Publishers Weekly reports that its parent company, Reed Business Information, is burying the Quill Awards, the results of which in past years have been horribly embarrassing.

Recommended.

Alexis Soloski at the Village Voice reviews English translations of Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New, Quebecois author Sylvain Trudel’s Mercury Under My Tongue, and Philippe Grimbert’s Memory.

Recommended with reservations.

In his article in The Chronicle of Higher Education covering the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, Michael Dirda wonders whether New York is still the city of dreams for young American writers.

The rain was slashing down when my train from Washington pulled into New York. Outside Penn Station, the line at the taxi stand was long, and, with little else to do for the next 20 minutes, I found myself thinking about all those young writers who, year after year, had come to this city of dreams, some bringing with them nothing but their ambition, others already clutching the manuscript for a novel, a play, or a book of poems. Here a few had found great or moderate success — and most none whatsoever. Yet even as the disillusioned gradually drifted home to Nebraska or Indiana, the next generation of hopefuls was already stepping off the bus at Port Authority and looking around at the city they would surely conquer with their pens.

Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Antonio Skarmeta’s The Dancer and the Thief. On The Diane Rehm Show guest host Susan Page interviews the Chilean author.

In 1993, Masako Owada, an Ivy League-educated Japanese commoner, married Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan, and the pressures of life in the Imperial Palace soon started building.

Scott Simon of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition talks with John Burnham Schwartz about The Commoner.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

James Donald at the China Post covers the recently concluded Taipei International Book Exhibition.

Things turned more serious when a well-travelled Li [Ang] told the audience of her concern over mounting political and economic pressures preventing Taiwan’s culture from reaching the rest of the world.

We heard all the time that our reports were too pessimistic–”go back and change it.”

Ken Silverstein at Harper’s interviews A. J. Rossmiller, author of Still Broken: A Recruit’s Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon.

At the Washington Post, Janice P. Nimura reviews Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool.

These three quiet novellas, composing the first of Yoko Ogawa’s books to be translated into English, share an eerie quality of nightmare, the precarious sense that beauty and distress are equally possible at any moment.

The Guardian features James Hopkin’s top ten Polish books.

The American Booksellers Association notes Amazon’s plan to fight a New York proposal that the online retailer collect and remit sales tax for sales to in-state customers.

Elizabeth Hand at The Village Voice reviews Susan Choi’s A Person of Interest.

Recommended with reservations.

At the New York Times, Patricia Cohen covers Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, which explores the crippling effects of American anti-intellectualism.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

Melissa Block of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered interviews Eric G. Wilson, professor of English at Wake Forest University and author of Against Happiness.

[Wilson] explores the link between sadness, artistic creation and depression — which has led to suicide in many well-known cases: Virginia Woolf, Vincent Van Gogh, Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway, for instance.

Wilson says perhaps this is “just part of the tragic nature of existence, that sometimes there’s a great price to be paid for great works or beauty, for truth.”

Highly recommended.

In the Times Literary Supplement, Sophie Ratcliffe examines James Wood’s How Fiction Works.

Recommended.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self.

At the center of the story is a precocious 7-year-old boy named Che. The child of ’60s radicals and the subject of one of the decade’s most sensational news photos, he was placed in the custody of his Park Avenue grandmother at the age of 2 and raised in strict isolation in upstate New York. “She planned to bring him up Victorian,” Carey writes. No television: no chance of seeing images of his infamous parents being escorted away by police. But the boy picks up stray details from a teenage neighbor who regales him with stories about the SDS, the Weathermen and his namesake, Che Guevara. He shows the boy a picture of his father from Life magazine. “You got a right to know,” he tells him. “Your father is a great American. . . . They will come for you, man. They’ll break you out of here.”

Imagine a former member of the Weather Underground, still in hiding, looking back on his macrobiotic salad days as a subversive, when the revolution, always the revolution, seemed around the corner, as close as a pop song blasting from a car radio.

At the New York Times, Will Blythe reviews Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions.

Benjamin Lytal at the New York Sun reviews John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon.

Recommended.

At the Guardian, Antonia Byatt defends the Arts Council’s cuts to its funding of literature.

Referring periodically to a set of printed notes on the table in front of her, she explains how she’s looking forward to “working with the literature sector” to think about the next three to five years. “Talking to people and hearing what they have to say is a very important part of that.”

Thank goodness she had prepared the notes. Without them she might have said something inane.

Russell Banks’s latest novel, The Reserve, gets a lukewarm review from Ron Charles at the Washington Post and a negative one from Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered profiles Twelve, publisher of Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

At the New York Times, John Lanchester reviews Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.

Recommended with reservations.

Laura Miller at Salon covers Maya Angelou’s poem of tribute to Hillary Clinton and Toni Morrison’s letter of endorsement to Barack Obama.