New York, the early 1980s. Newman Sykes is a feared book critic, failed novelist, and savage interviewer, with a must-read monthly column and a weekly segment on the local TV news. His friend and rival Howard Ritchie is a fiction editor whose keen eye and near-lunatic force of will have turned a sleepy university journal into a star factory.

The two men share more than high standards and a hunger for the next big discovery; they also share keys to Newman's Village pied à terre, where (unbeknownst to their wives) each has his own set of sheets. This unsavory arrangement is strained to the breaking point when Howard receives a story from one "D. Reeve," a newcomer, who turns out to be the fresh talent they've both been waiting for--and a woman with ambition and appetites as ruthless as their own.