Terry Gross: “I think radio is a great medium for someone who�s shy and self-conscious. It terrified me at first, really badly, but once I got over that, the nice thing about radio is that you are invisible, so any physical self-consciousness that I have is irrelevant when I’m on the radio. In terms of being shy, hey, I’m alone in a studio with producers in the control room, producers who I know really well, and I’m with a guest who probably isn’t even in the room with me. So I�m really operating in the realm of language and ideas.”

Well, for my money, Terry Gross needs to either interview more people like Gene Simmons (MP3) or have one hell of a lost weekend. She’d be a lot cooler if she expanded her realm. (via Jimmy Beck)

Holy shit!

Janet Maslin: “Honeymoons don’t get more hellish than the one that kicks off “The Falls,” Joyce Carol Oates’s thundering, sudsy Niagara of a novel.”

In light of the Times‘ recent Toni Bentley obsession, we’re wondering precisely what “thundering, sudsy Niagra” conjures up in other Times writers’ minds.

• The Davis Enterprise talks with local wunderkind Kim Stanley Robinson. The phrase “fried on automotive life” appears in the profile.
• Bernice Rubens has died. She was the second novelist to win the Man Booker Prize for fiction.
• Time dares to tackle Graham Greene, with a header about as bad as a knock-knock joke.
• Carol Shields’ Unless is now a play.
• Some dirt on Elmore Leonard’s new book, “I’m almost finished with a new book in which one of the characters is the son of an oil millionaire in Oklahoma in the 1930s, and he decides that he wants to be Public Enemy No. 1, like the bank robber John Dillinger. This guy doesn’t see what’s wrong with that and, like a lot of people, he doesn’t think he’s going to be held accountable.”

• Chinua Achebe has rejected one of Africa’s most prestigious literary awards, protesting the dangerous state of Nigeria.
• Playboy, sensing the final nail about to be hammered into its now culturally irrelevant coffin, opens the Playboy Club again after a twenty year hiatus. The venue? Las Vegas, of course.
• Susanna Clarke dares to call herself “the new black.” (Get on ’em, Hag)
• Everybody’s favorite Birnbaum talks with Jon Lee Anderson.
• Annamarie Jagose has won the Victoria Premier Literary Award for a novel set when homosexuality was a capital offense.
• The Chronicle writes up Litquake.
• William Hill on Cloud Atlas’ chances of winning the Booker: “I have been setting the odds for the Booker for over twenty years and this book has been more hotly fancied than any other.”
• Forget Good-Franz, Bad-Franz. Rake better get hopping on the two V.S. Naipuls.
• The Seattle Times follows up with Sergio Witz Rodriquez and his infamous 21-line poem.