Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches.

In The New Yorker, Eric Alterman contemplates the end of the American newspaper.

Recommended with reservations.

Khanna is obviously not shy about making bold statements. He disputes the popular view that India will emerge as a check to China. “India is big but not yet important,” he writes. “It could also be argued that China is a freer country than democratic India.” By that, Khanna means, literacy is higher and the poverty rate lower in China; it has more Internet connections and cellphones; and it is easier to start a business in China than in India.

Raymond Bonner at the New York Times reviews Parag Khanna’s The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.

Prospect has a piece by Mark Leonard on China’s intelligentsia.

Being on the other side of the tape recorder is uncomfortable, he says. After he spoke to a Guardian interviewer in 1995, he recalls, “my mother cried for days. I ended up crying on the phone too. [The interviewer] hadn’t twisted anything, but I was so keen to establish my credentials, surrounded by the Martin Amises and the Ian McEwans, I was like, ‘We were really poor! My mother was a cleaner!’ And she hated that. It was incredibly unthinking of me.”

At the Guardian, Esther Addley interviews Gordon Burn ahead of his new novel Born Yesterday.

In the Village Voice, Alexis Soloski talks with John Banville about The Silver Swan, his latest Benjamin Black novel.

It’s craft work, which I’m quite proud of. It gives me a lot of fun—well, some fun; a lot of satisfaction. I’m quite proud of these books—proud as a craftsman. Whereas I loathe and despise all my John Banville books. I really hate them. They’re better than anybody else’s; they’re just not good enough for me.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Alan Cheuse reviews James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand.

Benjamin Lytal at the New York Sun covers new translations of Tsutomu Mizukami’s The Temple of the Wild Geese and The Bamboo Dolls of Echizen.

Recommended with reservations.

The writers at Salon present a round-up of new books on the war in Iraq.

Recommended.

The plausible minimalist view of Proust’s Jewishness is that, attenuated as it was, it predisposed him to perceive more sharply than he might otherwise have done the hypocrisy and the hidden wellsprings of hostility toward Jews that were exposed in the fierce debates over Captain Dreyfus’s alleged treason.

In The New Republic (linked by way of Powell’s Books because the original article is only for subscribers), Robert Alter reviews Evelyne Bloch-Dano’s Madame Proust.

The Times Literary Supplement has a review by John Mullan of Rónán McDonald’s The Death of the Critic.

Nowadays, there are more critical responses than ever, but critical authority has been devolved from the experts. McDonald surveys the rise of blogs and readers’ reviews, of television and newspaper polls and reading groups, under the heading “We Are All Critics Now”. He argues that the demise of critical expertise brings not a liberating democracy of taste, but conservatism and repetition.

In the New York Times, Edward Rothstein reviews the “John Milton at 400” exhibition on view through 14 June at the New York Public Library.

Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Gordon S. Wood’s The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History.

Highly recommended.

At Slate Jim Lewis celebrates Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Jeff Lunden profiles playwright Edward Albee.

Recommended.

There are many for whom this problem seems trivial. The word “relevance” looms - that contemporary fetish, so often brandished to mitigate ignorance and justify a failure of curiosity. I would argue that my friends’ daughter and many young people like her suffer a loss of liberty when the past is in effect closed down and the present becomes the measure of all things.

So posits Sean O’Brien at the Guardian.

At the New York Times, James Parker reviews Tim Parks’s Cleaver.

In the Powell’s Books blog, Chris Faatz reviews the Selected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.

In the Village Voice, Giles Harvey previews Martin Amis’s The Second Plane: September 11, Terror & Boredom.

Recommended.

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter.

At Salon, Stephen Marche writes of the passing of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

At the Guardian, Alex Larman lets readers know that Philip Larkin’s reputation “has returned to its former heights.”

At the New York Times, Lawrence Van Gelder covers the revelation that supposed Holocaust refugee Misha Defonseca was in fact never “adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis” as she claimed in Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years (follow the link just for a look at the jacket). Nor was she ever Jewish. Ah, memoir! Deep shame falls upon anyone who needed help spotting this ruse.

Also at the Times, Motoko Rich informs the innocent, gentle, fawn-like readers of memoirs that the recently published and somewhat acclaimed (by such stalwarts as Michiko Kakutani, again of the Times) Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival by Margaret B. Jones, LA gangland drug runner and half-white, half-Native American hankie girl, was actually written by Margaret Seltzer, all-white princess, who perpetrated the fraud only to give voice to the voiceless. Such a brave, brave child of privilege can conjure a sniffle even in defeat, even while watching her publisher (the Riverhead Books unit of Penguin) recall all copies and cancel her book tour.

Recommended with reservations.

‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry.

John Lanchester’s piece continues at the London Review of Books.