While browsing Mediabistro this morning, we saw what—at first glance—appeared to be your average, run-of-the-mill snoozefest about women's magazines. The article, (entitled "Peaceful Coexistence: Glamour, MSL, and Cosmo Style") is about Glamour EIC Cindi Leive occupying the very same room as Cosmo EIC Kate White.

Did it end in a fight to the death? No, it did not.

But it did yield the best Martha Stewart tidbit since last week's "Don’t you do background checks on people? He was Egyptian!" incident.

Glamour's 50th-anniversary-celebration of its "Top 10 College Women" brought editor-in-chief Cindi Leive together with Cosmo editor-in-chief Kate White, who is a "College Women" alumna. So, too, is Martha Stewart. In this circumstance, Stewart looks like the mediator in resembling ex-President Jimmy Carter in the middle of warring factions.

And there you have it. Martha Stewart is the next Jimmy Carter. Except, you know, instead of negotiating peace treaties between Egypt and Israel, Stewart is vying to have her Egyptian driver deported back to the Middle East.

Same difference.

What do Salman Rushdie, Myla Goldberg and Martha Stewart have in common? Their publishes want to kill them.

None of them have met sales expectations for their books this year, which gives the New York Times Arts section plenty of reason to spit out a trend piece. This one, however, is actually quite timely: an end of the year round up of the industry's winners and losers.

Jimmy Carter, Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut, meanwhile, can expect quite the gift basket from their publishers this years as they issue subsequent printings of their tomes.

The sales data all points to the continued trend of Americans favoring non-fiction over silly creations intended to let readers escape into a fantasy land. (Shut up, Harry Potter.)

"If there's any theme to the year," said David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster's flagship imprint, "it's that people only want to read the truth." So while nonfiction sales are generally good, he said, fiction sales are best defined, in Mr. Rosenthal's usual plain-spoken manner, by an expletive.

Well holy fuck! Nicole Richie's non-fiction novela The Truth About Diamonds might just be a best seller yet.

Publishers Assess the Fall Season's Winners and Losers [Edward Wyatt, NYT]