Sex, Bestseller | featured news

Colleen Hoover's Hopeless, a self-published mature young adult novel about the darker side of sex, enters the list at an eye-popping position: No. 2. Hoover's reaction? "This entire experience has been surreal," she tells USA TODAY. Hoover had two books on the list last year: Point of Retreat, which reached No. 31 in July, and Slammed, which peaked at No. 17. Hoover says she turned down the chance to have Hopeless published by a major house and opted for self-publishing. It's obviously working.

Helen Gurley Brown, who fed the sexual revolution of the 1960s with her best-seller “Sex and the Single Girl” and then turned around the failing Cosmopolitan magazine by injecting her philosophy that women could have it all -- “love, sex and money” -- has died. She was 90.

I stared at my computer screen. There, sitting in my inbox was an email that confirmed the world around me had gone totally and utterly, bone-fide, stark-raving, strait-jacket wearing, mad. I read the first line. It said:“Shed! Your book is number 44 on Amazon... Congratulations!”