A roundup of crime fiction at The Economist begins:

Crime novels are among the easiest and most difficult to craft. The easiest, because the structure is straightforward: the hero is set a task, usually investigating a murder. So begins a perilous odyssey, where villains are dispatched and inner ghosts confronted, before a satisfying resolution. The most difficult, because as the plot is essentially predetermined, the writer needs skill to keep the momentum going, conjuring up original, complex characters and vivid scene-setting.

The New York Times has a fussy review by Julia Reed of Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees.

Recommended with reservations.

I rarely enjoy the short short story, but an occasional exemplar sways me. Narrative has “Okeechobee” by Claudia Zuluaga.

The New York Times has a review by Michelle Green of Katie Roiphe’s Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939.

At Slate, David Shenk revisits his 1997 book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut.

The longlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize has been announced.

Recommended with reservations.

A swarm of gnats engulfs the world, and we must weep. At Discover, Bruno Maddox mockingly mourns a passing genre and all fiction.

For one, it was around that time, the mid-1990s, that fiction—all fiction—finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas. Whatever the cause—dwindling attention spans, underfunded schools, something to do with the Internet—the fact is these days that if a Top Thinker wakes up one morning aghast at man’s inhumanity to man, he’s probably going to dash off a 300-word op-ed and e-mail it to The New York Times, or better still, just stick it up on his blog, typos and all, not cancel his appointments for the next seven years so he can bang out War and Peace in a shed.

Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post reviews Larry Berman’s Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent.

Slate recycles an article from 2004 to help explain the phenomenon of the instant review.

A. O. Scott at the New York Times writes of Norman Mailer’s films. A retrospective is playing in Manhattan.

The objection can be made that all of this stuff is trivial and secondary, an amusing distraction from the substantial and vexing edifice of Mr. Mailer’s real work, which is his books. Many of them, it seems to me, are too infrequently and poorly read, and some of their boldest gambits and thorniest truths are overshadowed by their author’s reputation for excess on and off the page.

Galleycat has a post on a science fiction scam in the making.

Bookslut has an interesting article by Alexis Wiggins on the lay of the land in independent publishing after the bankruptcy of Publisher’s Group West.

“We had sold 60,000 copies of What Is the What,” explains Eli Horowitz, publisher of McSweeney’s. Because of the PGW pay system, publishers received payments for sold books every 90 days. When the bankruptcy was announced, no one knew what was to become of the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sales for the previous quarter. “There were a couple months of confusion. Everyone was wondering what would happen,” Horowitz remembers. Publishers were faced with the prospect of a total loss of revenue for all fourth-quarter sales, a deathblow for many.

Recommended.

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition has a segment on the dwindling number of pages devoted to book coverage in print newspapers.

The Web site of The New Yorker has the full text of a masterful short story by Stuart Dybek. The theme, which has underpinned a great deal of the fiction and film that I have recently experienced, is the disappearing woman. She was the mother and the lover in When We Were Orphans, which I have just finished reading. She is found in her various forms in virtually all of Murakami’s novels. She is the object of the Chinese film Suzhou River (itself a Vertigo homage). Once begun, a worldly individual could expand the list to the limit of any reader’s patience. That the theme is engaging is beyond question. That it tells us something of the nature of woman is likely. That it reveals quite a lot about the psyche of man is painfully indisputable.

Highly recommended.

At the Washington Post, Art Taylor reviews recent mystery novels.

In her commentary at the Independent, Sarah Churchwell capably laments the low level of achievement in English of her British university students.

An impoverished understanding of their own language combined with an inflated sense of their own talents doesn’t merely result in smug graduates with a beggared ability to express ideas. Sophisticated ideas cannot flourish in a linguistic vacuum. Expression and thought are inextricably linked: crude language permits only crude thinking. It’s bad enough that these university students can’t communicate their thoughts intelligibly; but those thoughts are themselves constrained by embryonic language skills.

Recommended.

Luna Park has a review of the latest issue of Post Road.

At Salon, Astra Taylor reviews Daniel Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.

The book apparently features numerous examples of painful compromise that will be familiar to area readers, such as the story of Brendan, “a former lawyer at the progressive Center for the Study of Responsive Law, who switched career tracks for the bigger paycheck needed to buy a house within commuting distance of D.C.”

In a bizarre defeatist piece at The Age, Peter Craven argues that the only way to save Australian literature is to turn each work into a feature film or television mini-series.

The New York Times has a fluff piece (well, it does appear in the Style section) on hip, young librarians. Librarians often are cool (and libraries definitely are), but the article skips over most of the real reasons and heads straight for breezy talk over colorful cocktails. It also uses one of those atrocious non-words that tend to catch fire on the ‘net. Brace yourself. Are you ready? Guybrarian.

Not recommended.

In “Only Pinter Remains” at the Guardian, Terry Eagleton sounds the death knell of politically engaged writers in Britain.

The uniqueness of the situation is worth underlining. When Britain emerged as an industrial capitalist state, it had Shelley to urge the cause of the poor, Blake to dream of a communist utopia, and Byron to scourge the corruptions of the ruling class.

Tin House #32 carries an interview, excerpted on the Web, with Irish author John Banville.

JL/KR: You’ve said that some bad novelists can still be artists.

JB: I think the perfect example is Dostoyevsky, who was a terrible novelist but a supreme artist. Insofar as one can judge, reading his work in English, he seems entirely chaotic and formless. Yet his vision was so extraordinary that he made that chaos and formlessness seem almost irrelevant. As Nabokov said, in Dostoyevsky people are always dropping into drama to talk about the great Russian soul. But the talk is always good, even if it’s completely unconvincing in its setting. Everybody in Dostoyevsky talks like Dostoyevsky.

Eighteen young men charged in the assassination of the newspaper editor Hrant Dink went on trial here on Monday in what has been described as a test of the rule of law in Turkey.

The New York Times has an article on the trial of those accused of murdering a Turkish editor.

Salon is running a review by Alexander Nazaryan of A Russian Diary, the posthumously published record of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Anyone curious about why Russia’s post-Soviet flirtation with democracy has been such an erratic affair will find [the book] an indispensable tome. A reporter for Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper), one of Russia’s last organs of liberal media, Politkovskaya gained prominence–and notoriety–by chronicling the gradual depredation of civil liberties that began when Putin took power in 1999 and reopened the Chechen conflict that his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had waged to keep the small mountain region from gaining autonomy.

Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lobby of her Moscow apartment last fall with several point-blank shots that, as any Russian knows, signal a contract killing.

Rick Moody’s latest book, a collection of three novellas titled Right Livelihoods, gets a positive review at the Washington Post and a negative one at the New York Times.

Highly recommended.

National Public Radio’s Fresh Air has a chilling interview with two Philadelphia public school teachers who were assaulted by students.