At The Millions David Backer offers a guide to fiction online.

Literature is supposed to be a culture’s conversation with itself. A way of telling the story of its time, its moment. It’s a healthy and necessary thing, an authentic expression of the truth of the age. As a writer and student of literature and of this conversation, I went in search of the new fiction. I wanted to see its extent, the borders of its world. I wanted to do a little cartography to glimpse the map of our conversation with ourselves.

On ABC Radio National’s The Book Show, Peter Mares talks to Marco Roth about the neuronovel.

For Bookforum Craig Seligman elucidates the pleasures of reading first novels.

Some of us change a lot as we grow older, and some of us look not all that different from the way we did in high school. So it is with style. When we read first novels, we’re moved by some of the same things that move us when we see photographs of friends in their youth; the pictures of those who haven’t changed much are as fascinating as the ones of those who have. Our pleasure in these early books may be partly academic, but if it is it’s academic in the best sense of that much-abused word.

In The Atlantic, Alice Sebold contemplates literary awards.

In The Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens returns to Marx.

In the first volume of Capital (the only one to be published in his lifetime; the succeeding ones were works of Talmudic exegesis by his disciples), he has capitalism speaking in the words of Shylock; includes an extract from Timon of Athens wherein money is described as the “common whore of mankind”; and offers still another denunciation of the cash nexus, from the Antigone of Sophocles. One of the most famous phrases of Marx’s vast correspondence during the writing of the book expresses his hatred for having to work on “the economic shit,” and one recalls Lenin’s revealing opinion about gold—that it was fit only to supply the flooring for public lavatories. One pleasure in the rereading of Marx is to savor the trenchancy and aptness of his literary allusions.

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

What compels a man, 63, to run a side business in publishing books mainly of poems, as well as reprints of classics, in the year 2009? Not money.

Ian Shapira of the Washington Post profiles Roger Lathbury, principal of Orchises Press.

CNN reports that John Updike has died.

At Salon Jason Boog examines missed opportunities in book publishing.

“It’s going to be very hard for the next few years across the board in literary fiction,” says veteran agent Ira Silverberg. “A lot of good writers will be losing their editors, and loyalty is very important in this field.”

Renowned novelists released their works online after veteran author Park Bum-shin became the first to take the plunge by posting his latest novel, “Cholatse,” on Naver, the nation’s top portal site, last year.

It was the first attempt of its kind for a veteran novelist to release literary work with a serious theme online as a tool to efficiently communicate with readers about his or her work.

In The Korea Times, Chung Ah-young reports a resurgence in Korean literature.

In Prospect, Tom Chatfield examines literature’s prize culture.

At a lean time for everyone in the print industry, it doesn’t do to bite one of the few hands that’s left feeding you. But the increasingly interchangeable (and arbitrary) feel of each literary event in the calendar cannot serve the long-term interests of a trade that ultimately relies on fresh talent, readers and ideas for its survival.

It’s a troubling, self-destructive trend—and one that may yet see shopping for serious literature driven entirely online.

The New Yorker has James Wood’s favorite books of 2008.

National Public Radio announces that it is canceling Day to Day and News and Notes. A post at GalleyCat explains what the move means for public radio’s coverage of literature.

Recommended with reservations.

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

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

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

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

National Public Radio’s Day to Day laments America’s literary insularity.

A Google-news sweep reveals that first reaction in America is that the Nobel committee, in line with their prize-awarding colleagues in other fields, now see it as their God-given mission to cut the world’s only remaining superpower down to size. To prevent in literature what has happened in film (a cultural field in which Sweden and France were once world players – but no more). Or even in science.

At the Guardian, John Sutherland examines the reaction to Le Clézio’s Nobel win.

The Swedish Academy has awarded Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio the Nobel prize in literature for 2008.

. . .now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist.

Writing for Slate, Adam Kirsch probes the Nobel chasm.

Horace Engdahl is permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the body which chooses the Nobel Prize for literature. In an interview with an American journalist this week, he dismissed the writing of the US – the land of Melville, Hemingway and Fitzgerald – as “too isolated, too insular”. “They don’t translate [foreign books] enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” he said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

American writers were “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” he told the Associated Press. “Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world.”

In the Independent, John Lichfield reports on the fallout.

At the Guardian, Giles Foden offers a one-word response to Mr. Engdahl.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered reports that Russia’s authoritarian turn has produced a literary boom.

Poets & Writers notes that Melbourne has been named a city of literature by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.

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

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

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

In “Who Killed the Literary Critic?” at Salon Louis Bayard and Laura Miller, spurred by Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic (I noted the TLS’s review in March), discuss the future of literary criticism.

At the Guardian, Kate Connolly reports that Dmitri Nabokov has decided to publish his father’s final work, which he had been instructed to destroy.

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.

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter.

At Salon, Stephen Marche writes of the passing of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

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.

At the Guardian, Antonia Byatt defends the Arts Council’s cuts to its funding of literature.

Referring periodically to a set of printed notes on the table in front of her, she explains how she’s looking forward to “working with the literature sector” to think about the next three to five years. “Talking to people and hearing what they have to say is a very important part of that.”

Thank goodness she had prepared the notes. Without them she might have said something inane.

Vladimir Nabokov gave specific instructions that his final and unfinished novel be destroyed. The manuscript has resided in a Swiss bank vault in the years since his death, but Ron Rosenbaum reports at Slate that Dmitri, Nabokov’s son, now 73, nears a decision.

Recommended.

More Intelligent Life has a “this is your brain on Shakespeare” piece.

Recommended.

The Guardian has a short article on a debate at Manchester University in which Martin Amis took part. Terry Eagleton, who earlier made a bizarre personal attack on Amis in the preface to an academic text, was scheduled to appear but withdrew because of a “diary clash.”

The New York Times examines Norman Mailer’s literary legacy.

At the San Francisco Chronicle, Stephen Elliott reminds readers to focus on the words.

And what about Henry Miller? Susan Sontag? The endlessly self-promoting Truman Capote? Or the ultimate narcissist-pundit, Norman Mailer? Is Ernest Hemingway a lesser writer because his subject was often himself?

For the good of culture and the survival of literature we need to refocus and celebrate what’s between the covers and immerse ourselves in the richness on the page. . .

In a bizarre defeatist piece at The Age, Peter Craven argues that the only way to save Australian literature is to turn each work into a feature film or television mini-series.

Recommended.

The Guardian has the news that Philip Roth has won the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman.

The New York Times has an essay by Sam Tanenhaus on the writing of Saul Bellow. Herzog is one of my favorite novels, and Tanenhaus’s selection from it reminds me of why that is the case.

And the prose! Here is Herzog, the most fully realized intellectual in all of American fiction, aflame with lofty ideas and petty grievances, aboard a train hurtling along the Connecticut shore: “The wheels of the cars stormed underneath. Woods and pastures ran up and receded, the rails of sidings sheathed in rust, the dripping racing wires, and on the right the blue of the Sound, deeper, stronger than before. Then the enameled shells of the commuters’ cars, and the heaped bodies of junk cars, the shapes of old New England mills with narrow, austere windows; villages, convents; tugboats moving in the swelling fabric-like water; and then plantations of pine, the needles on the ground of a life-giving russet color. So, thought Herzog, acknowledging that his imagination of the universe was elementary, the novae bursting and the worlds coming into being, the invisible magnetic spokes by means of which bodies kept one another in orbit. Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, who would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.”

This year’s Taipei Book Fair focuses on Russian literature and culture.

Project Gutenberg is now offering texts in Plucker format, making it very easy for users of Palm OS PDAs and smart phones to download and read some important works for free.

NPR is running a feature on Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books.

Of the one hundred books that made the list for 2005, I have read only four. Ten more I plan to read. It is always interesting to see how one’s take on the literary landscape differs from those of one’s contemporaries.

Read the list at The New York Times.

Highly recommended.