Sometimes, the future is right in front of your face. Three years ago, there was a different n+1 (the most important literary journal of our time) dude publishing a much-vaunted, yet sorely disappointing first novel featuring immature young men fumbling their way with tragically smart women who are only with them due to the startling lack of suitable males in New York. It was Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision. This weekend, a reader snapped a photo of it at Barnes and Noble in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on fire-sale at the "Under $5" table... next to Michael Crichton. (Click to enlarge.)

In tomorrow's Times Book Review, 2005's it-novelist Ben Kunkel reviews Everett True's Nirvana: The Biography. Though there's no doubting Kunkel's competence in the relevant literature — apparently, Heavier than Heaven is "badly marred" by the influence of she-devil Courtney Love and Come as You Are "scants [the band members'] backgrounds" — one wonders if Kurt Cobain is really the super-sensitive misunderstood wünderkind in question here:

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.

Katherine Taylor is afraid of being considered a writer of chick lit ["Farrar Thinks Pink," Spencer Morgan, The New York World, March 12]. To establish her seriousness, she tells The Observer that my novel Indecision "was ridiculously simple" and suggests that "had it been a girl who'd written it, it would have had the pinkest cover in the world." I wonder why, if Ms. Taylor feels like that, she allowed her editor to send me the galleys of her novel, asking for a blurb. I didn't provide one—though I read enough of Ms. Taylor's book to understand her anxiety about being taken seriously.

Benjamin Kunkel
Manhattan

As you trudge to your thankless job some wet mornings, don't you yearn for those days of sitting around in a too-warm classroom and pretending that talking about total bullshit constituted some kind of important work, as long as you managed some references to encoded signifiers and diff rance and used the word "problematize" a lot? Well, uh, we do. Which is why the bullshitty discussion of the new vs. old Payless logo in the new issue of n+1 (disputed book-hottie Ben Kunkel's lit mag) gave us a warm and fuzzy feeling, even as it annoyed us as all things asssociated with n+1 must. Specifically, there was this one part of n+1's interview with "commerical semiotician" A. S. Hamrah that we think probably wouldn't have sat well with our 'Engendering Gender: The Semiotics of Postfeminism' professor:

In last year's hypedest literary debut, Indecision, there's a part that the Kunk wrote when he was totally high that goes,

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."