First, the roster of the silver medal-winning US Men’s Olympic Hockey Team includes MVP goalie Ryan Miller, defensemen Ryan Suter and Ryan Whitney, and forwards Ryan Kessler, Ryan Malone, Ryan Callahan, Ryan Kesler and Bobby Ryan; I don’t know if Coach Peter Laviolette was ever whistled for too many Ryans on the ice, but he could have been. Then George Colloney was nominated for an Oscar for playing a character in Up in the Air named Ryan Bingham, and then a guy actually named Ryan Bingham actually won an Oscar for writing the Best Song for Crazy Heart. Capping this frenzy of Ryanism, my friend Ryan D’Agostino, the distinguished editor from Esquire magazine and the accomplished author of the book Rich Like Them, visited my class at Marymount Manhattan College on Monday, and simply dazzled the students. Thanks, Ryan!

The Writing Center of Marymount Manhattan College celebrated its 17th anniversary with a dinner at Doubles in the Sherry Netherland on Wednesday night, and thanks to El Directore, Lewis Burke Frumkes, I got to attend. Among the others present were Bruce Jay Friedman (who told me a funny story about how he hired Mario Puzo over Arthur Kretchmer to work at the pulp fiction he once ran), Patty Marx, Molly Haskell (whom talked to me more about Gone With The Wind, which I had seen her discuss at the Jacob Burns Center in January), Hilma Wolitzer (that’s Molly and Hilma, pictured), Malachy McCourt and Judith Kelman. The Writing Center repeated its lovely custom of inscribing the names of all the writers present in icing on a cake (I’m there somewhere on the upper left.) During dinner I sat between Hilma (author of the novels Hearts, The Doctor’s Daughter and Tunnel of Love) and Judith, author of the novels The Session, More Than You Know and The First Stone), and they regaled me with stories of the writing life in the seventies and eighties, when publishing houses would send writers on book tours to exotic places like Seattle and Australia, and the paperback rights to books would be auctioned for fantastic sums, and and editors would arrive in limos to take writers to lunch at restaurants that were just two blocks away. Drool. “Now all I want is to be able to work,” said Hilma. So say we all.

Oscars are amusing, Olympics are fun, but for a good solid laugh, give me the competition for the Diagram Prize, the award presented annually to the Oddest Book Title of the Year. The shortlist of nominees for this year’s prize, which has been awarded for the past 32 years by the British trade publication The Bookseller, has just been announced. Readers should feel free to conclude whether any of these titles measures up to the standard set by previous winners, such as If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs; Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers; and last year’s memorable champion, The 2009–2014 World Outlook for 60mg Containers of Fromage Frais, by Professor Philip M. Parker. And whether or not you feel this is a sign of progress, the number of entries in the competition is dramatically on the rise, with this year’s 90 entries nearly tripling last year’s 32.

Here are this year’s nominees:

* David Crompton’s Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter (Glenstrae Press)
* James A Yannes’ Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich (Trafford)
* Daina Taimina’s Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes (A K Peters)
* Ronald C Arkin’s Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots (CRC Press)
* Ellen Scherl and Maria Dubinsky’s The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (SLACK Inc)
* Tara Jansen-Meyer’s What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua? (Mirror)

Go to www.thebookseller.com to vote for your favorite. The winner will be announced on 26th March.

In 2008 a young poet named T.A. Noonan conducted interviews with Stacy Morrison, who is the editor-in-chief of Redbook, and with me, in my capacity as Managing Editor of Playboy, on the topic of fiction in magazines. Ms. Noonan has run the results on her website, which is called Delirious Hem. The results, I think, are pretty funny. I’m glad she picked me, and I thank her.

There was a fascinating story in The Telegraph last week about a new book and a new film in France that alleges that the legenday novelist Alexander Dumas, left, author of The Three Muskateers and The Count of Monte Christo and other fabulous, fantastic stories of the 18th and 19th century, benefited enormously from having a ghost writer–indeed, a ghost writer who may well have done the lion’s share of creative work. Claude Schopp, France’s leading Dumas expert, says in a book to be released next month that Auguste Jules Maquet , below, was the man who actually came up with the plot for the trilogy featuring Porthos, Athos, Aramis. and d’Artagnan.

Says The Telegraph: “In the 1830s, Maquet, a novelist and playwright, had tried to have his works published but was told: “You have written a masterpiece, but you’re not a name and we only want names.” Another writer, Gérard de Nerval put him in touch with Dumas and asked the already famous author if he would rework one of Maquet’s plays, which was subsequently published. Soon afterwards, Dumas, a bon vivant who consistently spent more than he earned, fled his French creditors for Florence. There, he asked Maquet if he would let him publish one of his novels in serial form. Dumas renamed it Le Chevalier d’Harmental and it was published in 1841, signed only Alexandre Dumas. This was to be the start of a hugely fruitful literary partnership. Maquet would come up with the plots and historical backdrop and Dumas would embellish and expand on the story in his flamboyant style. . . .Dumas would pay Maquet handsomely and reap the glory.”

No fool, Dumas got Maquet to waive ownership of the work. In 1858, the pair fell out over money, which the debt-ridden Dumas owed his ghost writer. “Maquet took him to court three times, asking not just for money but recognition. During one court case, an editor at Le Siècle, a newspaper that serialised Dumas’ works, sent a letter to Maquet backing up his claims. He recounted how an episode of the Vicomte de Bragelonne which was due to be published in his paper had gone missing the day it was due to be printed. Dumas was unavailable so Maquet was contacted. By midnight he had rewritten the episode, which was published. When, the following day, the Dumas “rewritten” text was found, “only 30 words from 500 lines were not absolutely the same”. Despite such support, the court ordered Maquet financial compensation but rejected his demands to be recognised as co-author.”

And to this day, Dumas gets the credit. Most of it. On Maquet’s tombstone in Paris’ Père-Lachaise cemetery are engraved The Three Musketeers, the Count of Monte Cristo and La Reine Margot. Dumas’ remains, of course, were recently tranferred to the Pantheon, the Paris mausoleum where France’s greats are interred.

The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, by Duquesne law professor Ken Gormley, appears more than a decade after the sex-and-real estate scandal called Whitewater ebbed out, but even though Gormley does a fine job in retelling the tale, by the time the reader wades through the nearly 700 pages of bad judgments and self-serving decisions committed by Bill Clinton, Kenneth Starr, and the many colorful supporting players who populate this sad drama, a sickening cringe has resettled on the reader’s shoulders. Ten years turns out to be not nearly enough time at all.

It’s hard to review Clinton’s many tawdry escapades. Today we’re mocking John Edwards for his deceptions and delusions in trying to campaign for president and cover over his embarrassing relationship with Rielle Hunter. But Clinton did it, and obviously got away with it. More important, he got away with violating his path of office, in which he swore `to faithfully execute the laws.” Well, when you lie under oath, you commit perjury, and that’s a violation of his oath. He ought to have resigned.

But he ought not to have been driven out. The simple truth is that there were people who were out to get Clinton, who denied that he was a legitimate president and who sought his ouster. And their vicious campaign to drive him from office constituted a kind of coup.

It was an ugly time. Gormley does a fair and reasonable job of recreating the story, and his interviews with many of the subjects are thoughtful and enlightening. There are even times when Gormley even manages to enlarge our understanding of this well-reported story, as in his account of the day the Special Prosecutor and the FBI detained Monica Lewinsky in an exercise of that is at once farcical and harrowing. Many readers will enjoy this book, but I wouldn’t advise them to wander far from a shower.

I’m a little surprised by the wave of acclaim that has buoyed Game Change onto the top of the bestsellers’ list. The book was written by Mark Halperin, whose excellent work a few years ago on ABC News’s The Note revolutionized political coverage, and by John Heileman. Halperin now writes for Time; Heilemann, for New York magazine, and much has been made of the amount of shoe leather reporting these two undertook in interviewing 300 or so people for this book about the 2008 elections. It’s true that they uncovered lots of inside stuff, but I am not sure that it amounts to much. The much-discussed Harry Reid comment about Obama being light-skinned and speaking without a Negro dialect comes and goes in the story with so little consequence that I rather suspect that without the aid of tub-thumping publicist, the remark would have passed virtually unnoticed. What else? We learn that everyone in politics says fuck a lot. We get chapter and verse on the rivalries inside Hillary Clinton’s high command, but the number of people who care about the antics of these high school student council nerds (with one exception, to come) could fit in the palm of Chris Matthews’ hand. We learn that Elizabeth Edwards isn’t really nice and that John Edwards really isn’t decent, but the woman is dying and the guy is destroyed, and so there’s only so much pleasure to be gained from watching their immolation. There may be much that is new, as in not previously reported, but there is little that changes our views about people. Stlll, some good nuggets. “Jim Wilkinson, a longtime Republican operative, served as [Hank] Paulson’s chief of staff during the [financial] crisis, an his impression of the candidates could hardly have been clearer. “I’m a pro-life, pro-gun, Texas Republican,’’ says Wilkinson. “I worked all eight years for Bush. I helped sell the Iraq war. I was in the Florida recount. And I wrote a letter to John McCain asking for my five hundred dollar contribution back when he pulled that stunt and came back to D.C. Because it just wasn’t what a serious person does.’ To him amazement, Wilkinson determined that he would be voting for Obama.’’

What’s most weird is that the writers fail to extract a sense of drama from the most dramatic election in years. Obama moves through book unchanged, an amazingly composed and charismatic figure who rises to every occasion. The country’s plunge into a desperate financial crisis just weeks before the election becomes just another plot point. Obama aces the test, McCain chokes, but for all their interviews, the authors never deliver what was going on inside the heads of the candidates at this crucial moment.

One very odd thing: the authors devote two pages to an interview with Mark Penn, the widely disliked campaign guru whom many blame for Hillary Clinton’s strategic blunders in positioning herself and creating her message. (To be fair, many blame, and many are blamed, and there is much blame to go around.) But here Penn relates a personal conversation with Clinton in which she largely exonerates Penn. “It was just dysfunctional, and I take responsibility for that,’’ he quotes her as saying, before going on to say that the campaign was probably unwinnable anyway, and—here’s the grabber—that Penn’s rival Patti Solis Doyle was “a disaster’’ who “was in over her head.’’ Penn allows that Hillary told him that he rubbed people the wrong way and should seek therapy. Still, it’s an amazing example of self-serving and largely uncheckable quote that plops into the book virtually undigested.

J.D. Salinger, whom Stephen King today rightfully called “the last of the great post-World War II novelists,” died Thursday in New Hampshire at 91. Most people played up the legacy of The Catcher in the Rye, its great teenage narrator, its definitive postwar voice, its eternal first sentence (“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”) But I’ll always take Franny and Zooey. Here’s the ending:

I remember about the fifth time I ever went on ‘Wise Child,’ Zooey tells Franny over the phone.
I subbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast—remember when he was in that cast? Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again—all the years you and I were on the pro- gram together, if you remember. I don’t think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and—I don’t know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.”
Franny was standing. She had taken her hand away from her face to hold the phone with two hands. “He told me, too,” she said into the phone. “He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once.” She released one hand from the phone and placed it, very briefly, on the crown of her head, then went back to holding the phone with both hands. “I didn’t ever picture her on a porch, but with very-you know-very thick legs, very veiny. I had her in an awful wicker chair. She had cancer, too, though, and she had the radio going full-blast all day! Mine did, too!”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. All right. Let me tell you something now, buddy. . . .Are you listening?”
Franny, looking extremely tense, nodded.
“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”
For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands. For a fullish half minute or so, there were no other words, no further speech. Then: “I can’t talk any more, buddy.” The sound of a phone being replaced in its catch followed.
Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers. When she had replaced the phone, she seemed to know just what to do next, too. She cleared away the smoking things, then drew back the cotton bedspread from the bed she had been sitting on, took off her slippers, and got into the bed. For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.

Many years ago, Walter Kirn worked in the cubicle next to me at Spy, and he was a most entertaining neighbor (in fact, Walter was succeeded by Jim Collins and then by Larry Doyle. On the other side, I had Joanne Gruber. Spy provided me with tremendous neighbors.) During Walter’s short tenure, we spent pretty much the first half hour of every day talking over the wall, and because Walter lived a very different life than mine–he was literary, and a drinker, and a midwestern Mormon Princetonian, and in the process of divorcing his pretty English wife–I found him endlessly fascinating. Plus he always had interesting stuff to say, like whether everybody in the world could be divided into digital and analog camps. There was a day, or maybe more than one day, when Walter came in and expounded on airport life, on how all the things you do there are different than what you do in real life. You eat food you never eat anywhere else and read USA Today, which you never read anywhere else, and read novels that you don’t read anywhere else. He went on and on. I Wish I remembered his riffs more exactly, because they were so smart and funny, and because this one, no doubt, became his novel Up in the Air. Which, I confess, I have not read, but which inspired a movie that I saw last night, and which I admired very much (even though the movie does not contain the novel’s best line, “Fast friends aren’t my only friends, but they’re my best friends.” There was much to like, mostly the rather sad and unsparing ending to which the film builds. My favorite moment, though, came in a scene that takes place at a meeting. All of the road warriors, of which George Clooney is one of the best, have been gathered by their boss Jason Bateman, and there, sitting at table next to George, playing one of the road warriors, is Walter. They are watching video of someone being fired, and the person doing the firing says to the displaced worker “Anybody who ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you are now. And it’s because they sat there that they were able to do it.” It’s a line George spoke earlier in the film, and at that moment, a disgruntled George turns to Walter and says “That’s my line! I came up with that!” or words to that effect. I like that–the actor telling the original writer “That’s my line! I came up with that!” I know for a fact where the whole thing originated. Congratulations, Walter!

From Art Director Richard Weigand, a love letter to writers on the cover of Esquire’s 40th anniversary issue in October 1973, showing contributors John Kenneth Galbraith, Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Alan Arthur, Murray Kempton, John Updike, William Styron, Gay Talese, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Philip Roth, Dwight Macdonald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, John O’Hara, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Irwin Shaw, Richard H. Rovere, Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, Peter Bogdanovich, Garry Wills, Richard Joseph, Leon Trotsky, Ralph Ellison, Tennessee Williams, Malcolm Muggeridge, Sinclair Lewis, Gore Vidal, John Sack, Arnold Gingrich, John Dos Passos, Thomas Berger, John Cheever, Laurence Stallings. My heroes, more or less.