In “The Social Side of Literature” at the Guardian, Shirley Dent writes of literary cliques.

Cliques that matter are about breaking rules in private, about pushing against the boundaries of current thinking. They are about ideas. And they come about through people who have certain ideas in common joining together to explore and expound those ideas.

Cliques should be tough places - they’re where artists and writers wash their dirty intellectual linen in private, where no idea is unthinkable and criticism is no-holds-barred. Honesty and trust and privacy combine to permit this.

Recommended.

Salon’s end-of-year picks usually are, to my taste, the best around. This year’s selections are peculiarly uninspired.

The New York Times notes that the British Library has purchased the papers of Harold Pinter.

Recommended.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition interviews Xiaolu Guo, author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.

Luna Park asks Summerset Review editor Joseph Levens, essentially, why he bothers.

More Intelligent Life has a “this is your brain on Shakespeare” piece.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

Slate’s Book Club discusses Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy.

Michael Dirda, writing of Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Review of Books, opens with the assertion that his subject “still bothers people–in all kinds of ways.” At issue is the astonishing number of books that Oates produces. “Surely so many books can’t be that good, that deeply felt, truly authentic?”

Recommended.

The Guardian has a short article on a debate at Manchester University in which Martin Amis took part. Terry Eagleton, who earlier made a bizarre personal attack on Amis in the preface to an academic text, was scheduled to appear but withdrew because of a “diary clash.”

Highly recommended.

Mark Pilgrim’s assessment of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, formed through the juxtaposition of quotations, agrees with my own.

Salon’s Literary Guide to the World has an entry on Washington, D. C.

Recommended with reservations.

National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation interviews Francis Wheen, author of Marx’s Das Kapital.

Recommended.

The Washington Post’s Book World has bungled its annual list of one hundred remarkable books. How many entries could one need for ABC? Would Paul Auster not be rather shocked to discover that he had written Stalin’s Ghost?