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My most recent book, One Nation, Under God, is now available in paperback. If you’ve been worried about the state of the beleaguered book-publishing industry, buying books is the perfect bailout: unlike your assistance to Wall Street, you’ll actually get something in return for your money. Even better, I promise not to give myself a multi-million-dollar bonus at the end of the year.

As always, I urge you to support your neighborhood bookstore. (After-Words, The Book Cellar, and Fact & Fiction are three excellent choices.) If you’re one of those unlucky people without a neighborhood bookstore, buy it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Powell’s. Your purchase is a vote of confidence for the continued production of quality American fiction by yours truly.

Weeding a stack of papers and articles the other day, I came across something I’d clipped from the November 2007 Atlantic. In “The Future of the American Idea,” the magazine’s editors asked various contributors to share extremely concise thoughts on, well, the future of the “American Idea.” Some were good, some were bad–the whole exercise seemed a little stagey–but David Foster Wallace hit it out of the park in “Just Asking“:

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Yet another reason to miss Wallace.

My Fellow Americans received a very nice mention as one of Rick Roche’s “Books That Matter 2008.” Finding my name on a list that includes Sherman Alexie, Kurt Vonnegut, Nathan Englander, and Jhumpa Lahiri makes me swell with pride. Thanks, Rick!

Over lunch I read Juan Villoro’s short story, “Mariachi,” which will be published in February in Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Dalkey Archive).

It. Is. Hilarious.

It’s not too rare that I read a story I wish I’d written myself–but I rarely wish I could steal it and put it in my own in-progress collection. Villoro doesn’t seem to have been translated into English much, but I’m hoping to find more.

My dear friend Allen, who I miss a lot, was invited to go sailing on Long Island Sound (hard G, please). He sent me this photo, captioned, “what the well-appointed luxury sailing yacht wears on its navigation table.”

I love it.

So, if you happen to be in Western Montana this weekend, come to Missoula for the Montana Festival of the Book. It looks like it’s going to be a good one. I will be in exceptionally good company, as you can see:

Friday, October 24
2:30 p.m.
Crime Pays Panel
w/Peter Bowen, Alafair Burke, Craig Johnson, and Neil McMahon
Holiday Inn Ballroom A/B

Saturday, October 25
2:30 p.m.
Reading
w/Neil McMahon and Craig Johnson
Holiday Inn Yellowstone/Glacier

You can find the full schedule of events here.

I meant to post this sooner, but what with Bouchercon and all, it’s been a busy week. Long story short: my short story, “Untitled,” was the second runner-up in the “Chicago Crime Writers Competition,” sponsored by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Time Out Chicago, and Intelligentsia. The first round was judged by Vintage Books editorial staff, and Michael Harvey (The Chicago Way, 2007; The Fifth Floor, 2008) ranked the finalists with help from TOC’s books editor, Jonathan Messinger.

A longer version of “Untitled” exists–much, much longer–but the contest rules capped story length at 3,000 words and I figured that a pair of scissors never hurt anything (except, of course, the eyes of running children who ignore their mothers’ admonitions).

Check out the first runner-up, “Still Life,” by Lori Rader-Day, and the winner, “The Cutting,” by Chad Sanborn, too!

Marshal Zeringue, the one-man army behind the Campaign for the American Reader, asked me to apply the Page 69 Test to One Nation, Under God. Though he has a very impressive list of test-takers, for a little while I wondered what, other than a nice link-back, could result from examining a single page out of context.

To find out, I launched my book launch party with a reading of page 69 and received an enthusiastic response. Then I mulled it over and wrote a short post for the Page 69 Test blog. Nothing earth-shaking, but it is fun to think about what any single page does or doesn’t say about the work as a whole. I still have unanswered questions, though: why did Marshall McLuhan, the test’s creator, choose page 69 in particular? Was he feeling frisky? And was Marshal Zeringue fated to carry out McLuhan’s notion due to a shared (almost) first name?

Or was McLuhan making fun of Ford Madox Ford’s Page 99 Test?

Please sign up for my mailing list. I can’t guarantee you’ll win a prize, but I can’t guarantee that you won’t, either. And I’ll treat your precious e-mail address as if it were my very own.

(I don’t mean that I’ll sign my e-mails with your address–you know what I mean.)

I’ll be talking with Rick Kogan on “Sunday Papers” this Sunday, September 28, from 8:30-9 a.m. Central time. If you’re in the Greater Chicagoland area, that’s 720 AM on the dial (your radio does have a dial, doesn’t it?)–if you’re farther afield, you can listen online.

Hope you can tune in. Rick, besides being an institution in Chicago journalism, is one of the best book-panel moderators I’ve ever seen. If he can’t make me sound interesting, I don’t know who can. Although I promise to try to make me sound interesting, too.