In the New York Times, Mark Sarvas reviews Ed Park’s Personal Days.

“Personal Days” unfolds in three parts — “Can’t Undo,” “Replace All” and “Revert to Saved,” headings that will be instantly recognizable to any reader who has launched Microsoft Word. The book effectively employs any number of familiar McSweeney-esque devices (or tics, depending on your point of view), including catchy section headings; short, impressionistic passages; and creative typesetting.

But there’s a dark undercurrent to all the whimsy, a Beckettian dread as co-worker after co-worker is blasted out of the desolate landscape. (An interoffice messenger is known only as the Unnameable, and even his description — “50ish, tall, with a healthy fringe of white hair and gleaming, inquisitive eyes” — invokes Beckett’s visage.) Indeed, Beckett’s oft-quoted “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” precisely mirrors the plight of Park’s beleaguered characters.

He’s produced 11 volumes of novels and short stories, but he lives in western Australia, one of the remotest parts of the world. People don’t know about him. They don’t know what they’re missing.

Writing for the Washington Post, Carolyn See reviews Tim Winton’s Breath.

In “J.M. Coetzee and His Censors” at Granta, Simon Willis writes of In the Heart of the Country that “in the censors’ view the novel was rendered innocuous by a literary quality which curtailed the book’s likely readership.”

National Public Radio has Andrew Sean Greer reading from The Story of A Marriage.

Recommended.

The reader knows at the outset that Poland and France soon will fall and that millions will die, including many of those whom we meet in these pages, and Furst means us to feel frustration and anger as the prevailing idée fixe opens the way to Hitler’s acts of aggression.

Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw.

In the New York Sun, Hua Hsu reviews Ethan Canin’s America America.

At The Globe and Mail, Andrew Pyper delivers a sobering report.

The pressures on writers coming into the second decade of the quickly aging century go well beyond the previous demands of meeting deadlines and improving one’s craft. The midlist–we are soberly told by agent and editor alike–is, like the Titanic, a place no less doomed for all its comforts and good taste. Gone are the tweedy days of publishers sticking by an author because their editors believe in him. Now every book has to “work.” That is, move product. A lot.

Highly recommended.

At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Maurice Isserman wonders whether the left will ever learn to communicate across generations.

Amazon, the online retailing giant with a fast-rising share of the consumer book market, has adopted the literary equivalent of a nuclear option for rebellious publishers who balk at its demands.

In the New York Times, Doreen Carvajal covers the company’s growing market presence and leverage.

Ruth Franklin pans James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning at The New Republic.

Adult life begins in a child’s imagination,” said poet Dana Gioia, speaking before the graduating class of Stanford University in June 2007. “And we’ve relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.”

In the Utne Reader, Jeannine Ouellette writes of the future of creativity.

Writing for Slate, Ray Fisman explains why giving poor kids laptops doesn’t improve their scholastic performance.

At the London Review of Books, John Lanchester worries about the utility of his beautiful Library of America editions.

. . .it’s hard not to take the volumes down from the shelves and stroke them, like a Bond villain fondling a cat.

What is really hard, though, is to read them. The books are so gorgeous, so marmoreal, that I find them unreadable. Not unreadable in the Pierre Bourdieu/Edward Bulwer-Lytton sense, and not unreadable in theory – I want to read them, I really do. It’s just that in practice, I don’t.

Lindesay Irvine at The Guardian writes of “a very bright patch for a rarely spotlit field, with three awards for literary translations into English going to independent publishers in recent days.”

Recommended with reservations.

. . .Rebecca’s article is too sad to bear, and although I, too, have written about my troubled relationship with my mother, I did not have the heart to do so in a major way while she was alive. I waited until after her death to do so — and still I feared that I was both committing a sin and tempting fate. Exposing your mother’s nakedness in public, breaking publicly with the only woman who ever gave birth to you, is a tabooed, ungrateful, desperate, perhaps dangerous and always complicated act.

Phyllis Chesler, writing for Salon, covers the split between Alice Walker and her daughter, Rebecca Walker.

On Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviews David Sedaris about When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

At The New Republic, Steven Pinker eviscerates the right’s rubric for opposing biomedical research.

The problem is that “dignity” is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, “Dignity Is a Useless Concept.” Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy–the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another.

Mainichi Daily News has the second interview in its series of engagements with Haruki Murakami.

Robert Chalmers interviews Gore Vidal for The Independent.

Recommended with reservations.

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control.

At The New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton contemplates the fate of research libraries in the age of the Internet.

The New Yorker has a new English translation of a Nabokov short story (circa 1924).

For the New York Times, Edward Wyatt collects whispers about electronic books at BookExpo America.

Booksellers, who make up the other major group attending the publishing convention, are also concerned that electronic books could become more than a passing fancy for an electronically savvy subset of customers. “It certainly does feel like a threat,” said Charles Stillwagon, the events manager at the Tattered Cover Book Store, a large independent bookseller in Denver.