The Washington Post has a review by Jim Krusoe of Percival Everett’s The Water Cure.

The narrator of The Water Cure is a man whose 11-year-old daughter has been raped and killed. He now is in the process of torturing her murderer, but this, as they say, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The New York Times has a review (and the first chapter) of Glen Duncan’s The Bloodstone Papers.

Recommended with reservations.

WHYY’s Fresh Air has an interview with Connie Schultz, author of . . . and His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman Beside the Man.

The Complete Review alerts us to Condé Nast Traveler’s list of “The 86 Greatest Travel Books of All Time.”

Helen DeWitt has an interesting post on punctuation.

The Guardian has a review of Edmund White’s Hotel de Dream.

Recommended with reservations.

The Economist:

That machine has put Republicans in the White House in seven of the past ten contests. At times it has seemed as if the Democrats (oddly, given their status as the less Godly party) have had to rely on divine intervention to get elected.

Reviewers of recent books on atheism at The New Yorker and the Philadelphia Inquirer miss the point entirely.

From the former:

Since all the arguments against belief have been widely publicized for a long time, today’s militant atheists must sometimes wonder why religion persists.

and the latter:

The Atheist’s Bible, compiled by former Columbia School of Journalism dean Joan Konner, gains its more-than-tchotchke credibility from the authority of its creator - an odd standard to apply to a pro-atheism book, but there you are.

Maud Newton has a series of posts on independent bookstores in Washington.

As I stated earlier, I feared that O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It would not stay down. Beaufort Books has finalized a publishing deal with the Goldman family. The plan is to leave Simpson’s ghostwritten manuscript intact but surrounded by the commentary of the Goldmans. Framing the monstrous work in this way may safely cage it.

Not Recommended.

Salon has a delightful interview with the steely Dr. Taner Edis, author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam.

Robert Ito at the New York Times writes about how ridiculous the book business has become:

The item up for bidding was, at first blush, unremarkable. It was an unfinished manuscript, 397 pages long, less than half of the planned book, as well as an outline detailing story arcs and plot points to come. The writer? Someone named Jordan Ainsley, whom no one had ever heard of — not readers, not book editors, certainly not anyone in Hollywood. Yet the biggest movie studios were being asked to pony up seven figures for the privilege of committing the book, sight half-unseen, to film.

And the studios promptly, and exuberantly, threw themselves into a bidding war.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, the lovely Jennifer Egan recommends Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (published in 1860) for summer reading.

Highly recommended.

Book World at the Washington Post states that “Michael Dirda is on vacation this month.” It shows.

In an opinion piece at Salon, Gary Kamiya avers that editors are even more important in the Internet age than they were when print ruled the land.

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It’s about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It’s a handmade art, a craft. You don’t learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

The Academy of American Poets has selected Charles Simic as the recipient of the $100,000 2007 Wallace Stevens Award.

The latest report of the Association of American Publishers shows a 4.3 percent increase in sales for June.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has named Charles Simic poet laureate of the United States.

Salon is running a review of Taylor Antrim’s The Headmaster Ritual.