According to a New Yorker profile, not online but summarized in the Guardian, McEwan sheltered Rushdie for like a day in a cottage in Cotswolds, England. But it was a critical day, almost immediately after Iranian death sentence for purported blasphemy:

Rushdie was at the start of many years of internal exile. "I'll never forget - the next morning we got up early. He had to move on. Terrible time for him. We stood at the kitchen counter making toast and coffee, listening to the eight o'clock BBC news. He was standing right by my side and he was the lead item on the news. Hezbollah had put its sagacity and weight behind the project to kill him."

McEwan would go on to also totally have the back of Martin Amis after that author said Muslims should be denied travel, deported, strip searched and generally made to "suffer" until "they start getting tough with their children." Which was far worse than any of Rushdie's imagined crimes.

This sort of very public loyalty is why Ian McEwan is almost as famous as Amy Winehouse, and is thus "England's national author," according to the New Yorker. Which is true: Literary merit aside, fights + a posse = press.

• Ashley Dupre, call girl to former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, thanked her MySpace fans "for taking the time to send me a bit of strength and inspiration... your words have touched me." She thanked her detractors for making "me push myself and want it even more." [MySpace]
• Corey Feldman fought with old buddy and fellow child star Corey Haim on a reality show, and it emerged both had been molested at kids. Feldman felt the need to clarify that pop singer Michael Jackson was not the molester.
• A handwriting expert is suing Bryant Gumbel for allegedly smearing him on HBO's Real Sports. [Post]
• British singer Boy George really wanted to put on a special show for the New York sanitation workers with whom he performed community service, but he was denied a visa to enter the country, on account of an upcoming trial for allegedly imprisoning a male escort. [Post]
• British author Ian McEwan said he despises "Islamism" because it oppresses gays and women. [Times]
• Michelle Williams, mother of deceased actor Heath Ledger's child, is worried Ledger's mother and father will blow through the money in his estate before the child is 18 and able to claim any. [P6]
• Clearly trying to seed a sequel to his 1986 laugh riot The Money Pit, actor Tom Hanks keeps insisting his mansion in Sun Valley was poorly constructed. His latest appeal for legal intervention was rejected by a California court Friday. [P6]
• The 13-year-old daughter of billionaire Revlon chief Ron Perelman asked for a protection order against her mom and Perelman's ex-wife Patricia Duff. [Post]
• Singer Stevie Nicks said everyone should buy records and in turn save the music business and in turn "bring peace to our earth." [R&M]

Among the encompassing definitions we could give "the novel" is this : a novel is a vast heap of sentences, like stones, arranged on a beach of time. The reader may parse the stones of a novel singly or crunch them in bunches underfoot in his eagerness to cross. These choices generate tension...

... young, educated ... virgins ... wedding night ... sexual difficulties. The first stone on McEwan's new beach indulges his radical efficiency with a hook. If McEwan's first chapters generally ought to be sent, like Albert Pujols's bats, to the Hall of Fame, then we may agree that in this instance his first sentence is a first chapter of its own, as well as doing extra duty as its host book's perfect piece of ad copy.

[T]his seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan's written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls "the secret affair between disgust and joy." That horror is located in the distance between two selves, two subjectivities: humans who will themselves to be "as one," and fail miserably. The horror is in the distance between these sentences, which reside terrifyingly near to one another on the page...If "On Chesil Beach" is a horror novel, it is also as fundamentally a comedy, one with virtual Monty Python overtones: The waiters were arriving with their plates of beef, his piled twice the height of hers.

(Here's my spoiler warning: "On Chesil Beach" is far too lean and pure for me to muse on more than a few of its sentences without giving some secrets away. If you're inspired by the hook above, read the book — it'll be nearly as quick as reading my review, and more fun.)

As a long-time magazine and newspaper editor, I'd have no trouble firing McEwan for writing as he did if he worked for me ... But McEwan's defenders mustn't judge him by the rules of mere journalism. He links to his champions on his home page, where his own explanation can be found. The defense goes like this: He's a novelist, operating in a world of make-believe, and storytellers have always been allowed to pilfer and pinch from other writers with impunity.

He offers this zinger as proof:

If McEwan really did nothing out of the ordinary, the authors campaigning for him would do him a great service to note the passages in their own books that rooked from historical sources in a similar manner. Don't hold your breath.

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Ian McEwan Did Nothing Wrong, Say the Big-Shot Novelists [Slate]

• A side-by-side comparison of the plagiaristic transgressions of Ian McEwan and Kaavya Viswanathan. [ReadySteadyGo]
  
• The Catholic League goes all Bill O'Reilly on our holiday asses in an ad on the NYT op-ed page. [Catholic League]
  
• GQ names Pam and Kid Rock newlyweds of the year. Oops. [GQ]
  
• The real original fake writer tries fashion designing on for size. [Daily Intelligencer]