Notes from underground

LAST MONTH, shortly after Brigid Hughes succeeded the late George Plimpton as top editor of the Paris Review, she boasted to the Associated Press that the esteemed literary quarterly had recently published a story by an unknown author, Yiyun Li, from its file of unsolicited manuscripts. Not so fast! barked Steve Kostecke of the literati-watchdog group Underground Literary Alliance.

Li, Kostecke pointed out in a Jan. 26 column on the ULA website (literaryrevolution.com), is in fact an Iowa Writers Workshop degree candidate who has been published recently in both the Paris Review and the New Yorker. Hughes's heartwarming anecdote, he went on to charge, was "nothing but a gross attempt at the perpetuation of the myth . . . that the American lit world operates like some kind of fair democracy, instead of the shut-off, where-are-your-papers?, meaningless institution it has become."

L'Affaire Li was the latest salvo from the ULA, a Philadelphia-based group of self-described literary outsiders. In 2000, ULA founder Karl "King" Wenclas first gained notoriety with a petition protesting the award of a Guggenheim fellowship to the already wealthy novelist Rick Moody. Since then, Wenclas, et al., have made the gossip columns by disrupting readings by Moody, New Yorker writer Ben Greenman, Vanity Fair columnist Elissa Schappell, and other "insiders."

The ULA has crossed paths with the Paris Review crowd before. When Plimpton attended a 2001 press conference organized by the fledgling outfit, he proclaimed himself "disappointed." In a subsequent interview, Plimpton said of them, "They're very spirited, and I'm all for that . . .. [But] when they busted into the [Schappell] reading, I lost a lot of respect for them."

One can only imagine how the ULA will react to Wednesday's news that the Paris Review has awarded Yiyun Li its first-ever Plimpton Prize, for the best piece of writing in the past year by a "newcomer." Stay tuned!