In “Who Killed the Literary Critic?” at Salon Louis Bayard and Laura Miller, spurred by Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic (I noted the TLS’s review in March), discuss the future of literary criticism.

Highly recommended.

In the Village Voice, Michael Feingold notes a new English translation of Viennese author Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl. The short novel “displays Zweig’s two facets, the social-psychological analyst and the Romantic sentimentalist, in what often looks like a death struggle for control of the narrative.”

Mainichi Daily News interviews Haruki Murakami about his translations of American literature.

Ron Charles at the Washington Post reviews Jeffrey Lewis’s Adam the King.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (a Princeton man) set the bar high for anyone who wants to luxuriate in the tragedy of excess wealth and shattered dreams. In his best novels and short stories, the language is so lovely that you don’t mind or even notice how really silly the plots are, how insufferable the characters. Lewis can’t match that poetic style, but his novels have an elegance of their own, sparked with wit and marinated in nostalgia.

Here in the UK we have one of the most xenophobic literary cultures on the planet, with only 2% of the books on the shelves in Britain having started off in another language. Of course it’s partly because of the way the media treats foreigners, but it’s also because of the way that literature, unlike cinema, or music, is so irredeemably local.

Peter Florence at the Guardian covers the celebration of twenty-one years of the Hay festival.

Recommended.

In the New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, David Gura examines writers’ Web sites. The popular ones seem to be designed to appeal to those who do not read books.

Or perhaps, also like me, my uncle hoped that if one day he did manage to read Needham’s epic from start to finish, he would learn the answer to the famous “Needham question”: How did it come to pass that a civilization with such an astounding history of inventiveness and scholarship and intellectual curiosity failed to make the leap into the modern world of science? Where did China go wrong? Why did the industrial revolution take off in Europe, and not China?

Writing for Salon, Andrew Leonard reviews Simon Winchester’s biography of Joseph Needham, The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. Winchester (or his publisher) certainly should have stopped directly before the colon.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Alan Cheuse reviews Joseph Olshan’s The Conversion.

Not recommended.

At the Village Voice, authors pick their favorite obscure books.

Ron Charles at the Washington Post reviews György Dragomán’s The White King.

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Clark Davis covers BB&T CEO John Allison’s attempts to buy Ayn Rand a place on campus.

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Nam Le’s The Boat.

Recommended.

If you want to understand book publishing, you need to think less Bloomsbury and more Gambino: The five big companies are like the five families. Imprints are crews with plenty of ambitious upstarts looking to make their bones. And every once in a while even a good earner has to get whacked to send a message.

New York Magazine has an article on the fall of Random House’s Peter Olson.

Recommended with reservations.

Lindesay Irvine at the Guardian notes that Paul Verhaeghen has won the Independent foreign fiction prize for writing and translating his novel Omega Minor.

Recommended with reservations.

The New Yorker has “A Man Like Him” by Yiyun Li.

At the New York Times, Liesl Schillinger reviews Yan Lianke’s Serve the People!.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Patrick McGrath’s Trauma.

Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair — assuming, of course, there is any difference.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a piece by Karen Grigsby Bates on the closing of Dutton’s Books in Los Angeles.

Are we women now, as in the 19th and 20th centuries, in danger of coming down, sooner or later, with some configuration of what Elaine Showalter described as “the female malady”? Some culturally constructed and fashionably diagnosed form of emotional instability, that is, ranging from “weak” nerves to full-blown Britney Spears meltdown?

In the New York Sun, Daphne Merkin (unfortunate surname, that) reviews Lisa Appignanesi’s Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors.

At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Karen Heller calls out publishers over their limited cover designs.

Without effort, you can find a dozen similar covers on your local bookstore’s shelves. They all blur into so much Lifetime fuzz.

These covers scream to men “Please don’t read me!” while to women they coo “Here’s more of the same!”