I didn't witness anything at the National Book Awards anywhere near the levels of titillation Christopher Hitchens provided women and men (after winning over the crowd at Tuesday night's reading). About the juiciest gossip to float my way was a story about one of the evening's nominees having such an inflated sense of self-worth as to refuse a media escort a quarter for a parking meter in front of a bookstore where a drop-in signing was supposed to take place, on the grounds that it was the escort's job to cover expenses, not the author's. Unless you count the following...

So I spy National Book Award fiction nominee Joshua Ferris (left) talking to former winner Jonathan Franzen during the pre-ceremony reception, and when there's a lull in their conversation I re-introduce myself to Ferris, who confirms a bit of info I'd heard earlier that day about fellow nominee Jim Shepard being one of his writing teachers. "You spend an hour with Jim and you learn more than you would from some people in a year," Ferris enthused, adding that he really hoped Shepard would win the fiction category for his short story collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway. (When I caught up with Shepard a little later, and got him to sign my copy of the book, he recalled how his reaction to hearing the shortlist was excitement to learn about Ferris; we couldn't quite figure out if they were the first teacher-student pair to make the shortlist together in the fiction category, "but it has to have happened in the poetry category, right?" he mused.)

Then Ferris told me that just before we'd started talking, someone else who had managed to obtain a press pass to the ceremony had tried to take the piss out of him by doing their "interview" in the first person plural voice in which Then We Came to the End was written. ("Do we have any chances of winning the award tonight?" this guy asked. "You don't," Ferris retorted.) A little later into the reception, this same guy would attempt to establish a rapport with me by laughingly declaring, and I paraphrase, that Franzen was a jerk and that much merriment could be had by metaphorically poking at him with a stick. I was so caught off-guard by this unwelcome conversational sally that he was able to stroll off before I could ask how exactly verbally abusing a writer would be entertaining. Later consideration of the documentary evidence would suggest, unsurprisingly, that Franzen was in fact behaving quite civilly, perhaps even compassionately, considering the unprofessional and, quite frankly, toxic provocations to which he was subject.