In the basement of Lower East Side dive bar Lolita last night, a capacity crowd gathered to hear Kunkel-feuding debut novelist Katherine Taylor and elven-eared omnipresence The Reverend Jen debate each other. It was a lot like debate team in high school! Actually, no, it wasn't. But you know what high school thing it was exactly like, and what certain gatherings of the poor, artsy thirtysomethings who are managing to remain Lower East Siders so often resemble? That group of goth nerd drama geeks who always ate lunch together in that one certain corner of the courtyard. You know. The heavyset girls with black lipstick and ripped fishnets who would occasionally burst into Sondheim and the pasty boys who had just recently discovered that dark sunglasses and long hair can make acne scars seem sort of mysterious and romantic? Like that, but plus 20 years. Also plus Moby.

Not-chick-lit debut novelist Katherine Taylor laughs and shrugs off Ben Kunkel's snippy letter to the Observer, in which he responded to her assessment of his book Indecision as "ridiculously simple" by revealing that he declined to blurb her book but read enough of it "to understand her anxiety about being taken seriously." She tells Time Out: "I certainly didn't mean to insult him. The irony of that whole situation is that a word like simple was too complex for Mr. Kunkel to appreciate." Ha! Oh dear God, please let her book be good.

We so wanted to dislike debut novelist Katherine Taylor. Rules For Saying Goodbye was hyped as "invoking the spirit of Melissa Bank and Curtis Sittenfeld" in the announcement that it had sold to FSG, and it's rumored to be Starbucks' next pick. Oh, and: "It's hard, when you're blond and attractive and you live in Los Angeles and you've written a book about young women in New York, not to be called 'chick lit,'" she told the Observer's Spencer Morgan. Oooh, bitch! But wait... do we hate her? Maybe she's just being honest. Regardless, she does at least seem to understand the genre's conventions: "'Indecision [by Benjamin Kunkel] was ridiculously simple, I thought,' she said. 'And had it been a girl who'd written it, it would have had the pinkest cover in the world. It would have been the pinkest of all-time pink covers.'" Did we say we hated her? We might just have to buy a few hundred copies.