The tireless Robert Birnbaum is asking, er, "begging" some of his literary peeps for literary tidbits to add to his book digest page. This week, Chip Kidd tells him:
I just finished Thornton Wilder's epic novel "The Eighth Day," and my jaw is still on the floor. Even though it won the National Book Award in 1968, it was otherwise largely overlooked because it was so "out of step" with the counterculture era during which it was published. But it remains in print, thank God, and the Harper Perennial edition has a great introduction by John Updike.