PEN has announced many of the winners of its 2008 literary awards. The PEN/Nabokov career achievement award went to Cynthia Ozick.

Recommended.

Maureen Corrigan of Fresh Air reviews Donna Foote’s Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America.

Not recommended.

At 42 Augusten Burroughs is the first to admit he has written “more memoirs than anyone my age should be entitled to write.”

At the New York Times, Patricia Cohen reviews his fifth, A Wolf at the Table.

Mr. Burroughs said he had spent most of his adult life terrified “that I was like him.” Still, he continued to crave his father’s approval and attention until his death. “I can’t say I liked myself for continuing with him, but I wanted to understand him. I was compelled on some level to try and try and try.”

For National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Curt Nickisch covers libraries that are choosing to pay to digitize their collections rather than sharing control with Google or Microsoft.

Not recommended.

At the Guardian, Kate Connolly reports that Dmitri Nabokov has decided to publish his father’s final work, which he had been instructed to destroy.

Kerry Howley at Reason writes of the birth of the American hotel industry.

Hotels were a new institutional form that upset expectations about the arrangement of daily life and alarmed defenders of domesticity. They were full of beds and liquor, associated with sex, theft, and violence. Guests interacted with no patriarch—only a relatively egalitarian ecosystem of managers, porters, and bellboys. As people began to take longer and longer hotel stays in the mid-18th century, sometimes even living in them, “an entire genre of screeds against hotel living” was born, mourning the decline of traditional gender roles in a world where cooks and maids left women hopelessly idle.

The New York Times has Amy Virshup’s roundup of newly released fiction.

Andres Martinez at The Daily Texan covers Mikhail Shishkin’s recent lecture.

Today there is a paradoxical situation in Russia - that of a totalitarian state with free literature, Shishkin said.

“The acceptance [of literature] does not show liberalism, but how marginal literature is,” he said.

Recommended with reservations.

It isn’t that nothing ever happens to Gessen’s characters but that nothing of much significance happens to them, and this nothing-much happens continually, one might say on an hourly basis, like a nightmare Moebius strip of e-mail messages sent, received, replied to, and deleted; voice mail; Googling (”His Google was shrinking. It was part of a larger failure…. It wasn’t nice”); and the Sisyphean task of finding a parking space in New York City.

Joyce Carol Oates examines Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men in The New York Review of Books.

At the Guardian, Richard Lea talks with Thomas Leveritt about The Exchange Rate Between Love and Money.

It’s a book that never would have been written without the freedom which a career as a painter has given him. “I’ve always written like I’ve always drawn,” he explains, “and one of the side effects about never having worked in a corporate job is that I’ve never had to let go of these undergraduate wet dreams about writing.”

At Salon Gary Kamiya reviews Gerard DeGroot’s The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade.

Recommended.

. . .when Mr. Amis writes as a strong, consistent, and unambiguous foe of Islamic extremism, he is bucking the timidly relativist consensus of the British intelligentsia. At a time when even the Archbishop of Canterbury is prepared to see sharia become the law of the land, Mr. Amis’s unequivocal defense of liberal, secular values — of feminism, humanism, skepticism, and democracy — is genuinely brave.

In the New York Sun, Adam Kirsch reviews Martin Amis’s The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom.

The Financial Times has John Sutherland’s review of Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence.

If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.

Not recommended.

Book collectors might be presumed to be among the happiest of mortals. There, in the evening, they sit contentedly in soft easy chairs, beneath pools of warm lamplight, surrounded by their libraries — row after serried row of beautiful or rare volumes, all the great works of scholarship and the human imagination.

At the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night.

Jason Wilson at the Washington Post reveals the discovery of a musty literary liqueur.

My brother Tyler and I sometimes play a game we call Liquor Store Archaeology. . . .

Tyler became the clear victor not too long ago when he turned up something called, somewhat disturbingly, Peanut Lolita, a thick, peanut-flavored liqueur that once was produced by Continental Distilling in Linfield, Pa.

At The New Republic, Adelle Waldman examines Jhumpa Lahiri’s appeal.

Recommended with reservations.

At the Guardian, Jonathan Derbyshire argues, sensibly, that popular economic models do not explain everything.