Wonder Boys. Michael Chabon

      She went after them, and I stood awkwardly beside Miss Sloviak for half a minute, watching her take irritable puffs on a black Nat Sherman and blow them out in long blue jets.

      “I’m sorry about all this.”

      “Are you?”

      “It’s just pretty much your standard WordFest behavior.”

      “No wonder I’ve never heard of it before.”

      A minor squall of applause gathered and blew through the auditorium. Then the doors burst open again, and five hundred people poured into the lobby. They were all talking about Q. and his rascally double, the latter of whom had apparently ended the lecture with an unflattering remark about the cumulative literary achievement of Pittsburgh, comparing it with Luxembourg’s and Chad’s. I waved to a couple of my offended colleagues and nodded carefully to Franconia Epps, a well-to-do Fox Chapel woman of a certain age who had been attending WordFest for the last six years in the hope of finding a publisher for a novel called Black Flowers