“I have the worst idea for a book! It’s the single-worst idea for a book I’ve ever had,” Lydia Millet told her friend and fellow author Jenny Offill. “See, there’s a baby. And God speaks through it! It’s a terrible idea, isn’t it? I can’t wait to write it.”

Offill, Millet recalls in an interview with Bethanne Patrick, “encouraged me. That’s what friends are for.”

Sad to hear that Jim Harrison died Saturday. As Margalit Fox writes in the New York Times, his “lust for life — and sometimes just plain lust — roared into print in a vast, celebrated body of fiction, poetry and essays that with ardent abandon explored the natural world, the life of the mind and the pleasures of the flesh.”

Where is the line the between literature and life? Between identity and performance? Between style and substance? Is there a line at all?

At a time when the phrase “literary event” is a quaint anachronism (see Vargas Llosa’s Notes on the Death of Culture), a new novel from Jonathan Franzen may be as close as book lovers can come these days to tweezing a piece of the nation’s attention.

Top Ten contributor Valerie Martin receives a warm review from Sylvia Brownrigg for her career-spanning collection of stories, Sea Lovers: Selected Stories, in the New York Times Book Review.

Just two weeks after Amanda Filipacchi placed The Blazing World atop her list, we are proud to welcome its author, Siri Hustvedt (hoost-ved) to Top Ten Land.

She debuted with a funny and altogether winning novel that includes an 11 year-old girl’s seduction of a 29 year-old man (Nude Men, 1993). She followed that with the darkly humorous, tale of a young woman who is transformed from drama school dropout to Oscar winner with a little help from a man who imprisons her in his cloud-filled home Vapor (1999).

Sure, we could drop some giddy adjectival s-bombs and f-bombs (but never c-bombs) to express our delight. Instead we’ll just say aye, aye, min to our 166th member of Top Ten Land, Irvine Welsh.

Stephen King is in the news for at least two reasons this week. First, a prison break in upstate New York seems almost an homage to his terrific novel, The Shawshank Redemption, with a twist – in real life, the bad guys really are bad.

This week’s New York Times Book Review offers a Top Ten two-fer as Tom Perrotta reviews Kate Akinson’s new novel, A God in Ruins. (Although our contributors gather often for spirits at the Top Ten Country Club and share days at sea on the Top Ten Yacht (the S.S. Doorstopper), Kate and Tom have never done so together, so there is no conflict of interest.)