by TChris

Homeland Security is vigilantly protecting the country from foreign novelists.

Halted en route to a West Coast lecture tour, Ian McEwan, an acclaimed British novelist who lunched last fall with first lady Laura Bush, was denied entry into the United States for 36 hours this week.

Unfortunately for a country that has been terrorized by foreign novelists, Homeland Security relented -- but not because it wanted to.

During his third session on Wednesday with Homeland Security officials, after word had spread to British and U.S. newspapers about his situation, McEwan said his interrogators told him: "We still don't want to let you in, but this is attracting a lot of unfavorable publicity."

The quality of the agents guarding our borders from dangerous novelists is illustrated by a question that one of the agents posed to McEwan: "What kind of novels do you write: fiction or nonfiction?"