Recommended.

At the Globe and Mail, T. F. Rigelhof reviews Rawi Hage’s Cockroach.

[This] is an angry and agnostic book that will seriously annoy those unmoved and unshaken Bushites to the south, Harperites to the west and Péquistes in Hage’s hometown, who have yet to “realize that we are all gatherers and wanderers, ever bound to cross each other’s paths, and that these paths belong to us all.” And whom will it delight? The July issue of New Scientist shows that readers of narrative fiction score higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than those who don’t.

The Guardian has a gallery of books with odd titles.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

Reiji Yoshida of The Japan Times writes of the shrinking domestic publishing industry.

According to an annual survey by the Yomiuri Shimbun, 52 percent of 1,812 adult respondents said last October they did not read a book in the previous month, 14 points above the figure 20 years earlier.

The percentage of people who read one to three books a month had exceeded those who read none until the early 1990s. But the latter group has exceeded the former in number since the late 1990s, according to the survey.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Alan Cheuse reviews Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain and Roma Tearne’s Mosquito.

Recommended with reservations.

At the New York Times, Richard Eder reviews Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark.

The Sunday Times excerpts Kathleen Parker’s incendiary Save the Males.

. . .The reality is that men already have been screwed – and not in the way they prefer. For the past 30 years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life’s ills. Males as a group – not random men – are bad by virtue of their DNA.

While women have been cast as victims, martyrs, mystics or saints, men have quietly retreated into their caves, the better to muffle emotions that fluctuate between hilarity (are these bitches crazy or what?) and rage (yes, they are and they’ve got our kids).

Well, on balance, my stories are longer, I guess. But not so much as to be distinctive. I had to answer this question recently, of what it was I thought I was trying to do, and I came up with this formulation: that, for me, the project of fiction is to articulate consciousness with integrity.

Luna Park interviews Nam Le.

Sian Pattenden at the Guardian notes Random House’s attempt to sneak an unacceptable termination clause into the contracts of writers of children’s books.

Recommended.

Fresh Air remembers Ted Solotaroff, founder of The New American Review.

A short article at Thanh Nien Daily touts Hanoi’s temple of literature.

At the Financial Times, Richard T. Kelly reviews John Berger’s Booker-longlisted From A to X.

The Washington Post has Carolyn See’s review of Xiaolu Guo’s Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.

In the Village Voice, Sarah Norris reviews Sana Krasikov’s One More Year.

[Krasikov's] subjects, many of whom are Eastern European immigrants settled in America, struggle with predicaments—initially intended to be short-term—that they fear are becoming permanent.

“Last December. . .a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” The speaker is Leo Liebenstein, a New York psychiatrist, and the wife is Rema, an Argentine considerably younger than her husband. Confronted with this ingenious impostor (she’s so good he briefly contemplates the possibility that one of her feet might really be his wife’s), Leo is initially nonplused. Soon, however, he formulates a plan: find the real Rema.

Laura Miller at Salon reviews Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances.

The New York Times has an article on the passing of L. Rust Hills.

Not recommended.

In “What Would Allende Say?” at n + 1, Luke Epplin examines the lasting influence of a political project that never came to completion.

At the Guardian Alison Flood writes of the somber tone of this year’s rentrée.

WHYY’s Fresh Air interviews Ron Suskind. Suskind’s book, The Way of the World, alleges criminal behavior in the push for war with Iraq.

Recommended with reservations.

The Atlantic Monthly has “We Are All Businessmen” by Mark Fabiano.

The bus bounces over the lot and onto the road. Blue smoke makes us all cough, and the driver grinds the gears as he shifts up. The town passes from view and we head into the countryside, where there are no foreigners. The ride is bumpy, and there are no scenic views. I often wonder what Mr. Richard and the others would see if they came along. Like this. My best part of the day is getting off the bus in my village and walking down the road to my house. Of village life, they never see how we may live, our families working in the spice garden. Yes, they know about the kingfishers and monkeys. They don’t know how we strive daily to make our house clean from the dust, and without electricity and running water, we live OK.

In the New York Sun, Adam Kirsch writes of literature’s ability to cope with terror.

Recommended with reservations.

At the Powell’s Books blog, Jonathan Segura submits a defense of unlikable protagonists.

After a century and a half of famine, war, weakness, foreign occupation, and revolutionary extremism, a growing number of Chinese have come to look to the Olympic Games as the long-heralded symbolic moment when their country might at last escape old stereotypes of being the hapless “poor man of Asia”; a preyed-upon “defenseless giant”; victim of a misguided Cultural Revolution; the benighted land where in 1989 the People’s Liberation Army fired on “the people.”

In the New York Review of Books, Orville Schell explores the theme.

At Salon Rebecca Johnson goes in search of blurbs.

That compassion is natural to human beings there is no question. But does it pertain to our higher or to our lower natures? As even or precisely those who take compassion for a virtue acknowledge, it is an emotion. Can an emotion be a virtue? Yes, if the keynote of virtue is naturalness in the sense of spontaneity or authenticity. No, if what defines virtue is the perfection of our nature through the triumph of reason over passion. For this reason the long history of thought about compassion (stretching back at least 2,500 years now) has revolved around just this issue.

Clifford Orwin writes of today’s slippery wedge emotion at In Character.

Recommended.

At the Guardian, Maya Jaggi profiles Gao Xingjian.

The market pressures China now shares with the west are, he believes, “harder to resist than political and social customs”. He feels lucky that his ink paintings were selling in Europe before he fled, and have been widely exhibited. “I could make a living, so I could write books that didn’t sell much. I always understood that literature can’t be a trade; it’s a choice.”

Forbes notes that Amazon is acquiring AbeBooks.