Letterman's Rear Window When the Late Night external camera focused on Meg Parsont in her Pocket Books office, David Letterman got on the phone. ''I could hear the audience in the background,'' she says, describing Letterman's first call to her, ''but I thought it was a well-orchestrated phony phone call.'' But then she looked across Manhattan's 49th Street to see a gang of Late Nighters waving from an of office opposite hers. ''The next thing I knew,'' says Parsont, whose only previous appearance on television was when she protested budget cuts at her middle school, ''I was sitting next to him at the desk.'' The Late Night host crowned the mild-mannered book publicist ''Office Worker of the Week'' and presented her with a frumpy man's suit as a trophy. Parsont has it hanging, ''for sentimental reasons,'' on the back of her office door. She confesses that in the past she rarely watched Late Night with David Letterman, but she tunes in regularly now because Letterman calls her just about every Tuesday night.
Paper Bucks Her Putnam editor hasn't yet seen a draft of Amy Tan's next novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, but Fawcett Books already has purchased the paperback rights. No word on the price, but probably considerably more than the $1.2 million paid for Tan's first book, The Joy Luck Club.
Night and Day Now available: an unabridged audio tape of Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger. It will cost $38.95 and take 24 hours (eight cassettes' worth) to hear every word of the book.
Ryan's Legacy When Ryan White died of AIDS in April, he was working on a children's book. Tentatively titled I Have AIDS, the book is ''partly biography, partly letters,'' says Toby Sherry, his editor at Dial Books for Young Readers. ''It's his whole story — how he got AIDS, why he moved from Kokomo to Cicero (Ind.), how he feels about things. And it also includes letters he got from other children.'' She says Ryan collaborated with a writer on the book, which is due out next year.
