In the Washington Post, Donna Rifkind reviews Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered.

In the New York Times, Lydia Millet reviews Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask.

At National Public Radio, Maud Newton recommends Brian Dillon’s The Hypochondriacs.

Dillon is an unusually dexterous writer. Each of his slim chapters focuses on a different artist or thinker, and each fully evokes the subject’s fears and afflictions, showing how they’re reflected in his or her life’s work. Charlotte Bronte, for instance, was beset by headaches, chest pain and nervous, melancholic breakdowns that became a central theme of her fiction and tended to lift when she finished a novel.

In the New York Times, Jason Goodwin reviews Paul Theroux’s A Dead Hand.

The novel’s subtitle, “A Crime in Calcutta,” nods toward the current vogue for exotic detective stories and suggests that Theroux has absorbed the interesting fact that detective fiction has turned out to be the new travel writing. A great deal of place and history can be smuggled into the lush confines of the crime novel; people who might rather see foreign sights on YouTube or the Travel Channel than read a book devoted to them can still be jolted into pursuing a thriller that happens to be set in, say, Iceland or Istanbul.

On National Public Radio, Michael Schaub recommends Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.

In the New York Times Dwight Garner reviews Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.

In the Washington Post, Dennis Drabelle reviews Jonathan R. Cole’s The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected.

Cole’s prescriptions for improving American higher education include a push for more emphasis on the humanities. “The discrepancy between the growth of federal investments in the sciences and the humanities is appalling,” he writes toward the end of the book. “The humanities are essential to our understanding of other languages and cultures, of the values we hold, and of the moral arguments we make. In a world that increasingly depends on such knowledge for both our economic welfare . . . and our national security, the absence of significant programs to improve our grasp of it represents nothing short of a national disaster.”

For The Globe and Mail Edward Shorter measures two recent books on the human male anatomy, Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis and The Naked Man: A Study of the Male Body.

In the New York Times, Will Blythe reviews Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Henry Porter’s The Bell Ringers.

This is a sophisticated, engrossing and important political thriller. Porter wants us to see that the same technological tools that can be used to fight terrorism or to make government more efficient can also, in the wrong hands, be used to destroy freedom. Perhaps Porter’s most important updating of Orwell is to show how corporate money might work with political corruption to create a dictatorship behind a democratic facade.

At National Public Radio, Heller McAlpin reviews T. C. Boyle’s Wild Child.

For The Guardian Tim Adams reviews Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow.

Amis starts with a typically arch ­disclaimer, the suggestion that his tale – like the murder story in London Fields – is another “gift from real life”. ­”Everything that follows is true,” he drawls, blowing smoke at the reader. “The castle is true. The girls are all true, and the boys are all true. Not even the names have been changed. Why bother? To protect the innocent? There were no innocent…” He has said elsewhere that the novel is “blindingly autobiographical” and, though names obviously have been changed, you half believe him.

The appearance in English of this new version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s best novel, mistranslated as “The First Circle” when it appeared in Britain and America more than 40 years ago, is an exciting literary event that is destined to be little noticed or appreciated in our Twitterized times.

Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post reviews the new version of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle.

In the New York Times, Roxana Robinson reviews Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges.

At the core of this intelligent and ambitious book are questions about values. Dee’s primary message — that the family is essential to society, that we abandon it at our peril — is persuasive. Less so is the notion that uxorious idealism, not greed, might lie behind insider trading.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Alan Cheuse reviews J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists.

In one of my favorite chapters, Eco describes rhetorical devices, or tropes, used in listmaking, such as asyndeton, the avoidance of conjunctions. For example, I left out “and” when speaking of “schedules, calendars, in-boxes, deadlines, memoranda.” Asyndeton conveys the impression that a series could go on forever. In my immediately following sentence, I employed polysyndeton, in which a conjunction — in this case “or” — appears between each activity mentioned. Such repetition creates a feeling of almost naive breathlessness or awe, as if the writer, overwhelmed by the number of choices, can only point to an item there and another here and still another over there and . . .

In the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed.

In the Washington Post, Jason Goodwin reviews John Burdett’s The Godfather of Kathmandu.

If you wanted to try to make sense of the global banking crisis, instead of merely weeping openly at your A.T.M. balance, 2009 was a very good year. Bookstores were filled with volumes that, with expert 20-20 hindsight, explained how capitalism went to hell.

For the New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay.

At Slate Stephen Metcalf rereads John Knowles’s A Separate Peace for its fiftieth anniversary.

Rereading A Separate Peace for the first time in 30 years, I was surprised to discover its setting is the least anachronistic thing about it. A Separate Peace takes place at a New Hampshire prep school modeled not at all loosely on Exeter, where Knowles had been a student in the ’40s. Movies like Dead Poets Society, about boys knuckling under to a rheumatic American upper class and its to-the-hounds! institutions, derive from a lazy reading of A Separate Peace. A Separate Peace derives, for better and worse, from the thing itself.

For the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Dominick Dunne’s Too Much Money.

It is this book’s style to obfuscate ever so slightly (the Astor name becomes Harcourt, and the troublemaking relative becomes a nephew) while still allowing — no, insisting — that readers’ noses stay pressed to the glass of New York’s whirl of bold-face names. If you can’t figure out or don’t care that the talk show host called Harry Sovereign may be Larry King, this is not a book for you.

M. A. Orthofer of The Complete Review critiques Hansjörg Schertenleib’s A Happy Man.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow.

This was only the beginning of the weirdness. After a brief trip to the United States with his mother in tow, Perelman retreated to St. Petersburg and ceased communication with all but a few colleagues vetting his work. He declined the Fields Medal, a gesture equivalent to snubbing the Nobel committee.

For the New York Times, Jascha Hoffman reviews Masha Gessen’s Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century.

Retired Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl, who has her own action figure, recommends holiday books on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition.

Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers.

It is a novel about many things, all of them interesting and explored by Vásquez with acute moral sensitivity, but at its core is one of the greatest of all literary themes: betrayal.

In the New York Times, Jonathan Mahler reviews Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.

At Néojaponisme Daniel Morales reviews Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.

Some unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate) souls will choose 1Q84 as their very first Murakami novel. As they follow Aomame and Tengo through the confusion of the novel and experience a Murakami world for the first time, they too will likely be drawn in by the dialogue, by the pregnant pauses, by the temple rubbing and lack of responses to important questions. By the music references, some of the lofty overtones in the first chapter, and the hints of warmth and connection implied in the final chapter. If new readers like the book, they still have the strongest part of his catalog left to enjoy. On the other hand, they might be expecting more of the same. Experienced Murakami readers will recognize connections with his old works, and if they strain their eyes hard enough, they might even be able to see flashes of the old boku as he is bricked in for good by the third-person narrative in 1Q84.

At Slate Judith Shulevitz reviews Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

Meloy’s grasp of our civic abdication is clear-sighted, large-hearted, and desperately necessary. Her pity flows most abundantly for its victims. This is an understandable sentiment but also, at times, a literary liability. Meloy feels such anguish for the innocent that she cleaves to them almost too closely. There is a superabundance here of the child’s point of view.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Keith Thomas’s The Ends of Life.

When young, we are all aesthetes, eager to enjoy a wondrous world full of beauty, promise and reward. The experience of life itself seems enough to keep us busy and happy. So we fall in love and go to work and find success or not, and the decades roll by.

In later years, however, we become unwilling philosophers. A parent unexpectedly dies. The now-grown children go off on their own. Work suddenly loses its savor. Before long, we are taking long walks and wondering about the old perplexities: What makes for a meaningful life? How should we pass our too few days upon this Earth? What really matters?

For Salon Laura Miller reviews Nick Laird’s Glover’s Mistake.

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times reviews Stieg Larsson’s second thriller.

The ending of “The Girl Who Played With Fire” — like the revelation about Salander’s past, which gives the book its title — comes straight out of a horror movie: it’s gory, harrowing and operatically over the top. The reason it works is the same reason that “Dragon Tattoo” worked: Mr. Larsson’s two central characters, Salander and Blomkvist, transcend their genre and insinuate themselves in the reader’s mind through their oddball individuality, their professional competence and, surprisingly, their emotional vulnerability.

At National Public Radio, Maud Newton recommends Samantha Peale’s The American Painter Emma Dial.

Emma, in the employ of a critically acclaimed painter, hasn’t visited her studio in a year. Her self-loathing is palpable; the prose vibrates with the heat of her disgust. (The author herself served as a studio assistant to Jeff Koons — the controversial “King of Kitsch” — and would have had the opportunity to witness this creative trap first-hand.)

At Salon Stephanie Zacharek reviews Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.

Shell begins by outlining the history of mass production in America (perhaps not surprisingly, firearms were among the first items to be mass-produced) and the rise of the discount chain. In the late 1800s a sickly farmer’s son named Frank W. Woolworth opened the first “five-and-dime”; later, foreshadowing a future that workers around the world now seem doomed to live out, he quipped, “We must have cheap labor or we cannot sell cheap goods. When a clerk gets so good she can earn better wages elsewhere, let her go.” The understanding is that she’ll have somewhere else to go, where her skills and talents are wanted or needed, considered something worth paying for. But increasingly in our current work climate, more skills only make a worker more expensive and possibly more demanding, not more desirable.

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games.

When political leaders are ignorant of history, as the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate most certainly was, yet seek to employ it toward their own ends, the inevitable result is a distortion of history that is unwitting at best, deliberate at worst. It is easy to find in the past justifications or excuses for doing what one wants. It is rather more difficult to examine the past thoroughly and objectively and to learn whatever lessons it may teach us, however inconvenient they may seem.

The Economist has a review of Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World.

For The Nation George Scialabba reviews books by two authors who would like to lay claim to modern liberalism.

William F. Buckley Jr., if I recall correctly, once declared wearily that he was determined not to read another book vindicating liberalism or reflecting on its prospects until his grandmother wrote one. Old Billzebub may have been right, for once: liberals do seem peculiarly given to anxious self-examination and self-justification. Still, an uneasy conscience is better than no conscience, which has been the general rule among conservatives since 1980 at least. So let us attend, even if a little wearily, while Alan Wolfe and Jedediah Purdy examine contemporary liberalism’s entrails and peer into its future.

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Ward Just’s Exiles in the Garden.

Reading these tales of bluff, brusque people who wrestle clumsily with emotions, you get the impression that self-analysis may be less popular in some parts of the country than it is on the coasts.

For the New York Times, Liesl Schillinger reviews Robert Boswell’s The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards.

The Literary Review has Richard Overy’s critique of Bertrand M. Patenaude’s Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky.

What is the deal with Western men’s erotic obsession with the East?

At Salon Laura Miller reviews Richard Bernstein’s The East, the West, and Sex.

The New York Times has Janet Maslin’s review of Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.

What these opening passages also announce is that Mr. Currie is a startlingly talented writer whose book will pay no heed to ordinary narrative conventions. His thoughts on cosmic doom somehow take the form of a joyride. He survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and writes in a tenderly mordant voice of his own. He seems equipped to succeed at almost anything, in fact, except giving his books decent titles. “Everything Matters!” is his first novel unless you count the fanciful 2007 novel in stories that he perversely chose to name “God Is Dead.”

In Bookforum Mark Rozzo reviews Victor LaValle’s Big Machine.

The band of assorted former miscreants who have ended up at the Washburn Library include former prostitutes and identity thieves, all of whom seem to have no idea why they’ve been called there or what, exactly, the point of being there is. But no one seems to mind. As a nattily attired man called the Dean informs them, they are the newest class of “Unlikely Scholars,” and they will now devote their days to archival labors, scanning the nation’s dailies for stories about unexplained phenomena (ghosts, space aliens) buried in the human-interest pages, crowded out by headlines about Iraq, natural disasters, and hedge-fund calamities. “What others threw away,” Ricky reflects, “we savored.” The work was “pseudoscience, like phrenology or investment banking.”

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Ron Carlson’s The Signal.

Carlson never drops an extra word or a false phrase, even as “The Signal” accelerates like an avalanche, suspicion rolling into fear and then roaring down with a conclusion that shakes the ground. If men can’t be brought back to fiction by books as fine as this one, it’s their own damn fault.

At n+1 Benjamin Kunkel examines the insidious pull of networked living.

My hope is that these reminders will keep me from succumbing any further to a pastime that has already cut deeper into my more serious reading and writing than I’d like, and that has led me to partcipate in the great ongoing suicide (by freeloading content) of the intellectual class. Thinking of the internet, I remember the reflections of Proust’s Swann on his mistress Odette: To think I spent years of my life on a woman who did not appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type! Of course—one recalls that word domestication—he married her all the same.

At Salon Allen Barra reviews Aleksandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Richard Flanagan’s Wanting.

Lady Jane, now widowed, has dedicated her life to defending her late husband’s reputation from reports that he and his crew failed to discover the Northwest Passage and resorted to cannibalism before expiring in a manner unbecoming to British gentlemen. Determined to raise her husband above such ignoble rumors, Lady Jane enlists the help of the age’s most popular writer, Charles Dickens, who not only defends Franklin’s incorruptible British spirit but goes on to write and star in a sensationally popular play about the expedition!

The New York Times has David Orr’s review of Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009.

In the Washington Post, Marie Arana reviews Chesa Boudin’s Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America.

Eventually, Boudin admits, the American left is the real destination of his journey. “I came to see Latin America,” he writes, “as a prism through which I could better understand my own roots in the radical left in the United States, and the role my country plays in a global society.”

So, there we have it. Though we await desperately needed insights into the promise that has always been Latin America, we get the shaky road map of a callow young man.

For National Public Radio, Laurel Maury reviews Joanna Smith Rakoff’s A Fortunate Age.

Bookforum has Michael Kazin’s review of D. D. Guttenplan’s American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone.

For Slate Michael Wood reviews Gerald Martin’s Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.

In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Reynolds Price’s Ardent Spirits.

When Auden finally left Oxford, the neat and tidy Price was given a glimpse of the poet’s living quarters: “I looked round at two rooms in a state of disarray that I’d never before seen generated by any human being. And Wystan had only been in residence for two months. The desk, the floors, the tables, and every other surface were inches — if not feet — deep in abandoned books, magazines, clothing, galley proofs, dirty dishes, whatever. My face may have betrayed my literal shock; but Auden only gave a brisk wave above the chaos and said ‘If you’d like to come back later and see if there’s anything you want, by all means do.’”

The Village Voice has Jed Lipinski’s review of Lawrence Osborne’s Bangkok Days.

For The Wall Street Journal, John Gross reviews David Castronovo’s Blokes.

Perhaps no writer of stature, if only by dint of having exceptional gifts, qualifies as a bloke in this second sense. Certainly the members of Mr. Castronovo’s chosen quartet don’t. They were difficult, aggressive and self-centered: They cultivated a number of blokish tastes but also remained stubbornly literary, remote in many of their interests from the general mass of men and women.

In the New York Times, Liesl Schillinger reviews Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Christina Sunley recommends Halldór Laxness’s Independent People.

The trendy notion that each person has a unique learning style comes under an especially withering assault. “How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?” asks Mr. Willingham’s hypothetical teacher. The disillusioning reply: “No one has found consistent evidence supporting a theory describing such a difference. . . . Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.”

The Wall Street Journal has Christopher F. Chabris’s review of Daniel T. Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom.

In the New York Times, Clive James reviews John Updike’s Endpoint.

The way these poems search their author’s early mind suggests he has belatedly discovered a modus operandi that he might have used all along. He used the novel instead, with results that we all know.

WHYY’s Fresh Air has Maureen Corrigan’s review of What Are Intellectuals Good For? by George Scialabba.

Chiang emerges as a flesh-and-blood man rather than the buffoonish cardboard-cutout figure he has generally been portrayed as. China’s nationalist leader is revealed as a tormented soul, as prone to bursting into tears as into angry tirades, who through force of will conquered his own demons to — as he saw it — lead his people out of colonial oppression and moral decay to forge a strong, unified nation.

The Washington Post has Laura Tyson Li’s review of Jay Taylor’s The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China.

In the New York Times, Joan Silber reviews Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore.

Yoon’s narratives face the interesting challenge of relying on characters who don’t exactly believe in action. The sea woman, contemplating why she never remarried after the war, simply thinks, “A life was formed and she took it.” While a number of people here are tormented by longing — an orphan is sure that more than one man is the lost boy she once took care of; a young girl keeps seeing a ghostly woman in the snow wearing a dress like her dead mother’s — their yearnings result more in frustrated gestures than in actual drama.

The New Republic highlights its Nabokov archive.

Having recently re-read Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” I am struck by the parallels and affinities between it and “Closing Time.” As boys both Wright and Queenan were poor, often to the point of having little or nothing to eat; both had bad relationships with their father; both were driven to read at a very early age, read everything they could, and set their hearts on the writing life. It is possible to rise up from poverty, but it takes a rare soul to do so, and a force of will that those of us who are more fortunate are ill-equipped to understand.

Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews Joe Queenan’s Closing Time.

In the New York Times, Pico Iyer reviews Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.

For those who hoped that the rainbow nation emerging miraculously from the ashes of apartheid would bed down into a pluralistic and genuinely multiracial democracy, this trio of books provides a painful dose of disappointing scepticism.

The Economist offers a capsule review of R.W. Johnson’s South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid, Andrew Feinstein’s After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa’s Uncertain Future, and Alec Russell’s Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa, from Mandela to Zuma.

In Bookforum Peter Gay reviews Jenny Davidson’s Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century.

As his power leaves him, Selig writes: “I make lists now of the things I once could do that I can no longer. Inventories of the shrinkage. Like a dying man confined to his bed, paralyzed but observant, watching his relatives pilfer his goods. This day the television set has gone, and this day the Thackeray first editions . . . and tomorrow it will be the pots and pans, the Venetian blinds, my neckties.” In the end, as Shakespeare said long ago, we are left “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, which was recently reissued by Orb.

At Slate Judith Shulevitz reviews Amos Oz’s Rhyming Life and Death.

There are a lot of ways this book might have turned out. It could have been a rueful, self-congratulatory look back over a career—a Stardust Memories in novelistic form. It could have been a knit-browed investigation into the ethics of fiction. Instead, and luckily for us, Oz has boiled it down to a juicily sadistic fable of creation. Grim as the Author’s world is, it is also a demonically joyous production. He takes great pleasure in fashioning his characters, but he takes as much pleasure, or more, in wounding them. That is how he brings them to life.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Cambridge University Press’s The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940.

In reviewing two new family memoirs–The Sisters Antipodes by Jane Alison and When Skateboards Will Be Free by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh–Andrew O’Hehir at Salon appropriately begins with Larkin.

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Richard Mason’s Natural Elements.

Chad W. Post of Three Percent reviews Can Xue’s Five Spice Street.

The Complete Review critiques Tarek Eltayeb’s Cities Without Palms.

In Bookforum Kevin Canfield reviews Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Alan Cheuse reviews Jesse Ball’s The Way Through Doors and John Wray’s Lowboy.

Barbara Vine is a pen name used by the crime novelist Ruth Rendell, ostensibly for stories of psychological suspense rather than the police procedurals of the Inspector Wexford series, though this distinction is not strictly observed. Rendell’s detective fiction has its moments, but seldom transcends its genre. However, her less conventional novels deploy a sardonic moral calculus reminiscent of a certain dark vein in British literary fiction.

Laura Miller of Salon reviews Barbara Vine’s The Birthday Present.

The New Criterion has Stefan Beck’s review of John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings and Cheever: A Life.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Theodor Storm’s The Rider on the White Horse.

Throughout his fiction Storm repeatedly evokes the beauty of nature, “the sharp odor of the golden tansy blossoms,” the “grieving voices” of sea birds, the “secret music of the summer night.” But he also celebrates the simple pleasures of long ago: “We had jokes and riddles and rhymes at the table; and when they served dessert, we sang all the lovely songs that are now forgotten.” Somehow, he makes this nostalgia avoid the taint of mawkishness. Sometimes, this is through a sudden harsh truth: “For the first time she was facing life directly, in all its barren poverty: it was a path that seemed endless, dry; until, suddenly, it did end: you died.”

At The New Republic, Michael Tomasky reviews Leonard Downie Jr.’s The Rules of the Game.

As Critchley, chairman of the philosophy department at the New School for Social Research in New York, sees it, the great deficiency of modern life lies in our too-common unwillingness to fully acknowledge our mortality. Frantic to “deny the fact of death,” we “run headlong into the watery pleasures of forgetfulness” — namely, traditional religion and New Age claptrap promising us one or another form of immortality.

At Salon Laura Miller reviews Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers.

In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.

Nelson never chafes against the limitations of her chosen form, the realistic, well-made story. It’s the ideal medium for a writer who isn’t afraid to remind us of the familiar, who values insight over epiphany.

In the New York Times, Adam Kirsch reviews Antonya Nelson’s Nothing Right.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has Carlin Romano’s review of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct.

A novel that sets out to be diligently authentic in its treatment of history may deserve admiration. But it’s more impressive when a subject amply documented by historians is transformed into an independent work of the imagination, and we keep reading not because our knowledge of the past is being enhanced but because the fiction earns our attention in its own right, as a verbal adventure that uses historical material without being constrained by it.

In the New York Times, Joanna Scott reviews T. C. Boyle’s The Women.

The New York Times has Martin Walker’s review of Jonathan Brent’s Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia.

If one hero emerges from “Inside the Stalin Archives” it is Aleksandr Yakovlev, a former Columbia University graduate student and Soviet ambassador to Canada, and perhaps the real intellectual author of glasnost and perestroika. Yakovlev, badly wounded in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, was a traditional Russian intellectual who had a bumpy career in the party until Gorbachev brought him onto the Polit buro to be its most liberal voice. After Gorbachev’s fall, Yakovlev continued to campaign for full disclosure of the Soviet past, and he tells Brent of one of the pivotal moments in the last days of the Soviet regime. In the winter of 1991, when Lithuanian crowds began demonstrating against Soviet rule, Gorbachev asked Yakovlev, “Should we shoot?”

At Slate David Greenberg reviews William E. Leuchtenburg’s biography of Herbert Hoover.

Insignificant presidents force their authors into strained claims that their present obscurity is undeserved, while giants like FDR defy encapsulation in 200 pages. So Hoover is a choice assignment. Understanding the advent of the New Deal is impossible without insight into his failures. And yet Hoover is largely forgotten: In 2004, John Kerry’s presidential campaign stopped comparing Bush’s dismal record on job creation to Hoover’s when polling discovered that most Americans barely knew who he was.

The New York Times has David Kusnet’s review of Jeff Madrick’s The Case for Big Government.

To those who ask whether any country has ever taxed and spent its way to prosperity, Madrick offers two answers: the United States and its major competitors. In America, the greatest growth in public spending came during the most prosperous period in American history, the 25 years after World War II, when the federal, state and local government budgets “reached roughly 30 percent” of gross domestic product “and income levels in America became more equal.” Among the world’s most prosperous nations, most have higher rates of taxes and public spending, and many may have higher living standards, than the United States. “There really is no example of small government among rich nations,” Madrick observes.

In the LRB James Wolcott reviews John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick.

Heavy on mortality, light on morbidity, Updike elegises entropy American-style with a resigned, paternal, disappointed affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm.

Slate has Johann Hari’s review of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau.

In the New York Times, Susann Cokal reviews Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Sky Below.

[The novel] moves along fast and offers some vivid writing. But it’s more annoying than pleasing. The problems include too many wisecracks, too much profanity, too many “colorful” characters and a general feeling that the author is trying too hard.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Ira Berkowitz’s Old Flame.

For Salon Andrew O’Hehir reviews Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air.

Although Johnson does his best to view the rest of Priestley’s life and career through an optimistic prism, other authors might indeed paint it more sardonically. After making a discovery so big no living person could understand it, he was first driven out of England by monarchist, Anglican thugs (as amusing as that concept may sound today) and then demonized as a French spy and nearly deported from the United States under the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts signed by his former friend John Adams.

The Complete Review critiques Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years.

. . . Raffel’s translation loses the original’s music without finding a music of its own; he is wordy where the original is pithy and bare where the original is lush. Chaucer is in many ways the progenitor of English fiction—he is closer to Dickens than to Keats—but he is also a great master of English poetry; and since poetry is what is lost in translation, why not take the trouble to read the original and avoid the loss?

At Slate Adam Kirsch reviews Burton Raffel’s translation of The Canterbury Tales.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Simon Lewis’s Bad Traffic.

It has been Jian’s habit, since his days as a Red Guard, to recite the sayings of Chairman Mao as he goes into battle. Thus: “He watched the peasant scuttle forlornly away. He rubbed earth on his face and over the hammer, so that they didn’t shine, and put the hooded top over his football shirt and pulled the hood up. He mumbled ’surmount every difficulty to win victory,’ and set off down the track.”

If the high concept here is a poet in the middle of life’s journey bushwhacking through the dark wood of postmodern moral desolation, the piecemeal upshot feels more like a Lonely Planet guide to millennial anomie: Auden’s age of anxiety updated and downgraded as an era of vulgarity and travesty.

In the New York Times, David Barber reviews William Logan’s Strange Flesh.

There is in an important way no difference between her own experience and a particularly absorbing book she might be reading. One can’t help but admire the intricate mental apparatus at work: She is writing notes on her notes. These private jottings are, like her famous essays, almost entirely abstract and cerebral: She almost never describes the physical world, what the sky looked like, the smell of orange trees in Seville, or what she and her lover ate for breakfast.

At Slate Katie Roiphe reviews Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963.

The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror–especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose “lost causes” Zizek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes–the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult.

In The New Republic, Adam Kirsch reviews Slavoj Zizek.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews José Saramago’s Death with Interruptions.

The story opens at the start of a new year in a small, unnamed modern country. As is typical of the allegorical universalism in much of Saramago’s work, we never get a precise location or time period. The frenetic, amiable narrator refers to characters only by each one’s generic function: e.g. prime minister, mother, editor. All of them are confronting the most unusual nonevent in human history: “No one died. . . . New year’s eve had failed to leave behind it the usual calamitous trail of fatalities, as if old atropos with her great bared teeth had decided to put aside her shears for a day.”

I can well believe Johnson might have wanted to show that Lulu never does truly go to Marrakesh — there’s a hint of irony in her title. The trouble is that the reader doesn’t get there either.

In the New York Times, Erica Wagner reviews Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakech.

A roundup at New York Magazine considers The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, To Siberia, Chicago, Sea of Poppies, and The Prospector.

Salon has James Hannaham’s review of Nancy Huston’s Fault Lines.

Sol, an arrogant boy from California, is convinced he is some sort of messiah. Huston draws him with biting specificity and detail, in the process nailing the dark side of American narcissism and child worship. She has a fast-paced style, as breathless as Philip Roth’s, deceptively light though deeply engaged in current events. Sol’s parents have childproofed the house by covering the electrical sockets and putting soft corners on all the furniture, but as soon as Sol is alone, he enthusiastically seeks out images of pornography and torture on the Internet. Huston spares us neither the outrageous vulgarity of the hypocritical environment in which Sol’s parents raise him nor its appalling effect on his personality.

In the Village Voice, Jed Lipinski reviews Glen Pourciau’s Invite.

. . .both the form and content of Invite remain half-imprisoned by Carver’s influence. All the shopworn hallmarks are here: the drinking and cigarette smoking as a sign of inner turmoil; the clipped names (Don, Lou, Cam, Liv) meant to symbolize a working-class existence; the recidivist troublemakers who are, unironically, “at it again.” Pourciau seems tempted by irony and postmodern mischief, but in the end, he’s unwilling to let go of Carver’s staid earnestness.

More aspects of Rimbaud are known than can be assimilated: his vastly various, influential and innovative poetry itself; his expressive letters; his scornful and unhesitating permanent abandonment of poetry at the age of 20; the anecdotes of his contemporaries showing him as a drunken, filthy, amoral homosexualteenager who becomes a reserved, hard-working, responsible and respectable (if misanthropic and disgust-ridden) adult merchant and explorer.

The New York Times has Richard Hell’s review of Edmund White’s Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Ron Rash’s Serena.

The Financial Times has Naomi Alderman’s review of Howard Jacobson’s The Act of Love.

This is a subtle novel that repays careful reading. Felix wages his slow campaign to persuade Marius and Marisa into one another’s arms in the belief – so he says – that Marisa understands what he’s doing. But for much of The Act of Love it’s not clear that she does understand – or, even if she does, it’s not clear that she’s actually complying. When Felix insists that the matter was raised in “every conversation we almost had or refused to have”, when he tells us that he read her letters and understood that Marisa “would have wanted me to find no proof that she was having an affair as proof incontestable that she must have been”, the reader begins to doubt Felix’s sanity.

In the New York Times, Joshua Hammer reviews Ian Buruma’s The China Lover.

Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man.

The anti-American note struck there is not new to le Carré — it has coursed through his work much as it did in the fiction of Graham Greene — but it is expressed in A Most Wanted Man with special virulence. No doubt this reflects the author’s opposition to innumerable aspects of recent American foreign policy, but he seems neither to know nor to care that many Americans share that opposition.

Writing for Salon, Edward McClelland covers David Foster Wallace’s McCain’s Promise, Cliff Schecter’s The Real McCain, Paul Begala’s Third Term, and Matt Welch’s The Myth of a Maverick.

When scholars of the Obama presidency try to answer the question “Who Was John McCain?” — or, more pointedly, “Who Were the Two John McCains?” — they should start by reading what journalists had to say about him. Four new books about McCain, by four liberal authors, show how difficult it’s been for a politician with middle-of-the-road instincts to operate in a polarized era. Writers loved McCain during his first run for the presidency, in 2000. But eight years later, they think he’s a flip-flopping hack.

At the New York Sun, Alberto Manguel reviews William Goldbloom Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel.

It isn’t necessarily an advantage in the poetry world, especially the American poetry world, to be known for writing things that aren’t poetry. We’re suspicious of dabblers; we’d prefer for the poet to have, as Emerson put it, “only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity,” and we sometimes view single-minded devotion to poetry’s institutions as evidence of that larger dedication.

The New York Times has David Orr’s review of Clive James’s Opal Sunset.

In the Washington Post, Ron Charles reviews Per Petterson’s To Siberia.

The New York Times has Janet Maslin’s review of Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

. . .halfway through [the novel], the lives of Paloma and Madame Michel are unexpectedly transformed. A Japanese gentleman named Kakuro Ozu buys a vacant apartment. Though clearly rich, he is also immensely courteous and shrewd, and immediately perceives that neither the little girl nor the concierge is just what she seems. Before long, Monsieur Ozu is gently contriving some little tests to discover more about their secret lives. And this leads to developments that range from the comic to the touching to the heartbreaking.

What is it with Jews and sex? While the literature of eros has always been multicultural — from the “Kama Sutra” to “The Decameron,” Ovid’s “Art of Love” to “The Story of O” — it is hard to think of another culture as consistently, persistently obsessed with the subject as Jewish America, circa 1950-2000.

In the New York Sun, Ruth Franklin reviews Philip Roth’s Indignation.

Slate has Sara Mosle’s review of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes.

[The book] is an inspirational story about one man’s efforts to boost educational achievement in New York City’s Harlem. The book is also a sobering tale of how such good intentions, alone, are often not enough. Put the two together, and you have everything you need to know not only about inner-city education, poverty, and charter schools but about the realism that is essential to ambitious reform.

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.

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

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

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

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 Economist is not so keen on Haruki Murakami’s running memoir.

At the London Review of Books, Jacqueline Rose reviews Bernhard Schlink’s Homecoming.

Surely no boy of 9 could ever conceive of artfully juxtaposing an account of Nero’s oft-frustrated attempts to assassinate his mother with the boy’s own disillusionment upon discovering his mum canoodling with one of their married hosts?

At Salon Laura Miller reviews Matthew Kneale’s When We Were Romans.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Jonathan Segura’s Occupational Hazards.

In the Financial Times, Gillian Slovo reviews Damon Galgut’s The Impostor.

Among the many layers of this ominously compulsive world – a world where the active make good and the passive are lost – everything is misnamed. Just as the new political order in the form of the town’s oddly ineffectual black mayor has re-christened the town, so does Adam’s neighbour sit uneasily in his frightened disguise.

“I hear she slept with absolutely everyone, and during your separation, no less,” someone else tells him. “Most people have the sense to wait till the final paperwork is done. But from Day 1 it was like she was on spring break.”

In the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Michael Dahlie’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living.

At the Los Angeles Times, Lee Drutman reviews Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.

However you choose to tell it, it’s an extraordinary American family story, stretching from the 1820s to World War I. First there’s the pioneering tale of the founding grandfather, William, an Ulster immigrant and self-made Albany businessman. Then, the eccentric and domineering personality of Henry James Sr., high-minded, spiritually questing, unemployed, nomadic, scarred by the amputation of his leg in childhood, his “inward demons” and his breakdown in his 30s (or, in the Swedenborgian terms he adopted, his “vastation”). . . .

In the New York Times, Hermione Lee reviews Paul Fisher’s House of Wits, a collective biography of the James family.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.”

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

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

. . .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.

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.

Khanna is obviously not shy about making bold statements. He disputes the popular view that India will emerge as a check to China. “India is big but not yet important,” he writes. “It could also be argued that China is a freer country than democratic India.” By that, Khanna means, literacy is higher and the poverty rate lower in China; it has more Internet connections and cellphones; and it is easier to start a business in China than in India.

Raymond Bonner at the New York Times reviews Parag Khanna’s The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Alan Cheuse reviews James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand.

Benjamin Lytal at the New York Sun covers new translations of Tsutomu Mizukami’s The Temple of the Wild Geese and The Bamboo Dolls of Echizen.

The writers at Salon present a round-up of new books on the war in Iraq.

The plausible minimalist view of Proust’s Jewishness is that, attenuated as it was, it predisposed him to perceive more sharply than he might otherwise have done the hypocrisy and the hidden wellsprings of hostility toward Jews that were exposed in the fierce debates over Captain Dreyfus’s alleged treason.

In The New Republic (linked by way of Powell’s Books because the original article is only for subscribers), Robert Alter reviews Evelyne Bloch-Dano’s Madame Proust.

The Times Literary Supplement has a review by John Mullan of Rónán McDonald’s The Death of the Critic.

Nowadays, there are more critical responses than ever, but critical authority has been devolved from the experts. McDonald surveys the rise of blogs and readers’ reviews, of television and newspaper polls and reading groups, under the heading “We Are All Critics Now”. He argues that the demise of critical expertise brings not a liberating democracy of taste, but conservatism and repetition.

Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Gordon S. Wood’s The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History.

At Slate Jim Lewis celebrates Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo.

At the New York Times, James Parker reviews Tim Parks’s Cleaver.

In the Powell’s Books blog, Chris Faatz reviews the Selected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.

‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry.

John Lanchester’s piece continues at the London Review of Books.

Alexis Soloski at the Village Voice reviews English translations of Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New, Quebecois author Sylvain Trudel’s Mercury Under My Tongue, and Philippe Grimbert’s Memory.

Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Antonio Skarmeta’s The Dancer and the Thief. On The Diane Rehm Show guest host Susan Page interviews the Chilean author.

At the Washington Post, Janice P. Nimura reviews Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool.

These three quiet novellas, composing the first of Yoko Ogawa’s books to be translated into English, share an eerie quality of nightmare, the precarious sense that beauty and distress are equally possible at any moment.

Elizabeth Hand at The Village Voice reviews Susan Choi’s A Person of Interest.

At the New York Times, Patricia Cohen covers Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, which explores the crippling effects of American anti-intellectualism.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

In the Times Literary Supplement, Sophie Ratcliffe examines James Wood’s How Fiction Works.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self.

At the center of the story is a precocious 7-year-old boy named Che. The child of ’60s radicals and the subject of one of the decade’s most sensational news photos, he was placed in the custody of his Park Avenue grandmother at the age of 2 and raised in strict isolation in upstate New York. “She planned to bring him up Victorian,” Carey writes. No television: no chance of seeing images of his infamous parents being escorted away by police. But the boy picks up stray details from a teenage neighbor who regales him with stories about the SDS, the Weathermen and his namesake, Che Guevara. He shows the boy a picture of his father from Life magazine. “You got a right to know,” he tells him. “Your father is a great American. . . . They will come for you, man. They’ll break you out of here.”

Imagine a former member of the Weather Underground, still in hiding, looking back on his macrobiotic salad days as a subversive, when the revolution, always the revolution, seemed around the corner, as close as a pop song blasting from a car radio.

At the New York Times, Will Blythe reviews Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions.

Benjamin Lytal at the New York Sun reviews John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon.

Russell Banks’s latest novel, The Reserve, gets a lukewarm review from Ron Charles at the Washington Post and a negative one from Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times.

At the New York Times, John Lanchester reviews Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.

On the latest “You Must Read This” segment of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Michael Chabon recommends The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard, a collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s post-Holmes short stories featuring the titular French dandy.

In the current issue of Bookforum, Christine Smallwood reviews Tony D’Souza’s The Konkans.

The novel fills up with lonely hearts for whom life is a waiting room, their eyes trained as through a glass, darkly, on the one thing they believe will give them happiness.

Michael Dirda, writing of Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Review of Books, opens with the assertion that his subject “still bothers people–in all kinds of ways.” At issue is the astonishing number of books that Oates produces. “Surely so many books can’t be that good, that deeply felt, truly authentic?”

At the Washington Post, Shashi Tharoor reviews Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Neoliberal capitalism, [Klein] argues, thrives on catastrophe: Not only are fortunes made from the misfortunes of the masses, but the global dominance of free-market capitalism is built on the infliction of disasters on the world’s less fortunate.

At Salon Jonathon Keats reviews Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer.

At times, he speculates that absolute ugliness may exist. The smell of excrement and the sight of putrefying flesh, he points out, are offensive across all cultures. If he had included the writings of evolutionary biologists, he might have told us why this could be so. That he shows no awareness of post-Darwinian science can mean only that he isn’t serious about locating the sources of aesthetic feelings.

At the Village Voice, Richard B. Woodward reviews Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness.

Ron Charles at the Washington Post reviews Ha Jin’s A Free Life.

Salon has a lukewarm review of Nathan McCall’s Them.

John Lanchester at the LRB reviews Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.

At the New York Times, Robert Frank reviews Robert B. Reich’s Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life.

The New York Times has a review by Richard Eder of The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman.

Ron Charles at the Washington Post reviews Stephane Audeguy’s The Theory of Clouds.

We need more fiction featuring librarians.

He was the greatest union organizer of the latter half of the 20th century. In the span of a single decade, the 1960s, Albert Shanker did for public school teachers what Walter Reuther did for autoworkers.

At Slate Sara Mosle reviews Richard Kahlenberg’s Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy.

At the New York Times, David Bowman reviews Brock Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a review of Junot Diaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

The Washington Post has a review by Jim Krusoe of Percival Everett’s The Water Cure.

The narrator of The Water Cure is a man whose 11-year-old daughter has been raped and killed. He now is in the process of torturing her murderer, but this, as they say, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The New York Times has a review (and the first chapter) of Glen Duncan’s The Bloodstone Papers.

The Guardian has a review of Edmund White’s Hotel de Dream.

Salon is running a review of Taylor Antrim’s The Headmaster Ritual.

The New York Times has a fussy review by Julia Reed of Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees.

The New York Times has a review by Michelle Green of Katie Roiphe’s Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939.

Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post reviews Larry Berman’s Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent.

Slate recycles an article from 2004 to help explain the phenomenon of the instant review.

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition has a segment on the dwindling number of pages devoted to book coverage in print newspapers.

At the Washington Post, Art Taylor reviews recent mystery novels.

At Salon, Astra Taylor reviews Daniel Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.

The book apparently features numerous examples of painful compromise that will be familiar to area readers, such as the story of Brendan, “a former lawyer at the progressive Center for the Study of Responsive Law, who switched career tracks for the bigger paycheck needed to buy a house within commuting distance of D.C.”

Salon is running a review by Alexander Nazaryan of A Russian Diary, the posthumously published record of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Anyone curious about why Russia’s post-Soviet flirtation with democracy has been such an erratic affair will find [the book] an indispensable tome. A reporter for Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper), one of Russia’s last organs of liberal media, Politkovskaya gained prominence–and notoriety–by chronicling the gradual depredation of civil liberties that began when Putin took power in 1999 and reopened the Chechen conflict that his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had waged to keep the small mountain region from gaining autonomy.

Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lobby of her Moscow apartment last fall with several point-blank shots that, as any Russian knows, signal a contract killing.

Rick Moody’s latest book, a collection of three novellas titled Right Livelihoods, gets a positive review at the Washington Post and a negative one at the New York Times.

Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times reviews Andrew Keen’s book on the evils of Web 2.0. I wanted to recommend The Cult of the Amateur after I read it; many of the points that Keen raises therein are absolutely correct (such as the one I touched on in an earlier post). The digressions kept me from it.

. . .Mr. Keen wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book–to deliver some generic, moralistic rants against Internet evils like online gambling and online pornography. . .

The Washington Post has a review of Mark Slouka’s The Visible World.

It is a rare thing for a novel to split open the illusion of narrative–like one of those 17th- century anatomical drawings where the corpse helpfully holds back the flaps of his own stomach–to reveal the underlying mechanics of creation, memory and desire.

In his review for Slate of Ben Wilson’s The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain: 1789-1837, Michael Chase-Levenson asks: Why are we still so obsessed with the Victorians?

In the London Review of Books Jenny Diski covers the Susan Sontag collection At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, which was put together by Sontag’s son.

If the funny is hard to find in Sontag’s writing, her seriousness is never in doubt, and it is precisely the suspicion of that quality that seems to distinguish the present time.

The Washington Post has a review by Michael Collins of Andrew Wilson’s The Lying Tongue.

Christopher Byrd at the Washington Post reviews Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

Veronique de Turenne reviews Matt Haig’s The Dead Fathers Club for National Public Radio’s Day to Day.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers.

The London Review of Books has a review (surprise!) of The Echo Maker by Richard Powers.

The Washington Post has a review of Jeffrey Rosen’s The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America.

All Things Considered has a review of The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak.

Slate is running a review of Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford.

The London Review of Books has James Meek’s review of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a review of Marcus Sakey’s The Blade Itself.

The Washington Post has a review of Elisabeth Ladenson’s Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita.

Salon has a review of Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y.

The New York Times has a review of Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews John Haffenden’s William Empson Volume II: Against the Christians.

This is the second, and final, volume of John Haffenden’s monumental biography of the 20th century’s most dazzling and original literary critic.

. . .

William Empson: Against the Christians is even better than Haffenden’s first volume, rich in anecdote and scandal, with superb summaries of the difficult later criticism, and honestly affectionate.

The London Review of Books has a meaty (and brutal) analysis of House of Meetings by Martin Amis.

Jonathan Yardley at The Washington Post reviews Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games.

The enthusiasm with which the venerable firm of HarperCollins is promoting this massive deadweight of a novel, and the money that it’s putting where its mouth is, leaves one to ponder once again the eternally mysterious ways of the book-publishing industry.

The Washington Post has a review of William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub’s There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America. The reviewer concludes of the authors’ work that:

Their careful and convincing summary of research carried out in Chicago during the mid-1990s paints a picture of social intolerance and bad faith that makes wasting away on a desert island sound like a pretty reasonable alternative to scraping out a living in today’s contentious American cities and suburbs.

The Washington Post is running a review of The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian.

Slate has a review of Special Topics in Calamity Physics. The reviewer expresses surprise that the book was deemed “Best Of” list material and provides a well-reasoned exploration of why works of “precocious realism” are not suitable for such lists.

The Washington Post is running a review of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.

The Washington Post is running a review of Against the Day, reclusive author Thomas Pynchon’s new novel.

Paul Auster is at it again, writing about writing. The Times Literary Supplement has a review of Travels in the Scriptorium.

Fiction that calls attention to its own artifice, critiquing its own methods as it moves along, congratulating itself on its own success, always risks accusations of narcissism and self-indulgence.

Indeed it does, and Auster remains more susceptible to these accusations than most.

The Washington Post is running a review of Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land that, while mostly positive, touches on a few of the strangely anachronistic quirks of a Ford novel.

It’s probably time we all just accepted that Ford isn’t going to do anything about certain tics, such as his jarring references to “Negroes” and “Chinamen” (as if he were writing in 1961), or the manner in which his interlocutors constantly address each other by name when conversing. (Does anybody really do that outside of novels and infomercials?)

Stephen King is getting some surprising praise, such as that below from a review in today’s Washington Post, for his new novel Lisey’s Story.

. . .King has crashed the exclusive party of literary fiction, and he’ll be no easier to ignore than Carrie at the prom. His new novel is an audacious meditation on the creative process and a remarkable intersection of the different strains of his talent: the sensitivity of his autobiographical essays, the insight of his critical commentary, the suspense of his short stories and the psychological terror of his novels.

Recommended with reservations.

The Washington Post has a review by Martin Kettle of Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.

The New York Times is running a roundup of “recently reviewed books of particular interest.”

Today’s Washington Post carries a review by Ron Charles of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Apparently the novel “follows two of the last people on Earth, an unnamed man and his young son, as they walk through an incinerated wasteland foraging for food and hiding from gangs of starving cannibals.” If you have a friend or relative who knits sweaters and socks with kittens on them and foists these items off as gifts, then you clearly need to hop on Amazon right now and return the favor by sending her a copy of The Road.

The Washington Post has a review of Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.

The Washington Post is running a review by Alan Wolfe of Ray Suarez’s The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America. After some initial misgivings, Wolfe finds that the book handles its subject well.

Suarez, who identifies himself as a deeply religious person without giving specifics about his own faith, is offended by the Christian right’s efforts to identify their country with their faith, and he has no problem saying so. The result is a powerful reaffirmation of America’s greatest contribution to human liberty: the separation of church and state.

Powell’s Books blog has (by way of The Atlantic Monthly) a review of Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800. This is the sort of nonfiction to which I am naturally drawn, so I surely would have discovered it on my own at some point. Here the numbers alone are impressive–nearly four pounds, over a thousand pages, almost two hundred dollars.

Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, reviews The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges–and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates at The Washington Post.

The Washington Post has a positive review of T. Christian Miller’s Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq.

The review in The New York Times of Gunter Grass’s autobiography concludes that:

The great Grass ought to have been open to a clear choice: saying whether he jumped or was pushed into all this. Instead, he fudges the story of his SS enlistment and kind of glides around the specifics.

A New York Times review by Emily Barton begins:

At the start of her new book on writing, Francine Prose dispatches with The Question–the five words that inevitably confront writers who teach, writers who don’t teach, and possibly even nonwriters who do neither: “Can creative writing be taught?”

Prose’s succinct answer is “no,” but she elaborates on it with characteristic humor, asking us to imagine “Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don’t believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he’s a giant bug.” Repelled by that sort of poisonous atmosphere, I used to inveigh against writing workshops–right up until the day I started teaching one. Now, like many of my colleagues, I find myself wondering just how much success I (and my students) can reasonably expect.

A new book by two Beltway veterans laments a sidetracked Congress. The Washington Post’s review succinctly summarizes the authors’ approach:

The authors are members of what, sadly, may be a disappearing breed in Washington: independent-minded, knowledgeable experts whose concern for process is stronger than their desires for particular outcomes. They are means guys in an age dominated by ends. And they most emphatically do not believe that any particular end justifies craven or extra-legal means.

Yesterday’s episode of Fresh Air featured reviews of two new novels: Pound for Pound by late writer F.X. Toole, and The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos.

Gardam explains the title on the first page, so nothing will be spoiled for potential readers by recounting it now. An elderly man has just left his table at the Benchers’ luncheon room in London’s Inner Temple. Several jurists discuss the departed figure, who looked familiar. The Common Sergeant knows why: “It was Old Filth. Great advocate, judge and–bit of a wit. Said to have invented FILTH–failed in London Try Hong Kong. He tried Hong Kong.”

Read the rest of the review at The New York Times.

Of John Updike’s Terrorist, Jonathan Raban writes:

[The book] does so many things so well–is rich in scenes, or at least sights, of arresting brilliance, and sucks the reader into a gripping and suspenseful story–that it may seem churlish to harp on the one thing it does badly, which is to imaginatively comprehend the roots and character of Islamist jihad against the West. Because Updike shrinks from giving any real credence to the ideology that drives his plot (in both senses of that word), the book becomes a temporarily enthralling, but ultimately empty, shaggy dog story.

Read the rest of the review at The New York Review of Books.