My pal @shoogyboomz sat next to Chloe Sevigny on a train to New York from Connecticut yesterday. She took this covert pic with her iPhone:

The Big Love star is reading a 1992 edition of Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem/ Play It As It Lays.

I'm sure Chloe chose the book because Didion is a master prose stylist, not because the cover features a thin blonde in a bad floral dress and oversized sunglasses.

Say you're some Barnes and Noble wage slave working on a Tuesday night a couple weeks before Christmas. Suddenly, a group of middle class white people start asking you about a book that's not in the inventory, and then they hold an impromptu reading. Chaos!

Mischief and Mayhem, the new publishing collective founded by Dale Peck and Choire Sicha (among others), will stage the happening as a dangerous launch party for its first title, Lisa Dierbeck's The Autobiography of Jenny X

Today, December 6th, 2010: Jonathan Franzen appears on Oprah. And I'm liveblogging it.

3:59 pm: The teaser has a hug! Oprah says they've never met before, but it seems like they have. Nice suit, Franzen!

4pm: Michael Jackson was friends with some unappealing, wan family from New Jersey, which will occupy the first half of the episode.