The Times Literary Supplement hosts a selection from the print edition’s Books of the Year list.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a segment by Rick Kleffel on the art of translation.

Recommended with reservations.

Millions of journal articles are available online, enabling scholars to find material they never would have encountered at their university libraries. From classic psychology studies to the most esoteric literary theory, it’s all just a few clicks away.

A recent study, however, suggests that despite this cornucopia, the boom in online research may actually have a “narrowing” effect on scholarship. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work.

In the Boston Globe, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow examines the findings.

Recommended.

The New York Times has Liesl Schillinger’s review of Stalin’s Children by Owen Matthews.

When Matthews’s maternal grand mother was released from the gulag in 1948, her reaction to the sight of 14-year-old Lyudmila, whom she’d last seen as a healthy toddler, was less heartwarming: “The first glimpse Martha had of her younger daughter was a crippled silhouette at the end of the hall. Martha called out Lyudmila’s name, and howled as the little girl ran lopsidedly towards her. Lyudmila remembered that awful wail all her life.”

Still a Communist party member, Saramago describes himself as a “hormonal communist - just as there’s a hormone that makes my beard grow every day. I don’t make excuses for what communist regimes have done - the church has done a lot of wrong things, burning people at the stake. But I have the right to keep my ideas. I’ve found nothing better.”

At the Guardian, Maya Jaggi interviews José Saramago.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designates Iowa City, Iowa, the world’s third City of Literature.

More than 1,200 emerging and established writers from more than 120 countries have been in residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, which has enjoyed long-standing support from the U.S. Department of State. Writers have included such luminaries as Bessie Head, Bei Dao, Luisa Valenzuela, John Banville and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk. Each fall these writers participate in dozens of public events, including readings and panel discussions.

I was invited by Riky Stock of the German Book Office to give a presentation to GBO directors from around the world about publishing post-financial collapse. Which is a pretty big topic, and one that will probably dominate conversations post-holiday season, especially if the retail sector struggles as much as people are predicting.

At Three Percent, Chad W. Post serializes his talk.

Not recommended.

The National Book Foundation announces the winners of the 2008 National Book Awards. Mark Doty is the recipient of the award in poetry, and Peter Matthiessen is the recipient of the award in fiction.

Recommended with reservations.

In Bookforum Keith Gessen examines books on Edward Said (The Legacy of Edward W. Said) and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (The Soul and Barbed Wire).

At Slate Ron Rosenbaum sounds the new-media warning bell.

If this reads like an apostasy, it also looks like part of a larger withering of faith. Detroit is having a cataclysmic year while bus and train riderships exceed capacities, the once unsurpassed American road network is in vast disrepair and in countries from Japan to England, fewer people are undergoing the adolescent ritual of getting a driver’s license.

In the New York Times, Tom Vanderbilt reviews Brian Ladd’s Autophobia.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s biography of V. S. Naipaul.

. . .according to French and such one-time friends as Paul Theroux, the young Vidia really could be humorous and charming, and he seems to have been the indulged pet of the English literary and social establishment. On his travels, surprisingly, Naipaul also shows a rare ability to win the confidence and help of other people — not that he is a person one could ever actually trust.

Recommended with reservations.

In the Guardian, Richard Lea reports the winners of France’s Goncourt and Renaudot prizes.

The tapestries that hung so self-sufficiently at the end of part one of the novel become a backdrop for social criticism in part two. Malte seems to be merely historicizing them at first, noting that these tapestries used to hang in a private house, among the descendants of the fifteenth-century knight who commissioned them. But then he turns and notices that there are girls in the museum, modern girls with sketch pads who, like the tapestries, have moved out of the old houses and now live independently, with no one to fasten the backs of their dresses. These aristocratic girls dimly recognize that the lady in the tapestry represents everything that would have been theirs if family and religion and feminine passivity were still triumphant.

Writing for The Nation, Benjamin Lytal revisits Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

The LRB has Colm Tóibín’s review of Andrea Weiss’s In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Heidi Benson profiles Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books.

Pairing writer with subject is an art. And such matchmaking is “part of the excitement of being an editor,” Silvers said. “We want brilliant and beautiful articles - works of criticism and imagination.” From the start, he added, “if we [Barbara Epstein and himself] had one thing in common, it was this feeling of intense admiration for wonderful writers.”

At Slate, Adam Kirsch reviews Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

For the New York Times, Peter Stevenson reviews Donald Hall’s Unpacking the Boxes.

He is hinting at that uncanny sensation one can have as a child when something vividly alive and unfathomable, which defies description, is very much “happening.” (The parent asks the child what she did today. “Oh, nothing.”) The fact that Hall can evoke the fused aliveness and alienation of such “nothing happenings” is one reason for his success as a poet.

Recommended with reservations.

To say John Leonard was a reviewer at heart is to pay a great compliment to a profession that currently seems to be limping toward an undeserved obsolescence. I remember having lunch with him in a ratty ethnic dive off Times Square in early 2000, when he explained that, what with one thing and another, he’d somehow drifted out of the practice of reviewing books. That happens to many a fine critic; take time off to write your own book or to work some other beat, and eventually you migrate to the inactive section of book review editors’ rolodexes. It bothered him.

At Salon Laura Miller remembers John Leonard.

The Guardian has images of the front pages of newspapers following Barack Obama’s historic election victory.

In City Pages Ben Westhoff profiles Graywolf Press.

“Writers think of it as one of the best presses in America, I know that for a fact,” [Robert] Boswell says. “As a literary writer, you’re looking for a press that’s interested in publishing the highest-quality work they can find. In theory every press is trying to do that, but in practice a lot of presses are [too] driven by the bottom line. I feel that Graywolf genuinely practices that policy.”

“My policy is as radical…as the constitution,” said FDR during the 1932 election campaign when he was accused of wanting to nationalise the utilities.

The Economist reviews H. W. Brands’s biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Recommended.

These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.

In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith follows two paths for the novel.

At the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows explains why China is so awful at managing its own reputation.