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 bee