On the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" Anthology: Attack of the Dinner Party Zombies!

So I’ve been swamped with work the last few days, not to mention trying to decide what Christmas presents to give family members who fall into the Seriously Irritating category (Ah, festive cheer!), but I have managed to review The New Yorker‘s new anthology, 20 Under 40, which is billed, partly, as The Future of American Fiction. (Here let Santa say, “Oy.”) Many of the stories were quite good, and I’ll gladly single out Chris Adrian’s “The Warm Fuzzies” and Joshua Ferris’s “The Pilot” as two of my favorites. Too many of them seemed reminiscent of that blast from the past, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Oh, the horror of a dinner party gone wrong! Oh, the agony of our child getting rejected by the tony preschool! Where is Robin Leach when you need him? Nicole Krauss takes the cake when describing a successful writer (not her, no, seriously) who walks around the Village looking in bookstores to see if they’re stocking copies of her book and displaying them sufficiently to contribute to her self-esteem.
This other little tidbit caught my eye, on MSNBC: Those dastardly dastards at Wikileaks have now promised we’re going to get the dirt on UFOs in diplomatic cables:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40491489/ns/us_news-wikileaks_in_security/
I can’t wait. Seriously. I’ll probably have a dinner party to celebrate.