Between the Lines

MAGICAL RETAIL-ISM It may be Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s biggest hit since One Hundred Years of Solitude, but you’ll have to wait until next fall to read the Nobel Prize winner’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale — unless you know Spanish. Knopf will release 50,000 copies of the book Stateside en espanol on Dec. 3, the house’s largest first printing ever for a Spanish-language edition. ”It’s the most eagerly awaited book in Spanish [right now],” says Knopf marketing director Paul Kozlowski, noting that it sold 250,000 copies in Spain in its first two weeks.

HOT DEBUT Anyone who believes there are no second acts should check out Davitt Sigerson, the 45-year-old former head of Island Records who’s just sold his first novel. The tentatively titled Faithful is about a woman who leaves her husband for an ex-lover. ”If you were talking to anyone else here…they’d tell you it has the most extraordinary sex in it, but I don’t play it that way,” says Nan A. Talese, publisher of her eponymous imprint at Doubleday. ”He writes magnificently about fatherhood.” Talese has bought a second novel from Sigerson that’s in progress. No word on the sex in that one.

DAILY WISDOM Jon Stewart, the snarky host of The Daily Show, will offer a satirical take on the political system in the tentatively titled A Guide to Democracy Inaction, to be published by Warner Books (part of AOL Time Warner, parent company of EW) in time for the ’04 presidential elections. Warner, which insiders say paid $1.25 million for the book, was one of about half a dozen publishers that met with Stewart and his agent, Dan Strone, CEO of the Trident Media Group. ”There was nothing on paper,” says an exec who attended one of the meetings. According to the source, Stewart and his Daily Show staff promised, ”We put together a show every day; we’ll write a book that’s just as good as the show.” Warner publisher Jamie Raab, who acquired the book, was unavailable for comment.