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.

McEwan, who has won nearly every major British literary prize and whose best-selling novel “Atonement” won a National Book Critics Circle Award, finally landed in Seattle on Wednesday evening, just 90 minutes before he was scheduled to address 2,500 people packed into a downtown auditorium.

Looking relieved and exhausted, he began his speech by thanking the Department of Homeland Security “for protecting the American public from British novelists.”

He also detailed the literary expertise that Homeland Security officials brought to the three interrogations they put him through. McEwan said one official wanted to know: “What kind of novels do you write: fiction or nonfiction?”

[read the rest of the article, it does indeed get sillier]