National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a review of Marcus Sakey’s The Blade Itself.

The Washington Post has a review of Elisabeth Ladenson’s Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita.

Recommended.

The Wilson Quarterly has an article by Ross Terrill, author of Mao: A Biography, on the willingness of modern Chinese to embrace Mao the cultural icon and forget Mao the totalitarian.

This year’s Taipei Book Fair focuses on Russian literature and culture.

The New York Times has an article explaining the sudden popularity of Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers in New York.

The man who confessed to inciting the murder of journalist Hrant Dink shouted a threat against Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk on the way into court.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition has an interview with Jane Poynter about her book The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes inside Biosphere Two.

Salon has a review of Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y.

Recommended.

Slate has a short piece about the new vanity publishers.

Vanity presses for amateur writers who want to see their manuscripts in print were once limited to a small group of publishers. The service, now called “books-on-demand” or “print-on-demand,” has proliferated in the digital era. Amazon.com’s recently acquired print-on-demand division, BookSurge.com, offers several tiers of publishing programs with menus of services starting at $99.

The piece goes on to list some of the more unappetizing items on the menu.

Colbert I. King’s hard-hitting editorial at The Washington Post is well worth reading.

The documented portrayal of my bloodline isn’t easily forgotten. Those relatives of mine were considered legal property, which explains why they were listed by name, with individually assigned monetary value, among the inventory of farm implements, barnyard animals and other Colbert-owned assets.

“Get over it.” Not likely.

The New York Times has a review of Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest.

National Public Radio’s Fresh Air has an interview with Thant Myint-U about The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma.

The British are going to the public library.

So asks the article at Slate.

Recommended.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews John Haffenden’s William Empson Volume II: Against the Christians.

This is the second, and final, volume of John Haffenden’s monumental biography of the 20th century’s most dazzling and original literary critic.

. . .

William Empson: Against the Christians is even better than Haffenden’s first volume, rich in anecdote and scandal, with superb summaries of the difficult later criticism, and honestly affectionate.

A New York Times article notes that Emory University has acquired Ted Hughes’s love letters to Assia Wevill.

The collection includes more than 60 letters from 1963 to 1969, sketches, diary entries and photographs. One letter implores Ms. Wevill to “burn all my letters.”

Harper’s has a feature on the spread of Christian fundamentalism in America.

The London Review of Books has a meaty (and brutal) analysis of House of Meetings by Martin Amis.

The Costa (formerly Whitbread) category winners have been announced. There was an upset in the poetry division, with Haynes taking Heaney by a nose.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial on the Fairfax library system’s ruthless junking of books.

Recommended with reservations.

Jonathan Yardley at The Washington Post reviews Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games.

The enthusiasm with which the venerable firm of HarperCollins is promoting this massive deadweight of a novel, and the money that it’s putting where its mouth is, leaves one to ponder once again the eternally mysterious ways of the book-publishing industry.

Gawker has a post on publications that stiff freelancers.

Libraries in my area and across the country are scrambling to get rid of books. An article in the Washington Post reads:

. . .thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.

. . .

Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system’s return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves–and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone–even if they are classics.

The mind reels. Someone somewhere must have said: “The public library is a superb institution, a place of knowledge, discovery, preservation, a place of life, a place of liberty. It is nearly perfect. The only way in which we could possibly improve it is to make it more like Wal-Mart.” Someone else, nay, a whole board of someones, must have agreed.

I have always deeply respected the American Library Association for its commitment to excellence and its strong ethical and legal stance. Surely, then, this cannot become a truly national problem. Surely, then, some sense will trickle down from on high. The Post article continues:

“I think the days of libraries saying, ‘We must have that, because it’s good for people,’ are beyond us,” said Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association and director of Princeton Public Library. “There is a sense in many public libraries that popular materials are what most of our communities desire. Everybody’s got a favorite book they’re trying to promote.”

Again, the mind reels. Read the article and the delicious backlash it prompted. Be aware of attempts to do this to your library.

I have a soft spot for the British children’s fantasy novel, having read many in my youth. I was therefore saddened to come across the obituary of Philippa Pearce at the Guardian.

Logan Fox can’t quite pinpoint the moment when movies and television shows replaced books as the cultural topics people liked to talk about over dinner, at cocktail parties, at work.

Yes, it’s another independent bookstore closing.

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition has an interview with Calvin Trillin about his book About Alice.

Recommended with reservations.