Behold, the blurb that launched a thousand mocking blog posts: "Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it nothing can ever be the same..." Book blurbs: Old media's version of linkbaiting.
Oh, those crazy Safran Foer Krausses! We had almost managed to convince ourselves that they didn't matter anymore—after all, they've been too busy pooping out little scribblers to crank out any irritatingly overhyped books lately. But last night we heard this tidbit, from a source close to the writers, that made us feel the inadequacy of our lives and real estate holdings as sharply as we did when we first read of their acquisition of a $6.7 million Park Slope brownstone. Apparently, Nicole was recently asked why she and Jon found it necessary to move from their old house, a $3 millionish brownstone a block away. "Well," she said, "You know, we're planning to have at least two kids, and obviously we all need our own floor."
Yesterday, we asked you to choose your least favorite among the Jonathans, Bens and Davids of the literary world and their lovely writer-spouses. You voted for Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss by a pretty substantial margin, spanking runners-up Davendela and Michayelet. Nicole wins a signed copy of the execrable Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Jonathan will receive a signed copy of the 'we hear it's not bad but we have a deep-seated antipathy towards anything contemporary with 'Love' in the title which always strikes us as a marketing gimmick' The History of Love. The couple will also receive a free lifetime subscription to nonexistent UnderCover magazine as well as the privilege of being henceforth referred to as Jonicole. Unfortunately, we didn't include every lit-scene power pair in our poll; a commenter wrote in Salman and Padma (how could we forget her contribution to the canon, Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet?). But the omission we feel worst about has got to be this one:
For a long time, we've dreamt of a magazine called UnderCover, which would basically be Us Weekly but for literary "celebrities." The whole thing would be like "Jennifer Egan loses the baby weight!" and telephoto lens shots of Jonathan Franzen Safran Foer (admit it, you can't keep 'em all straight either) and Nicole Krauss's Park Slope manse. Sadly, the market could never sustain such a thing, but we figure the least we can do in order to keep the dream alive is to do a poll inspired by your response to our item about Heidi Julavitz yesterday. In it, we called Heidi and her dh, Ben Marcus, our "fourth least favorite literary power couple," and it got us to wondering: who's your fourth least favorite literary power couple? And while we're at it, who's your most least favorite l. p. c.? There is only one way to find out.
