Ben Kunkel's Indecisiveness Alienates Wealthy Patroness
Think you're so cool for thanking MacDowell or Yaddo in your acknowledgments? Peasant. Guess you didn't pass muster with Baronessa Beatrice (Be-uh-TREE-chay, you idiot) Monti, who invites a select group of young, book-hot literary lights every year to her luxurious villa, so that they might amuse her with their witty conversation and bad table manners (and, presumably, write or whatever). Staying there is free, of course, but it does have its price: you have to listen to an old lady yammer away at you about all the famous people she's ever met, entertained, been a muse to, played tennis with, or, like, thought about. One book-hottie who couldn't take it: last year's most overhyped debut novelist, Ben Kunkel. The Kunk gets back a little bit of the respect that we lost for him after reading the latter half of his book/any article in his lit mag by peaceing out of the villa before he was "excused."
"It must be the mosquitos!" Beatrice is quoted as saying. Personally, we'd rather be bitten repeatedly by a swarm of them than be forced to write an ode to a room in an old lady's mansion ("[Gary] Shteyngart recently completed a piece on the Tower's bathroom") but then, that's just us. Us and our silly (and, needless to say, completely untested) 'artistic integrity' thing.
