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Monday, March 31, 2003

Emotions Wet dreams

If you want to get shocked and awed by mail, ask New York Press readers who they hate.
Joyce Carol Oates invented this Jewish mother's wet dream in a Princeton laboratory, and now we have to live in a world where eager-to-please frauds like Foer receive unearned comparisons to geniuses like Burgess and Joyce. Continuing a disturbing recent literary trend, his overhyped, cutesy first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, features a fictional protagonist whose name is Jonathan Safran Foer. Incidentally, most of us get along just fine with a mere two names, dick.
· Eager to Please [NYPress]
(Disclaimer: We used to compile a similar list under communism; Politicians like Husak won every time)