The guy we put on the cover of The Stranger to parody Time magazine last year just landed a big fat deal with Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, the New York Observer is reporting.

The Observer asks Lin if he feels like he's "made it" now and Lin replies:

I honestly feel, to a large degree, like me and everyone else are close to death and that the awareness of this has, to me, precluded thoughts of “making it” (this is a theme of the novel).

That's funny. Also funny: the Stranger parody of Time's profile of Franzen in which Lin profiled himself; the piece Lin wrote for us about the levels of greatness a fiction writer can achieve in America; the piece he wrote about Seattle based entirely on hearsay and seeing people hanging out of windows; and the time he reviewed his Seattle audience when he was here on book tour.