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.

It’s good to see Yardley giving props to the new Broadway Comedies volume from Library of America. With its able collection of George Kaufman plays, it appears a must own for anyone interested in theatre and comedy. My only quibble with Yardley’s review is his strange suggestion that “there aren’t that many people under 60 who remember Groucho that clearly.” I beg to differ, given the Marx Brothers’ indelible imprint upon our cultural lexicon. But if Yardley is referring to theatre, given that Animal Crackers was staged a good 76 years ago and that Groucho didn’t appear on Broadway after, one wonders where Yardley’s hiding the keys to the time machine. Or does Washington Post Book World now cater to a nonagenarian (or perhaps a non-aging) demographic? Inquiring minds want to know, if only because the Weekly World News has stopped thinking.