork fat, and a ham made from the back leg of a mule deer. (Vegetarians didn’t have to feel left out; though, as Cindy Spiegel brought hummus.) We went back for seconds on all three meats… not least of all becaue we have no idea when we’re ever going to get to have them again!