What better way to bid a bloggy farewell to Sharon than to address a few of her favorite things -- hot publishing deals, hot young New Yorkers, and YA fiction? To those ends, we contacted our (best) friend and author Lauren Oliver (indeed, she's hot), who recently got a "significant deal" (that's publishing lingo, not my own) for two young adult books.

In this week's Portland Phoenix, I review the latest offering from Boston-based Rose Metal Press: A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: four chapbooks of short short fiction by four women, by Amy L. Clark, Elizabeth Ellen, Kathy Fish, and Claudia Smith. (You can find the review here, once it's posted online.)

I also got the chance to interview Kathleen Rooney and Abby Beckel, the founders (both in their late 20s, and graduates of Emerson College grad school) of Rose Metal.

In 2000, David Foster Wallace wrote this piece for Rolling Stone, about his seven days traveling with the then-insurgent John McCain campaign. The story, published in full as part of DFW's 2005 Consider the Lobster, offers an incomprable look inside the insanity that is a modern political campaign -- packaged in true DFW style, which means it is funny and intricately detailed and spot-on, analysis-wise.

We first became enthralled by Audacia Ray’s new book because it boasted a cover with numerical code arranged in the form of an ass. Bloody brilliant, if you ask us. Of course, the inside worked for us as well. Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration is a seriously painstaking peek into the way that women have/are using the internet to explore their sexuality and in some instances getting paid to do so.