While I still harbor considerable doubts about Sam Tanenhaus’s abilities to cover literary fiction with any degree of range or (here’s the key quality) humor, it is nevertheless good to see the services of one Mark Sarvas employed, deflecting attention from other decidedly less robust contributors.

My profile of Lionel Shriver can be found in today’s Chicago Sun-Times.

A year after Marisha Pessl became the Hot Young and Overeducated Literary Chick with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Galleycat reports that there’s a new Hot Young and Overeducated Literary Chick in the making named Rivka Galchen, who has a book called Atmospheric Disturbances and Other Sad Meteorological Phenomena.

Call me crazy, but there’s a title trend here, which I suppose would make this blog post a “trend piece” or perhaps a “trend blog post.” Since I am a philanthropist and I greatly desire to see more women in literary fiction, I hope to help all future Hot Young and Overeducated Literary Chicks get their book deals. With this spirit in mind, I have assembled a helpful list of future titles that might be used to acquire additional book deals:

Naughty Novelties in Quantum Mechanics
Geophysical Undercurrents in Close Proximity
Seismic Shifts and Other Assorted Miracles on the San Andreas Fault
Astronomical Gastronomy and the Burden of Astral-Intestinal Alignments
Zoological Bliss in the Existential Biosphere
Newton’s Ventricles and Ancillary Universal Gravitations
Metaphysical Heartbeats and the Critique of Pure Reason