Excellent news. I’m in awe of the wit and dash in Keenan’s books, and interviewed him when the one he’s being nominated for, Lucky Star, was published. Though I bow to co-finalist Merrill Markoe, Keenan’s got my emphatic endorsement; these are spicily, sharply (hey, a cinnamon stick could be both) funny novels.

Which reminds me, in part because both writers are hilarious and gay, but mostly because I discovered them at the same time, that I recently read the newest Stephen McCauley novel, Alternatives to Sex. It’s great. The Object of My Affection, the movie with Jennifer Aniston and an especially toothsome Paul Rudd, was based on McCauley’s novel of the same name, and when I say based on, I mean loosely based on; read the book. It’s an endearing movie (I especially like the scene in which literary agent Alan Alda, fainting in the heat of a Brooklyn walk-up, asks for something to fan himself with and cries, “Get me a magazine! Get me The New Yorker!”), but by all means read the book.

Speaking of awards, today Tina Brown was named to the Magazine Editors Hall of Fame.

Finally, here’s a mini-tribute to the clever, convivial, and career-creating Franklin P. Adams. Alliteration is all right with me in certain contexts, and, fortunately, this is one of them.