Anonymous Obama novel about 'immediate future'

Cover image of "O: A Presidential Novel." (Courtesy Simon & Schuster)

In a press release, Simon & Schuster's Jonathan Karp offered a few more hints about the publishing company's forthcoming anonymous Obama novel.

The novel "O" is "about events in the immediate future -- and the lengths to which the Obama administration and the Republican opposition will go in order to prevail," Karp writes. "Our hope is that fiction will offer some resonant truths about what President Obama is really thinking." By staying anonymous, he writes, the author is following in a grand tradition that includes not only "Primary Colors" but "The Federalist Papers" and "The Story of O."

In a previous press release, Simon & Schuster announced that the author "has been in the room with Barack Obama." In what might just be some clever marketing, the publisher is now asking reporters not to comment on authorship if questioned.

On January 25, we'll be publishing a secret novel simply titled O, about President Obama's campaign for re-election in 2012. The author of the novel wishes to remain anonymous. You may be asked to comment on whether or not you are the author. If so, it would be great if you refrained from commenting, in solidarity with the principle that a book should be judged on its content and not on the perceived ideology of its author.

(In 1996 journalist Joe Klein admitted to writing "Primary Colors," a lightly fictionalized and heavily unflattering account of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, after months of denial.)