[Culture minister Margaret] Hodge has spent the past six months in a consultation process that asks some unsettling questions. What, really, is the point of a public library in the 21st century? How should libraries respond to today’s 24/7 culture and the greater availability of cheap books? Why can’t that beardy librarian double as a barista?

What has been done to public libraries in the United States is now being done to public libraries in Britain.

The London Review of Books has Keith Gessen’s article on the trials of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.

He seemed to be moving in the direction Russia wanted to be moving: back into the club of advanced nations, rather than the club of basket-case states that lost wars to tiny mountain republics and periodically defaulted on their foreign debts. But somehow Khodorkovsky took it all too far, or too seriously. As Richard Sakwa describes in voluminous detail in his book on the Yukos affair, Khodorkovsky began trying to break the government monopoly on oil pipelines, planning an independent Yukos pipeline to China; and he also began negotiating a huge share swap, in essence a merger, with either ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco. He began, in short, to believe his own press. ‘Khodorkovsky,’ one very sceptical American financier told me, ‘was the only one of the oligarchs who forgot that he was an oligarch, that is, a crook. He decided that because he’d stopped stealing from the company that he was a great businessman, a builder of value! The other oligarchs, when they saw the fuzz, knew they should run. But Khodorkovsky forgot.’

Martin Amis responds with wit and grace to Anna Ford’s bizarre attack in The Guardian.

In The Guardian’s Books Blog, Robert McCrum celebrates the rise of self-publishing.

In The Guardian Lyndall Gordon, Emily Dickinson’s latest biographer, writes of the illness and the family feud that shaped the poet’s life and work.

Something in her life has so far remained sealed. The poems tease the reader about “it” and her almost overwhelming temptation to “tell”. I want to open up the possibility of an unsentimental answer. If true, it would explain the conditions of her life: her seclusion and refusal to marry. Once we know what “it” is, it will be obvious why “it” was buried and why its lava jolts out from time to time through the crater of her “buckled lips”.

In the London Review of Books, August Kleinzahler shares his feelings about selling his childhood home.

That Saturday morning, as I lay there waiting, the house was empty and had been for a while, apart from my inflato-mattress and the furniture the buyers had bought. I rather liked it. It made me feel monkish. I live in such a clutter of books and things in San Francisco. I would be pleased to live like this, here, through the winter. I would be pleased simply to live here, simply. Or not simply. No one need know I’m here. I’d keep the lights off but for a small reading lamp. I could slip out to the 24-hour A&P up by the high school in the middle of the night. I like 24-hour supermarkets at 3 a.m. I like them more than museums. America is very good at that sort of thing.

Writing for The Observer, William Skidelsky wonders why Britain still has it in for Martin Amis.

At the same time, Americans quite like writers who behave badly, the classic example being Norman Mailer. The French, too, tend to be more respectful of writers than the British and also expect them to be polemicists and provocateurs. If Martin Amis were French, you imagine that he would be considered a great intellectual.

Recommended with reservations.

In The Guardian A. L. Kennedy struggles with the writing process.

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.

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.

Christopher Reid wins the Costa Book of the Year Award.

Richard Brooks at the Times writes about the finances of The London Review of Books.

In The Guardian Naomi Klein alleges that corporate culture has taken over the US government.

No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal than Bush’s much-maligned defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Having spent 20-odd years in the private sector, Rumsfeld was steeped in the corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. His department’s brand identity was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat. For everything else, he said (sounding very much like Bill Gates), “We should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and ­effectively.”

. . .

Though it’s too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of “clean coal” and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly “war on terror” phrase – even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Highly recommended.

Issue 13 of The Journal of Specialised Translation focuses on the difficulties of moving texts between Chinese and English.

For The Guardian’s book club, John Mullan selects Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis.

Reverse chronology mocks what we know. New York cabs finally make sense. “They’re always there when you need them . . . They always know where you’re going. No wonder we stand there, for hours on end, waving goodbye, or saluting – saluting this fine service”.

If you could edit your past, what would you change?

A writer can’t subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time. For instance, my young husband Raymond and I endured a hellish nine months in Beaumont, Texas when we were first married, but during that time, in a kind of exile from civilisation, I managed to complete much of my first published novel.

At The Guardian, Rosanna Greenstreet interviews Joyce Carol Oates.

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.

For The Guardian, Esther Addley covers the shuttering of Borders bookshops in the United Kingdom.

Highly recommended.

This year the University of Cambridge celebrated its 800th birthday, an anniversary no less secure than any other of thirteenth-century origin, with an “anniversary portrait”, a handsome volume illustrated with the reminiscences of recent and not so recent alumni. Assisted by lengthier contributions on various aspects of the place, the fragments assembled in the collection, edited by Peter Pagnamenta, enable the Master of Trinity College, Lord Rees, to predict a brighter future for the University than for “any other patch of ground in the world”.

Continue reading Peter Linehan’s piece in the Times Literary Supplement.

At The Guardian’s Books blog, Nigel Beale posts on the history of the big bookshop.

Despite the collateral damage of some small publishers being screwed over, a narrowed selection of titles, and the eventual rationing of stuffed seats, this place, and others like it, revolutionised the book buying experience – mostly for the better. Nothing like it ever existed before, at least over here. In London, however, this kind of emporium is yesterday’s news. Late 18th-century news, to be precise.

Recommended with reservations.

At The National Post Mark Medley talks to Martin Amis about teaching writing.

The Guardian covers this year’s Booker prize longlist.

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?

In the Times Damian Whitworth interviews David Peace.

When he is writing he is “at his happiest, even when writing the things that I write. The act of writing is good for me”. If the writing isn’t going well he seeks refuge in his obsession with the number 9. “I rely on it more when my confidence is low. If I am not confident that what I have written is good I will count up the number of words I have written and if it comes to a number divisible by nine I think ‘great’.” He chuckles. “There’s all kinds of weird rubbish.”

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

At The New Republic, Antoni Cimolino explains why John McWhorter’s assertion that the works of Shakespeare should be rewritten for clarity is silly.

Recommended with reservations.

In The Globe and Mail Andrew Nicoll, author of The Good Mayor, recounts how his former agent urged him to pose as a woman in order to sell his novel.

I am a bloke of the brick-outhouse variety, a little over 6 foot tall and a little under 280 pounds. In my youth I played a bit of rugby – which is like football but without the helmets. I am a heterosexual man with a 16-colour default setting, completely unable to tell cerise from fuschia; I couldn’t find “rose-whisper” on a colour chart with the aid of a sat-nav.

The Guardian’s series on writers’ rooms looks at Justin Cartwright’s workspace.

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.

The Guardian has a gallery of submissions in the Designer Bookbinders International Competition.

Andrew O’Hehir at Salon reviews Archie Brown’s The Rise and Fall of Communism.

This is still an exceptionally difficult subject for Americans to confront with any clarity, I think. Our political life remains haunted in peculiar ways by the specter of Communism, which has become (to mix metaphors) an all-purpose ideological cudgel to use against one’s enemies.

Not recommended.

At the Guardian Stuart Evers wonders why contemporary British literary novels rarely “venture outside the greater London confines.”

Acquiring a literary archive can be a difficult, time-consuming task but it does not normally entail heavy farmwork.

At the Guardian Mark Brown follows the British Library’s pursuit of John Berger’s cache of papers, drafts, and correspondence.

The London Review Book Shop is holding a World Literature Weekend.

At the Guardian Robert McCrum lists working titles of literary classics.

In The London Review of Books Hilary Mantel recalls her years of public service.

Who’d be a social worker, anyway? The problem was the same then as now. Communal expectation was riven by contradiction. You were a busybody and a do-gooder, interfering in private life; or you were a useless, gormless, uncaring drain on the public purse. Whichever role you were cast in you had to get on with the job.

In the Guardian, Alison Flood reports an unusual offer from Dave Eggers.

In the Guardian, Justin McCurry covers the Japanese publication of 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s latest novel.

The debate over the novel’s title has yet to be settled, however. Some believe it was influenced by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, since the letter Q, when pronounced in English, is a homonym for the number nine in Japanese, pronounced “kyuu”.

Others insist that the title is a tribute to The True Story of Ah Q, a novella by the Chinese writer Lu Xun, whose work is said to have influenced Murakami.

GalleyCat notes that John Freeman has been appointed Acting Editor of Granta following Alex Clark’s departure.

In the Times Oliver Kamm asserts that liberal over-sensitivity to the beliefs of others is undermining freedom of speech.

But respect for ideas is never an entitlement. It depends on their intellectual resilience in public debate. No free society can treat people’s deepest beliefs as sacrosanct. They are fair game for hostile and derisive criticism. That is how knowledge advances.

Recommended.

Elizabeth Taylor Ruth Padel, the descendant of Charles Darwin who was recently elected the first female professor of poetry at Oxford, resigns her post amid allegations that she engaged in a smear campaign targeting her closest rival.

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.’”

At the Guardian Stuart Evers argues that prodigies have taken over fiction.

In The Australian Kevin Rabalais profiles Tash Aw, author of Map of the Invisible World.

He is burningly intense about his chosen career, and one feels he has staked everything on it. As he puts it: “Writing has warped me. I have not fitted myself for anything else.” In the beginning, he took jobs in warehouses, shops and offices, “menial work with very little responsibility that allowed me to keep all my mental space for writing”.

For the Observer, Olivia Laing interviews Adam Foulds.

Joan McAlpine’s article in the Sunday Times reveals that James Kelman regrets winning the Booker prize in 1994.

For the London Review of Books, James Wood writes about Ian McEwan’s narrative improbabilities.

Ishiguro’s fiction is acclaimed for the spare elegance of the writing, a testament to the power of what is left unsaid. But he is not spare in conversation – in fact, he talks readily for more than two hours. The curious thing is that, by the end of it, I still have no idea what he’s like. You couldn’t say he was closely defended – he is too personably forthcoming for that – but there is an opacity about him that eludes description, giving no glimpse of what might lie within.

In the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead interviews Kazuo Ishiguro.

For the Observer, Tim Adams talks to Claire Walsh about J. G. Ballard.

For the Guardian, James Campbell talks to August Kleinzahler.

“The poet taps into a larger, inhuman force,” Kleinzahler says, “unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. Like Eros. The Greeks designated gods for these forces – they’re not particularly nice.”

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.

Not recommended.

Christina Patterson profiles Martin Amis in The Independent.

Plans for Britain’s biggest ever public library were unveiled in Birmingham yesterday in the clearest sign yet of a national renaissance in the construction of grand civic libraries.

The Guardian has Robert Booth’s report.

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

At the Guardian, Alison Flood reports that Seamus Heaney is the winner of the David Cohen prize for literature.

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.

At the Guardian, Germaine Greer reveals that her “patience with the deeply banal theme of anal sex is finally exhausted.”

Recommended.

“Once you credit them like that,” he said, “you do all their work for them. They should have been worried about us. Let them worry. Let them wonder if we’re carrying a tool or if we have a crew. I’d like to go back, do it properly, deface the thing with red paint so there’s no swastika visible. You can’t have the main street, a shopping and commercial street, in a civilized city patrolled by intimidators who work for a Nazi organization. It is not humanly possible to live like that. One must not do that. There may be more important problems in Lebanon, but if people on Hamra don’t dare criticize the SSNP, well fuck. That’s occupation.”

Michael Totten recounts an attack on Christopher Hitchens in Beirut.

Andy Baio of Waxy.org explores how Chinese Internet users access articles from The Economist.

In the Times Literary Supplement, John Bowen writes of Charles Dickens’s refuge for fallen women.

Urania women were obliged to tell their story to Dickens but, once they had done so, were forbidden ever to refer to it again, either to each other, the staff at the home, or in their future lives. The parallel with the ways that Dickens handled his own family’s shameful secrets is striking.

The Guardian lists the writers nominated for Waterstone’s “new voices” promotion.

Recommended with reservations.

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.

At the Guardian, Alison Flood reports that Paul Auster finds himself a contender for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke award for science fiction.

In the Guardian, Sarah Crown interviews Peter Porter.

For the Financial Times, Anna Metcalfe chats with Patrick McCabe.

At the Guardian, Simon Reid-Henry talks about Fidel and Che: A Revolutionary Friendship.

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.

The Guardian’s series on writers’ spaces features Jane Gardam’s work room.

In the Guardian James Campbell profiles Per Petterson.

From the edge of his eye, Wadsworth became aware that his client had spoken, but he did not divert his gaze from the tip of his brush. Instead he pointed to the bound notebook in which so many sitters had written comments, expressed their praise and blame, wisdom and fatuity. He might as well have opened the book at any page and asked his client to select the appropriate remark left by a predecessor five or ten years before.

The New Yorker has “The Limner” by Julian Barnes.

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.”

The Guardian has William Skidelsky’s preview of next year’s fiction.

Recommended.

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.

Not recommended.

In the Guardian, Sarah Weinman investigates “Schadenfoer.”

Jonathan Safran Foer is a young, rich and successful literary writer, an oxymoronic state that arose at the moment his debut novel Everything Is Illuminated was published in 2002.

Not recommended.

Granta’s Books of the Year list is more interesting than most.

Richard Ford:

One publication I heartily recommend is Vasily Grossman’s book of cablegrams reporting on the Nazi push toward Moscow and Stalingrad. It’s called A Writer at War: Vassily Grossman and the Red Army, 1941–1945. The writing is (even in translation) extremely memorable as writing – not just for its reportorial virtues – and for the actually haunting pictures it puts into one’s mind. Grossman was a Jew, reporting on Nazis, at the same time as Stalin was exterminating Jews in various precincts of the Soviet Union. His precarious hold on his life, the truth, his profession, his sense of collegiality, his family, his own writing is a subtle but forceful torque in the writing itself.

Charlotte Higgins at the Guardian reports that Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise is the winner of this year’s Guardian first book award.

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

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

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

Recommended with reservations.

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

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

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

“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.

At the Guardian Mark Brown notes the passing of Pat Kavanagh, wife of Julian Barnes and former agent of Martin Amis.

In the Washington Post, Sir Ian Kershaw contrasts the writing of history with the writing of fiction.

One of the most frustrating feelings I experience when I sit in front of a computer screen before I start writing is knowing that I have to put words onto the empty space and that I am the only person who can do this.

Debut novelist Aravind Adiga wins this year’s Booker prize for The White Tiger.

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 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.

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.

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.

Not recommended.

Britain is a nation of museums, where they have collected everything worth collecting. A good museum typically requires generations of hard work. With long and careful planning the British have plundered collectibles from Egypt, India and Mexico, from China, and all corners of the world, carting valuables home like tireless ants. They spent no small amount of taxpayers’ money doing this, and they have spent even more on preservation.

They were spending pounds sterling, and everyone knows how far the pound goes.

The Guardian has “Collecting” by Zhu Wen.

In the Guardian, Alasdair Gray reacts to reading his biography.

Not recommended.

Recommended.

The short list for this year’s Booker prize is now available. One curried proof with garlic naan and India pale for the distinguished Mr. Sutherland, please.

As part of its celebration of the contest’s fortieth anniversary, the Guardian has a Booker prize retrospective featuring the comments of a judge from each year of the prize’s run.

David Lodge (1989):

Our shortlist meeting was the longest to date, and much of it was taken up with discussion of Martin Amis’s London Fields. It is public knowledge that two of the judges on the panel, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, successfully resisted its inclusion on the shortlist, an outcome I still regret. The final judging session was uncontroversial – all but one of us were unequivocally in favour of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. I consider it one of the best Booker winners I have read.

The success of the prize has had an enormous impact on the reception of literary fiction and other kinds of writing, not only directly, but also indirectly through the proliferation of new prizes that have imitated it. But the overtly competitive nature of these prizes, heightened by the publication of longlists and shortlists, takes its psychological toll on writers; and, given the large element of chance in the composition and operation of judging panels, the importance now attached to prizes in our literary culture seems excessive. A committee is a blunt instrument of literary criticism.

Recommended with reservations.

The Guardian has a gallery of books with odd titles.

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

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

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

Not recommended.

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

Recommended.

The New York Sun has the long list for this year’s Man Booker prize.

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.

Recommended with reservations.

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.

Not recommended.

Jenny Diski’s travelogue appears at the London Review of Books.

At The Guardian’s books blog David Barnett wonders why we have so little interest in independent writers.

At the London Review of Books, John Lanchester worries about the utility of his beautiful Library of America editions.

. . .it’s hard not to take the volumes down from the shelves and stroke them, like a Bond villain fondling a cat.

What is really hard, though, is to read them. The books are so gorgeous, so marmoreal, that I find them unreadable. Not unreadable in the Pierre Bourdieu/Edward Bulwer-Lytton sense, and not unreadable in theory – I want to read them, I really do. It’s just that in practice, I don’t.

Robert Chalmers interviews Gore Vidal for The Independent.

Here in the UK we have one of the most xenophobic literary cultures on the planet, with only 2% of the books on the shelves in Britain having started off in another language. Of course it’s partly because of the way the media treats foreigners, but it’s also because of the way that literature, unlike cinema, or music, is so irredeemably local.

Peter Florence at the Guardian covers the celebration of twenty-one years of the Hay festival.

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.

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.

Not recommended.

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.

At the Guardian, Richard Lea talks with Thomas Leveritt about The Exchange Rate Between Love and Money.

It’s a book that never would have been written without the freedom which a career as a painter has given him. “I’ve always written like I’ve always drawn,” he explains, “and one of the side effects about never having worked in a corporate job is that I’ve never had to let go of these undergraduate wet dreams about writing.”

. . .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.

At the Guardian, Jonathan Derbyshire argues, sensibly, that popular economic models do not explain everything.

Prospect has a piece by Mark Leonard on China’s intelligentsia.

Being on the other side of the tape recorder is uncomfortable, he says. After he spoke to a Guardian interviewer in 1995, he recalls, “my mother cried for days. I ended up crying on the phone too. [The interviewer] hadn’t twisted anything, but I was so keen to establish my credentials, surrounded by the Martin Amises and the Ian McEwans, I was like, ‘We were really poor! My mother was a cleaner!’ And she hated that. It was incredibly unthinking of me.”

At the Guardian, Esther Addley interviews Gordon Burn ahead of his new novel Born Yesterday.

Recommended.

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.

There are many for whom this problem seems trivial. The word “relevance” looms – that contemporary fetish, so often brandished to mitigate ignorance and justify a failure of curiosity. I would argue that my friends’ daughter and many young people like her suffer a loss of liberty when the past is in effect closed down and the present becomes the measure of all things.

So posits Sean O’Brien at the Guardian.

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

In the Village Voice, Giles Harvey previews Martin Amis’s The Second Plane: September 11, Terror & Boredom.

Recommended.

At the Guardian, Alex Larman lets readers know that Philip Larkin’s reputation “has returned to its former heights.”

‘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.

Recommended.

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.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

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.”

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Terry Eagleton at the London Review of Books explains Bakhtin’s cachet in the West.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

Not recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Highly recommended.

The Guardian has a short piece on writers’ rooms. The spaces themselves contain what one would expect–desks, computers, reference books. Some are tidy (perhaps only for the camera), some unkempt. A few of the quotations provide a bit of interest.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Highly recommended.