THE LITERARY BLOGGER

Average age

30 Natural habitat

Creative Limbo A graduate of the Creative Writing program at Columbia, the literary blogger had one novella published by a second-rate publisher in the U.K. in 2002. The book sold 60 copies.

Of course, the Literary Blogger has also written a novel, a postironic epic set in “hipster” Brooklyn (quotation marks his), a borough the LB describes as an “ontological shtetl for the soulless.” His agent has not been able to sell it, and the LB, who likes the words “my agent” a whole lot and regularly throws in “yeah, he’s Jonathan Safran Foer’s agent, too” is now “thinking of getting a new agent.”

Now it’s the agent of the latest “hot young author,” Benjamin Kunkel, that he wants. Indeed, even though the LB is a terrible fiction writer, he may, in fact, be able to get Kunkel’s agent because the LB’s blog, which is linked to other lit blogs of note, has been on a four-week bashing spree of Kunkel (first posting: “Benjamin Kunkel: The Future of Fiction or Hair Gel Model?”), and it’s gotten the LB column inches in New York magazine.

“His agent will take me,” admits the Literary Blogger, “because he wants to shut me up.” (The tactic certainly worked with J. S. Foer’s agent, who needed to snip an extended Foer-hating thread that began with the posting: “ Jonathan Safran Foer — Neocon or Weenie?”)

Although he has the persona for bon-vivantism, he spends 90% of every week in his Williamsburg basement apartment tending to his site, which he still insists is “just a hobby.”

Petrified of turning 30, the LB fears that if his novel is not published by then, he will have missed the sell-by date of Hot Young Authorism, and he may wind up being remembered as that guy who once got into a fistfight with Jonathan Ames at a PEN party for Bret Easton Ellis.