National Book Award-winning writer William T. Vollmann stunned the Penguin offices when he submitted a 22-page children’s book to Viking editor Paul Slovak this morning.

“It’s the shortest manuscript I’ve ever seen from Bill,” said Slovak, who also told reporters that editing this “would be a breeze.”

The book, entitled Shooting Guns at the Gnus, is also illustrated by Vollmann. Vollmann hoped that the book would encourage young children to start firing guns early, so that they could get a sense of “what it means to be free” at a very early age.

Parents bristled at Vollmann’s plans, claiming that he was taking advantage of his literary reputation to sully the pristine nature of the children’s book market. One organization, The Society for Safe Books, plans to picket the Penguin offices this morning, demanding that Penguin not publish anything even remotely offensive. None of the activists, however, had read the book in question.

Writer Neal Pollack, who found considerable success with his book, Alternadad, has decided to write nothing other than father-related essays through the end of his natural life.

“They keep paying me for this,” said Pollack. “So why spoil a good thing?”

It was previously thought that the demand for dad essays would run out sometime last year. But like the Hubbert peak theory, nobody really knows when it will happen.

The news came as James Howard Kuntsler announced that he was beginning work on a new polemical book called The Dad Emergency, which suggests that America is spiraling into an age where dad essays will run out and America will be left helpless, looking for reading material in the suburbs.

“There will come a time when people will be shooting each other in the parking lots of malls and roasting babies over a spigot because there aren’t enough dad essays to go around,” said Kunstler. “And not even Neal Pollack will be able to fill the demand.”

At the present time, there remain enough dad essays. Although the price of dad essays seems to be going up. Some gas stations have begun installing vending machines next to pumps to take these rising costs into account.

“On some days, the dad essays sell more than gallons of gas,” said Tony Primera, the 42-year-old owner of a Shell station outside Wyoming. “I’ve been toying with the idea of shifting to a dads-and-gas style business, but I’m beholden to the forces at Shell.”

Indeed, Shell has started to commission writers to write more dad essays, believing that selling dad essays with gas will make people forget that the price of gas is going up.

“Pollack was ahead of the curve on this,” said a Shell spokesman. “But we’ll smoke him out of the supply. Conglomeration is our specialty. And I think that we have a track record to back this up.”

Hot on the heels of the Litblog Co-Op’s disbandment, litbloggers decided to combine their collective malaise and stop blogging.

Bookbanger.com’s Gary Hesmith was the man who came up with the idea after experiencing peer pressure shortly after reading Remainder, which other litbloggers had gone crazy over. “I just wanted to type ‘Tom McCarthy is cool’ into Typepad, and even that sentence seemed too much time for me to commit to.”

Many litbloggers who stopped blogging had long wondered when the money would start showing up. They had remembered the magical dot com days, when cashes of money would often saunter into offices unannounced and someone would have the professional courtesy to deposit some of this into random bank accounts. These litbloggers figured that by sitting on their asses doing nothing, the dinero would arrive just in time for dinner.

But 1999 was a long time ago. And the dollar was in poor health against other currencies. So Hesmith decided that the only thing anybody could agree upon was that blogging was almost as hard as assembling a piece of IKEA furniture.

The moratorium on litblogging will remain in effect until someone gives these litbloggers money. Many of them moved into basements in Terre Haute.

“They laughed at me when I first said that,” said writer Richard Ford, who had made litbloggers very angry with remarks delivered to Motoko Rich. “But I was right the entire time.” Before I could ask Ford additional questions, he then cut the interview short, because he needed to find another talented African-American writer to spit on.

This Sunday, Rachel Donadio continued her regrettable declivity into the morass of embarrassing personal essays — the kind of writing once penned by Curtis Sittenfeld, before Sittenfeld wised up and stopped writing for the New York Times Book Review for good.

But this has not prevented literary experts from asking why Donadio, who is in her mid-thirties and really should know better, would bang out such remarkably judgmental tripe. (Sittenfeld was 31 when she wrote her essays.)

There is a sad but certain answer. Hard-pressed to answer this question, this hastily formed literary committee decided to take some initiative. They knocked on the door of Ms. Donadio’s apartment and discovered a woman — half-Sittenfeld, half-Donadio — who expressed a half-hearted desire to move to downtown Philadelphia. This committee reports that Curthel Sittenadio was looking around for two partially completed manuscripts: one named Ep, the other named The Man Of. The hope was to put these two books together and finally break out of the New York Times doldrums with a published novel that would sell.

But what happened was a merging of personalities that may prove to be inexorable. Scientists have been commissioned to bring the old Rachel Donadio back — the one who once worked at the New York Observer and who was, every so often, fun. But the physical and writing transmogrification may be permanent.

At a press conference attended by only three reporters*, Daniel Menaker announced that he is now slated to star in a new motion picture: The Karate Kid V: Titlepage. This represents the next step in what Menaker calls “the Titlepage evolution.”

“With Pat Morita dead, they’ve been trying to find an excuse to revive the franchise,” said Menaker. “I pitched them on a book-themed martial arts picture, and they went for it!”

Studio executives were taken with Menaker’s consistently black apparel. Menaker informed the executives that he had picked this idea up from Steven Seagal. Menaker took meetings. Contracts were then signed.

Menaker will play a new sensei — “an old war buddy of Mr. Miyagi’s” — who opens a dojo in Reseda and instructs teenagers to sit in uncomfortable chairs while cameras rapidly capture their bored expressions, while only one person at a time talks about books. Those who cannot fall in line with this stern routine will be given the crane kick.

Martin Kove will reprise his role as Kreese, who will take revenge on “all friends of Miyagi” and, in particular, any awkward television he has to endure just before fighting. John G. Avildsen, who expressed problems with the script, has reportedly demanded a minimum of $3.2 million to direct this film.

* — Once again, demonstrating that the newspaper book review crisis has been lost.