It’s probably evidence of my bad character that this amuses me so (or maybe it’s the photo). “Deborah Schoeneman reports that Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist) at a Poets & Writers party, having nursed a grudge for two years over Whitehead’s negative New York Times review of A Multitude of Sins.”

Author Ford explained to Powell’s that the problem was that “apparently somebody [Colson Whitehead] took me to task for the very thing I want to do…. To make all the words count, and to put the words in the right order. . . . I want to be interesting because all the words are in the order that I think make sense to the reader. And at the same time not sacrifice complexity, not sacrifice good sense, not sacrifice felicity, not sacrifice intelligence. ”

Those critics. They really hate it when you get the words in the right order.