As a quality of mind and character, Wordsworth’s “egotism” was central to his nature; it is therefore bound to lie at the heart of his greatest verse.

Dan Jacobson revisits Wordsworth in the Times Literary Supplement.

Not recommended.

n + 1 has a piece on Slavoj Zizek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

At Time, Don Morrison examines France’s diminished cultural profile.

The New York Times reports that the New York Public Library is buying four hundred boxes of correspondence, journals, and other writing of late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

In a time of daily articles describing the efforts of misguided librarians to destroy the institution of the library from within, it is refreshing to read of a library system taking its mission seriously.

At the Washington Post, Shashi Tharoor reviews Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Neoliberal capitalism, [Klein] argues, thrives on catastrophe: Not only are fortunes made from the misfortunes of the masses, but the global dominance of free-market capitalism is built on the infliction of disasters on the world’s less fortunate.

Recommended.

National Public Radio’s Day to Day has an interview with Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot.

At Salon Jonathon Keats reviews Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer.

Not recommended.

The New York Times has published its list of the year’s notable books. As usual, I have read only a few of the selections.

Recommended with reservations.

Denis Johnson has won a National Book Award for Tree of Smoke.

The light of a New York Sun article catches Judith Regan as she emerges from her lair to file a lawsuit.

At times, he speculates that absolute ugliness may exist. The smell of excrement and the sight of putrefying flesh, he points out, are offensive across all cultures. If he had included the writings of evolutionary biologists, he might have told us why this could be so. That he shows no awareness of post-Darwinian science can mean only that he isn’t serious about locating the sources of aesthetic feelings.

At the Village Voice, Richard B. Woodward reviews Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness.

Recommended.

Ron Charles at the Washington Post reviews Ha Jin’s A Free Life.

Salon has a lukewarm review of Nathan McCall’s Them.

The New York Times examines Norman Mailer’s literary legacy.

It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals.

At the London Review of Books, Slavoj Žižek explores the issue.

Jacki Lyden, of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, interviews Ha Jin, author of A Free Life.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is running an article on the impostor syndrome.

In psychological terms, that’s a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment.

. . .we have come so far in the American postindustrial meritocracy that everyone has equal access to guilt-ridden feelings of fraudulence.

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition has a segment on the relationship between novelist Ann Patchett and her first reader, Elizabeth McCracken.

The New York Times profiles Hungarian author Peter Nadas, whose latest book is Fire and Knowledge.

At the Guardian, Richard Ford holds forth on the short story.

Not recommended.

Slate’s Fall Fiction Week looks at great works never read, Philip Roth’s alter ego, books of the season, and more.

How the Internet might replace the newspaper as a source of information is never explained by those who assure you that it will. At present about 80 percent of all news available on the Internet originates in newspapers, according to John Carroll’s estimate, and no Internet company has the resources needed to gather and edit news on the scale of the most mediocre metropolitan daily.

At the New York Review of Books, Russell Baker probes the decline of journalism.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered talks with Michael Chabon about his adventure story Gentlemen of the Road.