Thief Grabs Franzen's Glasses, Demands Ransom

A London literary event featuring US author Jonathan Franzen was gatecrashed yesterday by a crazed thief who grabbed the glasses right off the writer's face, left behind a $150,000 ransom demand for them, then leaped in a lake as he fled British bobbies. Franzen was said to be "extremely disgruntled," noted the Telegraph.

The writer is apparently deep into some bad Brit mojo. Franzen was at the Hyde Park event to hawk his latest novel, Freedom, in the country where several thousand first editions of the book had to be shredded after it was discovered the wrong version—one that contained errors—had been printed in the UK. One Brit blogger quipped: "The US puts Franzen on the cover of Time; the UK misplaces his commas and steals his glasses." (More Freedom stories.)