Book buzz: Lena Dunham signs $3.5 million deal

• Random House will publish Lena Dunham's forthcoming book of essays
• 'Sandman' creator Neil Gaiman's new novel will be published in 2013
• Pete Townshend's memoir is out this week, and so is a Barbra Streisand biography

Here's a look at what's buzzing in the books world today:

Lena Dunham signs deal: The bidding war is over. Random House has acquired Lena Dunham's essay collection, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned, for more than $3.5 million, The New York Times reports. Dunham is the 26-year-old filmmaker and creator of the HBO show Girls. Random House describes the book as "in the tradition of Helen Gurley Brown, David Sedaris, and Nora Ephron," with "frank and funny advice on everything from sex to eating to traveling the world."

New and noteworthy: Books on sale this week include a memoir from Pete Townshend of The Who and a high-profile biography of Barbra Streisand. And read reviews of Mick Jagger by Philip Norman (*** out of four) and Beautiful Lies by Clare Clark (** 1/2).

Neil Gaiman novel: The writer (The Sandman comics, Coraline, American Gods), will publish a new novel for adults, called The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It is about "a man returning to his childhood home and recalling magical, impossible events of decades earlier" and will be published by William Morrow in June 2013.

Nobel Prize odds: The Nobel Prize for Literature will be revealed on Oct. 11 (the day after the National Book Award nominees are revealed), and Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has 2/1 odds based on the Ladbrokes betting site.

'Pi' lives on:Life of Pi author Yann Martel weighs in on the Ang Lee-directed film adaptation of his book after the author took a hands-off approach: "The funny thing is that with that attitude, he ended up doing a movie that was incredibly faithful to the book -- the story line but also the idea, the intent. To trust him that it's a better story, and sure enough, he pulled off a brilliant movie."

Reader involvement: Author David Hule will publish chapters of his book as he writes them through a new initiative from Sourcebooks that includes using crowdsourcing and reader feedback "to shape a book's content as it's being written," the Chicago Tribune reports.