Betting on the Tournament of Books

The Morning News Tournament of Books is alive and kicking. The truly strangest choice, however, was Danny Gregory’s endorsement of I Am Charlotte Simmons over Wake Up, Sir! “Slither slither” over a playful Wodehouse homage?

Well, nobody said this was perfect.

But since people seem to be betting on the results and we’ve recently been applying “thin-slicing” to nearly every aspect of our lives (to say nothing of our ignoble yet inconclusive efforts to get the inside dirt from the honorably recalcitant Mark Sarvas), if we were betting men, we expect Susanna Clarke to get deservedly flogged. We also believe that Jessa Crispin will say no to Cloud Atlas. Because heaven forfend that a damn fine novel get widespread recognition. We also predict that Maud will side with The Plot Against America.

So if our educated guesses make you a small fortune, you know where to send the 10%. And that concludes our Meyer Lansky moment of the year.

An Apology

I’d like to take the opportunity to personally apologize for the “Fuck you, crack open David’s skull and chug some blood” message that had appeared here for a few weeks. To be perfectly candid, I don’t know who David is, nor do I have any desire to crack open anybody’s skull, much less imbibe blood at a kegger.

Like other authors, the original plan was to leave a mysterious, yet profane message in reaction to all the angry Indians who had crashed this site. I was feeling morose that the usual publicity I got for this site had backfired. And I had briefly considered a one week experimental period as a vampire.

Unfortunately, to my great surprise, I discovered that I did actually enjoy the sunshine and that I did not burst into flames when I left my apartment. I was so pissed off at my failure that I decided to leave the message.

I still don’t exactly know what to do with this site. I’ve thought of donating it to the orphans. Perhaps they can come over and apply their box of Crayolas to my monitor.

Reason #4,762 Why Laura Miller is Incompetent and Has No Imagination

Salon: H.P. Lovecraft is “a hack,” “literature’s greatest bad writer,” “not very scary” (has she even read “The Rats in the Walls” or the Cthulu stories?), Cthulu as “an unpronounceable name,” “Cthulu isn’t scary,” “camp,” “purple prose,” relying desperately on Joyce Carol Oates’ asseessment of “The Colour Out of Space” when she obviously despises Howard’s groove, “hasn’t the psychological acuity,” and not “wholesome at all.”