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.

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.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

Not recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Highly recommended.

Highly recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Highly recommended.