Ha Jin has nabbed the PEN/Faulkner. This is his second win. And this also makes Ha Jin the second author to win the award twice — aside from Philip Roth.

If my own tale wasn’t enough for you, the erstwhile Mr. Esposito and Golden Rule Jones have offered theirs. Hopefully, other folks will chime in with their own accounts, preferably in dialogue form. Clearly, if there is an overarching theme here, it’s used bookstore employees going out of their way to drive away book enthusiasts.

Lenny Kravitz has donated his guitar to help fight hunger in Brazil. We applaud Mr. Kravitz’s generosity. As anybody knows, a guitar can be cut up and thrown into a stew to serve 12.

Emma Garman has plodded through JSF’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love. Krauss is JSF’s wife. The results? Both novels are remarkably similar.

• Maud has a report from a JSF reading. There are lots of mumbles and ashen expressions described.
• Dan Green is refreshingly unapologetic about his long posts, while remaining concerned that his content is being tagged “read later.”
• Ms. Tangerine Muumuu has some alternative titles for reluctant memoirs.
• Steve Almond offers eight reasons why he writes short stories. Apparently, he can’t accept the flawed framework of a novel and doesn’t care much for plot, two sensibilities which might account for why we’ve been unable to muster up more than cursory enthusiasm for his work.
• Robert Birnbaum, a man who has apparently frightened so many authors that not even Zoe Heller can utter his name, talks with Nick Flynn.
• Terry Teachout is a machine, I tell ya!
• Apparently, romance novels are all about the nookie. All this time I thought they functioned as an excuse to get models who resemble Fabio off the dole. Who knew? (via Sarah)

As the New York Times reported yesterday, Dan Brown is only one blockbuster novel away from designing an aircraft and using assorted taxpayer money to bankroll his obsessions. Should the aircraft prove successful, Brown reportedly has his eye on Vegas.

Since the success of The Da Vinci Code (which Brown refers to as the Book 4 Hercules), Brown hasn’t left the house. He speaks of rampant bacteria that might infect him and has a number of aides leaving milk bottles just outside his door. When Brown does leave his compound, he’s been known to babble about being able to buy any individual on the planet. He’s also taken to hitchhiking with the vain hope that he’ll be picked up by some guy named Melvin.

Brown has been toying around with the plot structure for Ice Station Zebra, having watched the film 75 times in the past month alone. While his publishers are encouraging Mr. Brown to abscond with its plot the same way that he did with Umberto Eco for his breakthrough success, Brown is too busy trying to determine if Jeb Bush needs a loan.

However, should Brown face writer’s block and remain incapable of writing further novels, Martin Scorsese is said to be interested in making a Dan Brown biopic.

Carrie recently weighed in on the good man as protagonist. And by “good man,” we may wish to clarify this wholesome term more wholesomely: maybe Ward Cleaver or Father Knows Best fits the bill. The irresistable person who can do no wrong. The person who has few problems other than how they’re going to refinance the house or, worse yet, the type who spends most of a novel lounging about a silk dressing gown.

While I generally tend to favor protagonists who have significant problems (not necessarily outright bastards), whether obvious ones or, even more interestingly, flaws hidden beneath tightly sewn seams of life experience leading inexorably to a dilemma we are about to experience, there’s something to be said for Carrie’s plea. Certainly the human perspective isn’t limited to madmen or druggies or pedearasts. Nearly every community has a do-gooder. Not a nagger who gets in the way of other people’s affairs or a sanctimonious Dimmesdale type copping a feel in a garret. We’re talking a genuinely outstanding member of society with nary a blemish on his record.

And I don’t want to cop to the easy defense that these types of characters don’t make for conflict. However, I think good men must be thrown into conflict in order for us to recognize their virtues. We must understand how they arrived at their goodness over the years, what efforts at self-purging and ascetism that allowed them to become the people who they are. Transposed against a narrative template that involves people from the past coming into this good man’s life, I can see this working as a way to compare and contrast the good man of today versus the developing good man of the past.

I haven’t yet read Gilead. In fact, it’s a stone’s throw away on my own bookpile. But I’ll be quite curious to see if this hypothetical development is one of the linchpins of the book. To understand and ruminate upon virtue is perhaps a trickier thing to know than vice.

The Rake continues his mighty depictions of bookstore readings with a run-in with Lily Tuck.

This video is wrong on multiple levels. (via B)

For some curious reason, Jessa seems more eager to link to Amazon titles rather than John Leonard’s “Welcome to New Dork” in the NYRoB, which has been online for a week. She suggests that she can’t get into Lethem’s fiction because “his metaphors kept getting in the way.”

I think that Ms. Crispin is being too unequivocal with Lethem’s work and should give the man another chance. While Lethem’s novels can be gimmicky, I consider him to be one of the most interesting fiction stylists working today, a conclusion that, admittedly, took me several books to figure out. Consider the many genres Lethem has worked in. Consider his use of language and his own determination never to write the same kind of novel twice. I haven’t read The Disappointment Artist yet, but I did read Lethem’s “The Beards” (an excerpt from the upcoming nonfiction book) in The New Yorker several weeks ago (unfortunately, not available online), a fascinating glimpse at how Lethem used pop culture to disguise his growing disconnectedness with the world when personal tragedies bogged down his life. And if we look at the McDonald’s in the middle of a dystopian future in Amnesia Moon, the White Castle burgers clutched onto as comfort food in the early moments of Motherless Brooklyn, or the comics and music in The Fortress of Solitude, we see a writer who willing to present pop culture as an elixir that can often be debilitating to existence.

This interesting dilemma in current novels, what indeed separates Lethem from a J-Franz gushing over Peanuts, is what Leonard singles out in his essay among current writers. But I think Leonard may be too hard on Lethem. Where other contemporary writers have used nostalgia as a way to throw in a cheap gag or to pad out a novel, I would suggest that Lethem is the only literary figure brave enough to recognize its potential as an imprisoner. Not even Paul Auster could do that when he summarized the plot of Out of the Past in Ghosts.

For those who aren’t satisfied with three-word reviews, my lengthier take on Stop That Girl is now up at January.

SHERMAN OAKS — Much like Mark Twain, he’s damning the human race again, but that’s just Harlan. Ellison is the kind of crank that makes for a good feature on a slow news day.

“FEED MY EGO, SUZE! I AM THE GREATEST LIVING WRITER THIS PLANET HAS GOT! LOOK AT MY COPIOUS NOTES. WHY, EVERY SENTENCE IS PURE GENIUS! YOU CAN FIND MY NOTES IN THE FILE CABINET, IN THE FILE MARKED ‘IDEAS THAT PIGEONHEADS CAN’T COMPREHEND.’ THESE IGNORANT FOOLS DON’T UNDERSTAND MY GENIUS!”

Another day, another dollar, another cash-strapped editor conned out of his money. $500,000 for a 24-word Ellison piece of flash fiction, and it’s only Tuesday. Another wing to add to the sprawling Ellison estate. Ellison has chewed out another editorial intern over the phone for mispronouncing Solzhenitsyn’s last name. The intern is sobbing and apologizing, and telling Ellison that she’s on Xanax and that she’s been with a therapist since the age of 12. But Ellison doesn’t budge and wants to hear her whimper some more before hanging up. This is clearly a fight worth winning.

Harlan Ellison’s hubris fed a lot of hungry intellectual minds in their twenties looking for a bombastic figurehead. Unfortunately, most of them grew up, which wasn’t good for Ellison’s midlist standing. But that hasn’t fazed Ellison. These days, he spends his autumn years calling random people at odd hours, getting angry over the important details that most people take for granted. “Damn you!” he cries out to a delivery boy earning minimum wage. “I told you I wanted the California roll, not the Nevada roll! Don’t you understand the difference between Las Vegas and La Jolla? What the hell is a Nevada roll anyway?” High blood pressure hasn’t stopped Harlan Ellison from getting angry or correcting people of these unfortunate mistakes, which he blames on “cultural amnesia” — in this case, the unpardonable errors of a Sherman Oaks sushi bar. A self-made man of privilege should get what he wants. Screw the working class and the moronic masses. It’s justice, Ellison-style.

Harlan Ellison, 70, has been denied his meds again. He’s sitting in an atrium of his own design, pointing out how superior it is to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel. There are many, many, many, many, many strange things here: the Rolodex of credible, perceived and imagined enemies out to get Ellison, the various black helicopters that Ellison insists were manufactured and put into service by the Department of Defense, and an old-fashioned card catalog detailing the people he claims to know or might have known, and the hyperbole he’s built his careeer upon.

On a bathroom wall there’s a Will Eisner drawing of The Spirit, drawn by Eisner in about ten minutes, signed: “To Harlan: Thank you for ripping out my left testicle. I needed to feel unnecessary pain, and I needed a second opinion when the blood clotted. All best, Will.” It’s art, goddammit. Never mind that it was one of about 90 drawings that Eisner made one autumn day in 1982.

All of this is part of how Harlan Ellison gets what he wants. He recently broke the nose of one journalist who liked “his touching little fantasy tales.” But he didn’t just break the journalist’s nose. He lectured the journalist for three hours on genre ghettoization. This was a matter of pride.

While some might contend that Ellison has become a parody of himself, there are still others who will happily kiss his 70 year old ass, despite its many wrinkles. Ellison regularly wards off these fanboys, commissioning hit men to knock them off.

“Their lives are worthless,” he says. “It’s the individual’s responsibility to stop heckling writers. For fuck’s sake, they might start literary blogs.”

Incidentally, a guy named Philip Gourevitch will be taking over Brigid Hughes’ editorial duties at The Paris Review. While Mr. Gourevitch’s name won’t roll off the tongue quite as easily as Hughes’ did, Galleycat has the links on who this man is. Meanwhle, Scott has a few reservations.

Maud can be found in today’s Newsday, reviewing A.L. Kennedy’s latest, Paradise.

Who was the editorial mastermind who assigned Deborah Solomon to interview Rich Gannon?

I was just another guy in the press room. Did I try to curry favor with him? Sure. When he got married, I left a wedding card for him in the press office. People are saying this proves there is some link. But as Einstein said, “Sometimes a wedding card is just a wedding card.”

You mean like “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”? That wasn’t Einstein. That was Freud.

Oh, Freud. O.K. I got my old Jewish men confused.

You should learn the difference between them if you want to work in journalism.

It’s official. Tom DeLay is insane.

There is a used bookstore, which I shall not name, in San Francisco. It may very well be the most nightmarish book dealer in California, worse even than the boxy blockbuster outlets where clerks are sadly illiterate and where shelf space is devoted to the dreaded popular offerings of our time.

It is neither the used bookstore’s collection of books nor the crammed stacks that I have a problem with. Nor do I quibble over the store’s remarkably inflated prices for its stock, which rivals Green Apple in fleecing the customer by pricing a dogeared hardcover with fecal matter and other questionable deposits left by previous readers at a mere four dollars off the original price: $17 for a $21 hardcover now readily available in trade paperback, to give you one egregious example.

Rather, it is the eccentric and hopelessly depressed husband-wife team, lanky and listeless ex-hippies who appear to have never recovered from Altamont, who run the place. Upon entering, the purveyor is immediately assaulted by a paranoid “NO PHOTOS!” sign emblazoned in angry Shaprie on a viciously ripped piece of cardboard, presumably to ward off the legions of G-men and black helicopters that have stormed the place with expensive Nikons. And if you do not surrender your backpack to the proprietors within thirty seconds, they will unleash motley cries of horror and assorted accusations (“Thief! Thief!”), as if you have just molested an infant. You are given half a playing card to hold onto and if you have any questions about whether the store has a particular title in stock, you are told to fend for yourself. Clearly, despite being in retail for years, this miserable couple has failed to grasp the basic idea that showing a customer where an object of desire resides might result in a sale.

I generally avoid this place because I find it disheartening to see something as inspiring as a large collection of books sullied by the variegated vagaries of glum vendors as yet uncategorized in the DSM-IV. The last time I had browsed the bookstore, I was reprimanded for not buying anything. And it was suggested then that I was somehow contributing to the store’s financial shortfall.

My friends know me as an easy forgiver. And since my last encounter with these jaded overlords had been a year ago, since I was in a cheery mood, since I happened to be in the neighborhood, and since I had recently bemoaned how difficult it was to find Anthony Burgess titles that very afternoon with friends (outside of A Clockwork Orange), I thought I’d give my revived Burgess hunt a go.

Burgess, I should point out, is an author I adore. A brave, playful and remarkably prolific writer writing across several genres (science fiction, historical fiction, pointed British satire) who is no longer alive and whose books remain in print only through the most precarious of midlist conditions. If ever there was a time to buy Burgess, the time was now. Before he became relegated to the dust heap of forgotten novelists, until the inevitable “rediscovery” essay in the April 2039 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

Burgess, I’m delighted to report, was found: specifically, The Long Day Wanes, a collection of Burgess’ Malayan trilogy that I had not read. I approached the counter, ready to welcome Burgess back into my life. The wife was there, a moribund look hidden beneath hanks of stringy gray hair.

“This book’s been sitting there since 1998,” she said. “No one has touched it.”

“Well, I’m glad I rescued it from extinction. It’s a pity that Burgess has been on the decline the past ten years.”

The second sentence was the wrong thing to say.

“Oh boy. Have you heard my rant?”

Before I could say no thank you, the woman let loose a hysterical rambling about how most people can’t read, how 50% of America can’t even read street signs, and how barely anybody in the City reads books.

“Did you know that?” she sneered, tapping her fingers on a counter pocked with numerous dents and scratches, waiting for the inevitable moment to deliver part two.

“Wait a minute,” I replied. “We’re the top national city for bookstores. Number ten on the most literate city list.”

She didn’t hear me. She carried on with how money was being siphoned off for computers instead of books in the libraries. Homeless people waiting for three hours to check their email in lines. Bill Gates and his financial stranglehold on schools. And then she revealed the ultimate demon itself! The Internet. All a bunch of rabid lies.

“Actually, the Internet’s been pretty good to me. There’s an ongoing debate over literary issues. And without the Internet, I don’t think I’d have nearly as many John P. Marquand books as I do. Of course, I hit every used bookstore I could find first.”

“Where did you order?”

“What?”

“Where did you order?”

“Alibris.”

“Let me tell you something about Alibiris. It’s one giant warehouse.”

“Really? That’s strange. I’ve had packages come in from used bookstores in Utah and Illinois.”

“It’s all a front. You need to order from Abe Books.” (As it turns out, the lady was right on this point. Alibris sends consigned books with inflated prices for titles that used sellers provide through its warehouse with the bookstore’s name and logo on the packages.)

Admonished for making a mistake I wasn’t aware of, I didn’t receive a thank you. And given the moribund harangue and the rampant accusations, I certainly won’t be buying from the place again.

But it does make me ponder how anyone can remain in the used bookstore business with any shred of sanity intact. Any retail business is ripe with problems, subject to the cash flow of any given month and whatever remains in savings to stay afloat. But that’s still no excuse to bombard your customers with vitriol. After all, they’re the devoted dreamers keeping the bookstores alive.

The National Book Critics Circle Award winners have been announced:

NOVEL: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
BIOGRAPHY: De Kooning: An American Life by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
CRITICISM: Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontlnie of a Hip-Hop Planet by Patrick Neate
GENERAL NONFICTION: The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch
POETRY: The School Among the Ruins by Adrienne Rich

Andre Norton has passed on.

Of all people to weigh in on the Robert Blake question, Joyce Brothers says, “They will not only accept him back but accept him back in spades. We are a nation that loves comebacks. We have `Rocky’ and `Rocky 2′ and `Rocky 3.'”

Craig’s List: “Aqua Matrix is seeking 27-35 year old Caucasian and Asian females for submission for a Day Player role on the CBS soap opera Guiding Light. Must be beautiful and threatening when she needs to be.”

Stop That Girl by Elizabeth McKenzie

REVIEW: Stop those similes.

PHONE: “Is Mr. Champion there?”

ME: “Who may I ask is calling?”

PHONE: “I’m from the Republican National Committee. Do you have a few moments of time?”

ME: “How did you get my name?”

PHONE: “Are you a Republican?”

ME: “I asked you a question first. How did you get my name?”

PHONE: “Are you a Republican?”

ME: “Wow, you’re a one-trick pony. Look, I’d like you to take my name off your list and never call me again.”

PHONE: “Sure. Obviously, you’re a Repubican.”

ME: “What makes you say that?”

PHONE: “Obviously, you’re a Republican.”

ME: “If you say so…” (hangs up)

Like 99.99% of the blogosphere, I’m white and I’m male. Sometimes, I get an erection. In fact, it’s safe to say that writing long libertarian screeds on copyright and the horrors of government regulation (get off my lawn, G-men!) gets me hotter and friskier than the Jenna Jameson videos I rent from the video store (also white, also male, also libertarian, but perhaps a scad dirtier).

Why, if it weren’t for the power of the blogosphere (which is more truthful than those Communists writing for the New York Times), it’s safe to say that I’d be giving speeches at my local Rotary International chapter about the Important Issues of Our Time and inviting other white men for cocktails at the Elks Lodge to discuss the merits of how to wiggle out of paying too much capital gains tax. (Damn government!) Some of you fools in the peanut gallery haven’t lived until you’ve spent six hours of your life figuring out legitimate ways to trademark the crack of your ass. And, by golly, you’ll find my asscrack on file in the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office. Why? Because that’s what America is all about!

We practice actual journalism out here in the blogosphere. We’ve sent our people out to the conventions to sit around and do nothing. What more do you want of us?

If these pesky minorities or those cute little intellectual chicks actually wanted to blog, then by the Good Grace of God, they’d be doing it! If the impoverished masses actually cared enough about their opinions, then they’d quit one of their two jobs at Starbuck’s and climb into the saddle, riding out the magic with other good Americans.

And if they cared enough about popularity, then they’d be ingratiating themselves with the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds, aping every opinion with the gusto of a Trekkie fawning over Leonard Nimoy. If they knew what was good for them, they’d spend all of their spare time tying the Number of the Beast to Dan Rather.

I may not read blogs that disagree with me, largely because my guidance counselor has suggested it might spike my blood presure. The last thing anyone needs in this golden age is differing opinions. But out here in the electronic frontier, we’re creating a democratic elite. The kind of sensible realm ruled by white males who all agree with each other. So why won’t you put away your silly Noam Chomsky books and join us?

I wish to apologize for my speech this morning at SXSW. Had I known that my revelations would send shockwaves through the weblogging commnity, I would have, of course, been honest and forthright about the night I spent with Nicolette Sheridan playing touch football and the resultant FCC investigations.

But no matter. Now that you all know that Dr. Mabuse is an online persona that I adopted out of manic depression and that Edward Champion does not in fact exist, now that you know that Champion was modeled after an autistic cabana boy who spent twelve years of his life trying to read William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, only to die at the age of thirty-one while cleaning an Olympic-sized swimming pool with a small toilet brush, I realize that I will have to return my Bloggie Award for Lifetime Achievement While Staring at a Laptop.

I can accept this. I am a prevaricator and a married woman. I have deceived you. And I say again, without a jot of guilt, that I am, in fact, Ayelet Waldman and have been engaged in morose thoughts since 1995.

All this time, I thought I could make a solid living writing Mommy-Track Mysteries and have a quiet life of privilege contemplating the benefits of muesli. But when I started this blog and the other one, I got a little carried away. I couldn’t stop describing how good the sex was with Michael every time he came home from writing a comic book movie. You would too if you saw how nice his ass was. I think we can all agree that Pulitzer Prize winners, particularly ones that you’re married to, can make anyone feel all tingly.

Hopefully, this does not mean the end of Return of the Reluctant. My therapist has suggested that turning this weblog over to the Unitarian Universalists is a start. Dennis, a suicidal young man who first saw God in a pastrami sandwich, has agreed to step in as we all come to terms with the disturbing truth. I hope you can all invite Dennis into your lives as readily as you accepted “Dr. Mabuse.”