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

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.’

Q. What will surprise us?

A. That people in political life–however remote their fame may be in relationship to a 10-year-old kid–have no difficulty embracing the notion that they are on “Billy’s” radar. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, Nancy Reagan, Ralph Reed and many others sign collectible trading cards and 8 x 10 photos for their young fan like they are superheroes.

Washington Post blogger Steven Levingston talks to Bill Geerhart about Little Billy’s Letters: An Incorrigible Inner Child’s Correspondence with the Famous, Infamous, and Just Plain Bewildered.

Recommended with reservations.

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

At Slate Deborah Blum writes about the height of Prohibition madness.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Recommended with reservations.

The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible.

Jason Epstein attempts to foresee the digital future at The New York Review of Books.

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

Not recommended.

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

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

Laura Miller at Salon covers the German teen plagiarism posturing.

Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can’t tell them anything! It’s as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism—despite the fact that they’ve grown up in our very midst.

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

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”.

A piece at National Public Radio bemoans the trivialization of American culture.

Perhaps the tendency to trivialize is born of bandwagonism or laziness. Idiomatically speaking: It’s easier to tear down than to build up. Or maybe we devalue valuable things because, as Herbert Marcuse observed, of society’s tilt toward repressive desublimation. In Marcuse’s mind, our capitalist culture renders a strong, often threatening urge into something weak and nonthreatening. For instance, marketers learn to satisfy our desire to be closer to nature by selling us Patagonia fleece jackets that we wear in our all-terrain Land Rovers driving to the mall.

This desublimation is repressive, Marcuse asserted, because it muffles social criticism and supports addictive consumerism. Consequently, contemporary society is spiritually and intellectually stagnant.

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

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.

Recommended with reservations.

At Salon Rahul K. Parikh interviews Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.

[He] has only been a practicing surgeon for six years, and he is still just an assistant professor at Harvard, but his game-changing New Yorker essay about the gobsmacking cost of healthcare in McAllen, Texas, became required reading in the White House. As a New Yorker staff writer, Gawande has long been known for his meditative, honest and lyrical essays about medicine, but his work became that much more important as healthcare exploded into a national conversation (and crisis).

Recommended with reservations.

Everyone is probably sick of the topic by now, but I would feel remiss were I not to note April L. Hamilton’s cogent take on the row between Macmillan and Amazon.

The New York Times has Katie Zezima’s profile of Cornish, New Hampshire.

By all accounts Mr. Salinger loved the area. He would, until recent years, vote in elections and attend town meetings at the Cornish Elementary School, and he went to the Plainfield General Store each day before it closed. He was often spotted at the Price Chopper supermarket in Windsor, separated from Cornish by a covered bridge and the now ice-jammed river, and he ate lunch alone at the Windsor Diner. Mr. Salinger was also said to have frequented the library at Dartmouth College and to have attended the occasional house party.

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

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

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

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

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

Bookninja rounds up recent e-book rumblings.

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.

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

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

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

Recommended with reservations.

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

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

John Matthew Fox posts on the predictive power of book reviews.

I do know that book reviews should have more importance than merely telling me whether or not I should read a book. They also perform the critical role of judging books. But to survive in this new media landscape, book reviews need to do what only they can do: describe the book well, connect the book to current books, the canon, trends, and make insightful interpretations that many readers might have otherwise have missed.

Recommended with reservations.

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

Universities (even those with enormous endowments) have historically taken advantage of recessions to bring austerity to teaching. There will be hiring freezes and early retirements. Rather than replacements, more adjuncts will be hired, and more graduate students will be recruited, eventually flooding the market with even more fully qualified teacher-scholars who will work for almost nothing. When the recession ends, the hiring freezes will become permanent, since departments will have demonstrated that they can function with fewer tenured faculty members.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has William Pannapacker’s bleak prospectus for those seeking graduate degrees in the humanities.

Not recommended.

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

The New Republic introduces The Book: An Online Review.

The first thing to know about The Book is that it is a supplement to our print content–an attempt to apply the new technology to the old and untarnished purposes. While our online book review will certainly be lively, it will not be significantly more relaxed than our magazine itself. We are not slumming here, or surrendering to the carnival of the web. Quite the contrary. We are hoping to offer an example of resistance to it. Many of the writers you will read in The Book are the same writers you will read in the magazine. Their subjects, too, will be the same. Here you will find criticism, not blogging; pieces, not posts.

Laura Miller of Salon urges readers to move outside of their literary comfort zones.

We all have our little biases, and far be it from me to suggest that people force themselves to read books they don’t like, but sometimes that’s all these preferences are — prejudices. Getting out of your rut can lead to unexpected and exhilarating rewards.

Recommended with reservations.

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.

In The Atlantic Monthly, Wayne Curtis examines the supersizing of cocktails.

The Adios Mo-Fo is among the most popular drinks sold at Howl at the Moon, at Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles. A friend and I ordered one on a recent visit, then watched the bartender deftly hoist and upend four bottles at once—rum, gin, vodka, and blue Curaçao—letting loose long strands of colorful liquid, as if from the udder of a magical cow.

Poets & Writers has a piece by Kevin Nance on Northwestern University’s gutting of its prize-winning journal TriQuarterly.

After the magazine’s final print issue this spring, it will become an online-only, student-run publication associated with Northwestern’s new MFA program in creative writing, located on its Chicago campus. The positions of the magazine’s longtime editor, Susan Firestone Hahn, and associate editor, Ian Morris, will be eliminated.

In The New Yorker, James Wood reviews Paul Auster.

What is problematic about these books is not their postmodern skepticism about the stability of the narrative, which is standard-issue fare, but the gravity and the emotional logic that Auster tries to extract from the “realist” side of his stories. Auster is always at his most solemn at those moments in his books which are least plausible and most ragingly unaffecting.

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

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

In the New York Times, Larry Rohter profiles Open Letter Books.

Recommended.

Here is a gathering of books that appeal to the sense of touch and the sense of sight. You will want to read them, of course, but in many cases you will also want to feel the quality of the paper and the binding and let the beauty of the reproductions fill your eyes. There could be no better gift at a time when the book business is on the defensive. These are books that cannot be repackaged as eBooks.

In The New Republic, Jed Perl shares his list of the year’s best art books.

Laura Miller of Salon misses the march of weird little marks.

Authors who have eschewed quotation marks include E.L. Doctorow, David Guterson, Charles Frazier, Nadine Gordimer, Kate Grenville, William Gaddis and (sometimes) Raymond Carver.

Why do they do this? I once heard Doctorow tell a group of journalists that if a writer knows what he’s doing, quotation marks aren’t really necessary. “You can tell when it’s dialogue,” he explained. Often enough, that’s true. However, to say that an element of written language can be eliminated without rendering the language itself incomprehensible is not tantamount to saying that the element is superfluous and ought to be abandoned.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

At The Awl Choire Sicha writes about a curious inversion.

At a bar last night, I was talking to someone smart who made an excellent point: that a very quiet, revolutionary act in the history of publishing had just taken place.

On WHYY’s Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan picks her books of the year.

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

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

In The Atlantic Monthly Hanna Rosin asks, “Did Christianity cause the crash?”

Tin House picks the best debut novels of the decade. I have read only the first and second on the list (number one was a bit of a bust; number two I liked), but I will probably add the others to my teetering stack.

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

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at The Wall Street Journal reports that Random House again is making specious claims to digital rights.

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

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

In Bookforum Kera Bolonik interviews John Irving.

BF: Critics pounce on authors who revisit themes and images, as you do: writers, bears, deadly accidents.

JI: I’ve always been interested in the impatience the critic has with a novelist’s many ways of repeating him- or herself, because to me, repetition in fiction is the necessary concomitant of having something worthwhile to say. Would someone say of Shakespeare, “What is it with all these dysfunctional royal families?” “Is everybody’s mother sleeping with their uncle?” How many good marriages did Tennessee Williams write about? [Laughs.]

Recommended.

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

In The New Yorker, James Wood shares his favorite books of 2009.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

In The Atlantic, Alice Sebold contemplates literary awards.

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

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

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered interviews Dave Eggers about Zeitoun.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich notes Barnes & Noble’s e-book plans.

Recommended with reservations.

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

For the Washington Post, Marie Arana interviews Karl Taro Greenfeld.

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

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

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

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

Recommended with reservations.

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

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

At Slate Nathaniel Rich examines the appeal of Scandinavian crime fiction.

What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness.

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

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

Recommended.

In the New York Times, Sewell Chan reports that J. D. Salinger has prevailed in his court battle against a pseudonymous hack who ripped off his work.

In a victory for the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, a federal judge on Wednesday indefinitely banned publication in the United States of a new book by a Swedish author that contains a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of “The Catcher in the Rye.”

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.

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

On WHYY’s Fresh Air Terry Gross interviews Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

Recommended with reservations.

On Twitter Ron Charles links to an article by Christina Hoff Sommers in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Dr. Sommers asserts that errors in feminist scholarship are particularly persistent because every correction is viewed as a personal attack.

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

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

Recommended with reservations.

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

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

The American Booksellers Association’s Emerging Leaders project has a list of reasons to buy books from independent sellers.

J. Robert Lennon’s piece on writing in the Los Angeles Times certainly mirrors my experience.

Like the slavering maws of a multipartite mythological beast, the intentional flaws of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader swiftly swivel to rain disdainful and fetid organoleptic disaster upon all who dare approach the sacred mount.

Not recommended.

In the New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer covers Ray Bradbury’s support of public libraries in California.

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

The complaint against Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers makes surprisingly interesting reading.

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

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

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

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

The Washington Post’s Marie Arana interviews Eduardo Galeano.

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Susan Stamberg gets summer reading picks from independent booksellers.

The Huffington Post has Mark Sarvas’s ridiculously ill-conceived essay on Amazon’s Kindle.

Of course, I’ll still love my library, love sitting amid my shelves, poking randomly through titles I haven’t considered in years. But the destiny of the book lies not in satisfying Luddites, curmudgeons and romantics, but rather in introducing a new generation of readers into the joys of literature and making sure that those words we spend all those years in lonely rooms writing will find as many readers as humanly – or digitally – possible.

For the New York Times, Sam Tanenhaus interviews John Irving.

The Wall Street Journal covers the Justice Department’s intensifying interest in the settlement between Google and publishers and authors.

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

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

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

Recommended with reservations.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Robert Siegel notes J. D. Salinger’s lawsuit against a Swedish author accused of ripping off The Catcher in the Rye.

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

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

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

For the New York Times, Motoko Rich covers BookExpo America.

There were the panels: “Giving It Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense and When They Don’t,” “Red Hot Readers: Market Adoption of Mobile eReading Devices” and “Jumping Off a Cliff: How Publishers Can Succeed Online Where Others Failed.” Tina Brown, rasping with a bad case of laryngitis, kick-started a discussion with the chief executives of four New York publishing houses by asking if they were shocked when Amazon.com began charging $9.99 for e-books — “that paltry, pitiful sum.”

Not recommended.

At The Complete Review M. A. Orthofer laments the latest price increase of the New York Times.

At National Public Radio, Maureen Corrigan recommends crime fiction for summer.

For The New York Review of Books, Julian Barnes remembers John Updike.

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

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

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

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

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

At Publishers Weekly Jim Milliot reports a surge in on-demand and short run titles.

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

Larry Rohter at the New York Times notes the passing of Mario Benedetti.

In a career of more than 60 years, Mr. Benedetti wrote more than 80 books, addressing subjects that range from love and middle-class frustration in Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital, to the pain of exile. He also worked for decades as an editor of literary and political magazines and was a film, literary and theater critic for newspapers in Uruguay and elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world.

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.’”

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Rebecca Roberts interviews Bao Pu, editor of Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang.

At Inside Higher Ed Scott Jaschik reports hard times for university presses.

With some university presses facing budget cuts that could effectively kill their operations, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. But experts on literary magazines are nonetheless surprised — and worried — by the announcement this week out of Middlebury College that it will cease sponsorship of The New England Review by 2011 if the publication doesn’t become self-supporting.

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

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

At the Washington Post, Bob Thompson notes retrenchment in American publishing.

Recommended with reservations.

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

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

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

In the New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco examines the funding of American colleges and universities.

For years, we have witnessed a growing gap between rich and poor colleges, the privatization of public universities, and aggressive if not reckless investment and spending practices at wealthy institutions, where the allure of gain appears to have overwhelmed the consciousness of risk. Now we are also witnessing drastic budget contraction at the most fragile and vulnerable institutions. Higher education has always been a mirror of American society—and, for the moment, at least, the image it reflects is not a pretty one.

Recommended.

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

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

The New Republic highlights its Nabokov archive.

Recommended with reservations.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition profiles Barney Rosset.

Columbia University announces the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Highly recommended.

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

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

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.

Not recommended.

At Salon Sarah Hepola reports the disappearance of gay-themed books from Amazon’s search results and sales rankings.

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

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

A young writer who turns up at the office of an editor or literary agent with a volume of stories is all but guaranteed a chilly, pitying welcome. That kind of thing is just not commercial.

In the New York Times, A. O. Scott praises the American short story.

For The Village Voice, Eli Epstein-Deutsch covers L. J. Davis’s recent reading from A Meaningful Life.

Recommended.

In the New York Times, Miguel Helft covers a legal challenge to Google’s settlement with publishers and authors.

Opposition to the 134-page agreement, which the parties announced in October, has been building slowly as its implications have become clearer. Groups that plan to raise concerns with the court include the American Library Association, the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and a group of lawyers led by Prof. Charles R. Nesson of Harvard Law School.

Poets.org lists lots of National Poetry Month activities.

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

In the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler examines the furor surrounding Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a short segment on e-books and digital restrictions management.

Recommended with reservations.

The Village Voice has Eli Epstein-Deutsch’s profile of Cabinet magazine.

Not recommended.

For the Washington Post, Maureen Freely writes about translating Orhan Pamuk’s works.

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

Not recommended.

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.

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

Recommended with reservations.

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.

In the New York Times, Robin Pogrebin reports the New York Public Library’s difficulty in getting Orient-Express Hotels Ltd. to honor its agreement to purchase the former Donnell Library building in Midtown Manhattan.

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

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

Not recommended.

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

“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.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich profiles Europa Editions.

Reading is required for any John Updike pilgrimage. That’s not “reading,” as in books, but Reading, as in Pennsylvania. It seems you can’t go a block in this city of about 83,000 without running into one of the author’s old stomping grounds or a scene from one of his books, where often the city is named Alton or Brewer.

For the Washington Post, Ben Chapman takes the tour.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, librarian Robert Darnton outlines his opposition to Google’s book scanning project.

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.

For The Village Voice Brian Parks interviews John Haskell about his new novel, Out of My Skin.

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

For National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Lynn Neary covers publishers’ and booksellers’ objections to Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device, the second version of which was recently announced.

At The New Republic, Javier Marias frets about the behavior of artists.

The most worrisome thing for those of us who have turned out to be novelists or poets or sculptors or painters or musicians is that not even as adults have we seen much reason to admire our predecessors. We might feel great admiration for their work, but we rarely take to them when their lives are recounted in books or depicted on screen. I don’t know if it’s just that our profession has been particularly unfortunate in that respect or if artists really are unbearable.

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

At Three Percent Chad W. Post examines the furor over the inclusion of arts funding in stimulus spending.

Roger Ebert is reading newspapers again.

Of course I’ve never stopped reading the Sun-Times. That’s the start of my daily ritual. But while I used to read four newspapers every day, I found that, gradually, I wasn’t. You know how it is. You get mired in the matrix of the web and think you’re reading all the news you can handle. You have the papers, but they’re unopened at the end of the day.

However, during the election season and the Inauguration euphoria, I renewed our subscription to the New York Times and remembered, at first almost unconsciously, how much I enjoy reading a newspaper. The pages follow in orderly progression. The headlines and artwork point me to stories I find interesting. I am settled. I am serene. I read, I think. I am freed from clicking and the hectic need to scroll, to bounce between links. I don’t have [to] search for the print stories. They find me.

Liane Hansen of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition interviews Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Lark & Termite.

Recommended.

The New York Review of Books has Robert Darnton’s analysis of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers.

. . . Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will be protected from copyright liability.

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

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

The Complete Review covers the end of the Washington Post’s Book World section.

In The New Republic Jerry A. Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True and professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, explains why science and religion can never be reconciled.

It would appear, then, that one cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. That alleged synthesis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and supported by agreed-upon evidence, logic, and reason, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsupportable or even falsified. In other words, the price of philosophical harmony is cognitive dissonance.

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.

GalleyCat notes layoffs at Publishers Weekly.

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

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

Highly recommended.

Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.

At Time Lev Grossman looks at publishing trends.

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

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

Recommended with reservations.

I write all my first drafts by hand — not, however, with a quill pen — because there seems to be some kind of symmetry between the muscular movement of my hand and the flow of ideas in my head. That symmetry gets destroyed by a keyboard, which becomes an alien intruder in the dialogue within myself. Lots of friends assure me that I could quickly make the transition to the laptop and enhance my productivity. I’m sure they’re right, but my dirty little secret is that I want to prolong rather than shorten the writing process, since it is my only source of creative fulfillment.

In the Washington Post, Joseph J. Ellis defends putting pen to paper.

Salon is running an Associated Press story on a financing deal between The New York Times Company and Mexican telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim.

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

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

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

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

Bookforum interviews Mary Gaitskill.

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

For the first time since the NEA began surveying American reading habits in 1982 — and less than five years after it issued its famously gloomy “Reading at Risk” report — the percentage of American adults who report reading “novels, short stories, poems or plays” has risen instead of declining: from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in 2008.

Bob Thompson at the Washington Post covers the report.

At National Public Radio, John Irving remembers Richard Seaver.

When I met Dick and Jeannette, I was recently divorced and spectacularly unreliable; I envied the obvious strength of the Seavers’ marriage and Jeannette’s superb cooking. Their youngest son, Nick, and my middle son, Brendan, were friends. In my wrestling room in Sagaponack, Dick and I wrestled together. I was younger, and more technically trained; he was bigger and stronger. (Few people know that Dick Seaver wrestled — probably because he was such a sweet and gentle man.)

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

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

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

At The Wall Street Journal Anita Elberse writes of publishers’ continued focus on blockbusters.

When a publisher spends an inordinate amount on an acquisition, it will do everything in its power to make that project a market success. Most importantly, this means supporting the book with higher-than-average marketing, advertising and distribution support — which is exactly how Grand Central handled “Dewey’”s launch. To do otherwise would be foolish: If a product like “Dewey” fails to draw readers, Grand Central knows its profitability will be severely hurt. With such high stakes and money tied up in a few big projects in the pipeline, the need to score big with a next project becomes more pressing, and the process repeats itself. The result is a spiral of ever-increasing bets on the most promising concepts, creating a “blockbuster trap.”

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich reports that publishing’s “cushy schmooze fest seems to be winding down.”

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.

. . . 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.

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.

For National Public Radio, librarian Nancy Pearl lists books beneath the reading radar.

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.”

In The Village Voice, Zach Baron covers Jonathan Franzen’s State by State performance at the New School.

As it happens, State by State was patterned after the WPA American Guide series of the Federal Writers’ Project, itself a 1930s response to a different kind of disaster: the Great Depression. Writers—Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, and many others—were paid to create state guides, collecting bizarre regional details and descriptions of the land in service of the creation of what John Steinbeck called “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together.”

Scott Simon of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition speaks to Publishers Weekly contributing editor Charlotte Abbott about present conditions and the future of publishing.

Recommended with reservations.

With book sales in a general free fall, bookstores — large and small — closing around the country, and library and school budgets slashed, the publishing industry is now feeling the same pain as the rest of the economy. Small presses and university presses are not exempt from the squeeze; in the end, it comes down to income and profit, and as consumers find themselves short of cash, publishers are discovering the hard way that the fat years are over. It can’t be business as usual. The business as it has been run since Kerouac poured his novel onto a massive roll of paper stopped making financial sense long ago. Change is here to stay, even if we don’t yet know what those changes will be.

For the Washington Post, André Bernard describes the mood in the book publishing industry.

For the New York Times, Motoko Rich reports layoffs and restructuring at Macmillan.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Laura Miller presents Salon’s 2008 Book Awards.

In a day of especially grim news for the book business, Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, announced a sweeping reorganization aimed at trimming costs, while Simon & Schuster laid off 35 people.

The moves signaled just how bad sales have become in bookstores and followed the news this week that the publisher of the adult division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the house that represents authors including Philip Roth and José Saramago, had resigned, presumably in protest of a temporary freeze on the acquisition of new books.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich describes the turmoil at large publishing houses.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post offers advice on book giving.

9. Support the midlist. Many good novelists, most poets and nearly all scholars sell only a few thousand copies of their books, if they’re lucky. Blockbuster titles and brand-name authors will always be with us, but the books that matter in the long run, the books that will truly speak to our very innermost being, can easily be overlooked. Browse through the fiction shelves. Pause at the poetry section. Buy a few of these books, and you’ll be a patron of the arts.

Three Percent announces the twenty-five titles on its longlist.

In terms of criteria, we only considered original titles published (or released) in the U.S. in 2008. No retranslations, no reprints, no paperbacks of previously published hardcovers were eligible. And what we’re looking for is the best translated book, not just the best translation.

Recommended with reservations.

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.

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

Recommended with reservations.

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.

I was invited by Riky Stock of the German Book Office to give a presentation to GBO directors from around the world about publishing post-financial collapse. Which is a pretty big topic, and one that will probably dominate conversations post-holiday season, especially if the retail sector struggles as much as people are predicting.

At Three Percent, Chad W. Post serializes his talk.

Not recommended.

The National Book Foundation announces the winners of the 2008 National Book Awards. Mark Doty is the recipient of the award in poetry, and Peter Matthiessen is the recipient of the award in fiction.

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

At Slate Ron Rosenbaum sounds the new-media warning bell.

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.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Heidi Benson profiles Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books.

Pairing writer with subject is an art. And such matchmaking is “part of the excitement of being an editor,” Silvers said. “We want brilliant and beautiful articles – works of criticism and imagination.” From the start, he added, “if we [Barbara Epstein and himself] had one thing in common, it was this feeling of intense admiration for wonderful writers.”

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.

To say John Leonard was a reviewer at heart is to pay a great compliment to a profession that currently seems to be limping toward an undeserved obsolescence. I remember having lunch with him in a ratty ethnic dive off Times Square in early 2000, when he explained that, what with one thing and another, he’d somehow drifted out of the practice of reviewing books. That happens to many a fine critic; take time off to write your own book or to work some other beat, and eventually you migrate to the inactive section of book review editors’ rolodexes. It bothered him.

At Salon Laura Miller remembers John Leonard.

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

In City Pages Ben Westhoff profiles Graywolf Press.

“Writers think of it as one of the best presses in America, I know that for a fact,” [Robert] Boswell says. “As a literary writer, you’re looking for a press that’s interested in publishing the highest-quality work they can find. In theory every press is trying to do that, but in practice a lot of presses are [too] driven by the bottom line. I feel that Graywolf genuinely practices that policy.”

“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.

These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.

In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith follows two paths for the novel.

At the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows explains why China is so awful at managing its own reputation.

Recommended.

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.

Google announces a settlement in its legal battle with representatives of the American publishing industry.

With this agreement, in-copyright, out-of-print books will now be available for readers in the U.S. to search, preview and buy online — something that was simply unavailable to date. Most of these books are difficult, if not impossible, to find. They are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves, yet they make up the vast majority of books in existence. Today, Google only shows snippets of text from the books where we don’t have copyright holder permission. This agreement enables people to preview up to 20% of the book.

What makes this settlement so powerful is that in addition to being able to find and preview books more easily, users will also be able to read them. And when people read them, authors and publishers of in-copyright works will be compensated. If a reader in the U.S. finds an in-copyright book through Google Book Search, he or she will be able to pay to see the entire book online. Also, academic, library, corporate and government organizations will be able to purchase institutional subscriptions to make these books available to their members. For out-of-print books that in most cases do not have a commercial market, this opens a new revenue opportunity that didn’t exist before.

John Laidler of the Boston Globe reports a surge in the use of local public libraries.

Back in 2002 I had a running debate with a friend of mine on the subject of “dignity.” She claimed that this was something I was excessively concerned about. She didn’t think it was possible for people like us to be really dignified in the old (and possibly imaginary) way of prior generations and characters in classic novels.

In writing about David Foster Wallace at n+1, Benjamin Kunkel writes about art and criticism in general.

Not recommended.

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.

At a meeting on Wednesday morning with the Flemish Literary Fund, Jill Schoolman, the publisher and editor in chief of Archipelago Books, a nonprofit Brooklyn publisher of works in translation, discussed her plans to bring out “Wonder,” a novel by Hugo Claus, a Belgian writer who was frequently discussed as a Nobel contender before he died by euthanasia earlier this year.

For the New York Times, Motoko Rich covers the Frankfurt Book Fair.

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.

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

Haruki Murakami appeared at Berkeley. Ben Dooley has the details at The Millions.

On Murakami’s next novel: He finished it last week.

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.

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.

For National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Wall Street’s sweet deal.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees.

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.

Recommended with reservations.

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.

Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviews Robert Baer, ex-CIA operative and author of The Devil We Know.

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.

More Intelligent Life has an article on the perfumes of Christopher Brosius, including one described as “First Edition, Russian and Moroccan Leather, Binding Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish.”

At n+1 Mark Greif writes of the political theology of the GOP.

If I had to play for one side or the other, and I had no other thoughts or feelings but the will to side with genius, I’d play for the Republicans. The GOP convention trumped the Democratic—because some intelligence there is, in their control room, who can conceive of mastery on the grandest scale; a moral monster, to be sure; a jinni of evil; a trafficker in political eschatology, unafraid to trespass on myths of the gravest consequence. Someone behind the scenes held the key and boldly turned it: someone foresaw that the means of hatching a McCain triumphant was to make of him a risen God. This was the burden of the Vice Presidential and Presidential addresses, and the galvanism of the last few days.

Not recommended.

In the New York Times Magazine, Jonathan Mahler profiles Auburn Professor of Philosophy Kelly Jolley.

He says that philosophy requires a certain rare and innate ability — the ability to step outside yourself and observe your own mind in the act of thinking. In this respect, Jolley recognizes that his detractors have a point when they criticize his approach to teaching. “It’s aristocratic in the sense that any selection based on talent is aristocratic,” he told me. “I know it offends everyone’s sense of democracy, this idea that everyone’s equal, but we all know that’s just not true.”

The Washington Post lists the authors who will appear at the National Book Festival on Saturday, 27 September.

Recommended with reservations.

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

While writing for The New Yorker, George Saunders doesn’t blink, for he is Right.

I’m finding it hard to concentrate, as my eyes are killing me, due to I have not blinked since I started writing this. And, me being Regular, it takes a long time for me to write something this long.

Where was I? Ah, yes: I hate Élites. Which is why, whenever I am having brain surgery, or eye surgery, which is sometimes necessary due to all my non-blinking, I always hire some random Regular guy, with shaking hands if possible, who is also a drunk, scared of the sight of blood, and harbors a secret dislike for me.

So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon.com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.

In New York Magazine Boris Kachka writes of the end of publishing as we know it.

At Salon Laura Miller remembers David Foster Wallace.

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.

The Atlantic Monthly has “Searching” by Billy Collins.

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.

Not recommended.

In the Village Voice, Giles Harvey previews the Library of America’s collection of the poems of John Ashbery.

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.

Recommended.

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.

Recommended.

Fresh Air remembers Ted Solotaroff, founder of The New American Review.

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 New York Times has an article on the passing of L. Rust Hills.

WHYY’s Fresh Air interviews Ron Suskind. Suskind’s book, The Way of the World, alleges criminal behavior in the push for war with Iraq.

The Atlantic Monthly has “We Are All Businessmen” by Mark Fabiano.

The bus bounces over the lot and onto the road. Blue smoke makes us all cough, and the driver grinds the gears as he shifts up. The town passes from view and we head into the countryside, where there are no foreigners. The ride is bumpy, and there are no scenic views. I often wonder what Mr. Richard and the others would see if they came along. Like this. My best part of the day is getting off the bus in my village and walking down the road to my house. Of village life, they never see how we may live, our families working in the spice garden. Yes, they know about the kingfishers and monkeys. They don’t know how we strive daily to make our house clean from the dust, and without electricity and running water, we live OK.

Recommended.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich examines the erosion of literacy in America.

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

Not recommended.

You don’t have to read these books to imagine the outcome: girl meets guy; girl gets guy but first she has to discuss him endlessly with her gal friends and perhaps Mother, who is typically a dragon or an ex-supermodel or both.

It seems that even the target audience has tired of chick lit.

Christopher Hitchens undergoes waterboarding and writes about the experience for Vanity Fair.

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

Kay Ryan is now the poet laureate of the United States.

Recommended with reservations.

Laura Miller at Salon probes Barack Obama’s reading history.

A taste for serious fiction is rare in the American male these days, but Obama has it. According to several friends, he even tried his hand at writing short stories during those early years in Chicago, and he recalls priggishly scolding his half sister, Maya, while she was visiting him in New York, because she chose to watch TV instead of reading some novels he’d given her. Among the authors he favored during his years of intensive reading were Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow (cited as his favorite before he switched to Shakespeare). He has also mentioned Philip Roth, whose struggles to shrug off the strictures of Jewish American community leaders must have resonated with the young activist.

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.

Recommended.

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.

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.

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

Robert Chalmers interviews Gore Vidal for The Independent.

The New Yorker has a new English translation of a Nabokov short story (circa 1924).

For the New York Times, Edward Wyatt collects whispers about electronic books at BookExpo America.

Booksellers, who make up the other major group attending the publishing convention, are also concerned that electronic books could become more than a passing fancy for an electronically savvy subset of customers. “It certainly does feel like a threat,” said Charles Stillwagon, the events manager at the Tattered Cover Book Store, a large independent bookseller in Denver.

Mainichi Daily News interviews Haruki Murakami about his translations of American literature.

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.”

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Alan Cheuse reviews Joseph Olshan’s The Conversion.

Not recommended.

The New Yorker has “A Man Like Him” by Yiyun Li.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a piece by Karen Grigsby Bates on the closing of Dutton’s Books in Los Angeles.

At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Karen Heller calls out publishers over their limited cover designs.

Without effort, you can find a dozen similar covers on your local bookstore’s shelves. They all blur into so much Lifetime fuzz.

These covers scream to men “Please don’t read me!” while to women they coo “Here’s more of the same!”

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.

Kerry Howley at Reason writes of the birth of the American hotel industry.

Hotels were a new institutional form that upset expectations about the arrangement of daily life and alarmed defenders of domesticity. They were full of beds and liquor, associated with sex, theft, and violence. Guests interacted with no patriarch—only a relatively egalitarian ecosystem of managers, porters, and bellboys. As people began to take longer and longer hotel stays in the mid-18th century, sometimes even living in them, “an entire genre of screeds against hotel living” was born, mourning the decline of traditional gender roles in a world where cooks and maids left women hopelessly idle.

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

Recommended with reservations.

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.

Not recommended.

Jason Wilson at the Washington Post reveals the discovery of a musty literary liqueur.

My brother Tyler and I sometimes play a game we call Liquor Store Archaeology. . . .

Tyler became the clear victor not too long ago when he turned up something called, somewhat disturbingly, Peanut Lolita, a thick, peanut-flavored liqueur that once was produced by Continental Distilling in Linfield, Pa.

At The New Republic, Adelle Waldman examines Jhumpa Lahiri’s appeal.

Recommended with reservations.

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches.

In The New Yorker, Eric Alterman contemplates the end of the American newspaper.

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.

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

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

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

At the New York Times, Lawrence Van Gelder covers the revelation that supposed Holocaust refugee Misha Defonseca was in fact never “adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis” as she claimed in Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years (follow the link just for a look at the jacket). Nor was she ever Jewish. Ah, memoir! Deep shame falls upon anyone who needed help spotting this ruse.

Also at the Times, Motoko Rich informs the innocent, gentle, fawn-like readers of memoirs that the recently published and somewhat acclaimed (by such stalwarts as Michiko Kakutani, again of the Times) Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival by Margaret B. Jones, LA gangland drug runner and half-white, half-Native American hankie girl, was actually written by Margaret Seltzer, all-white princess, who perpetrated the fraud only to give voice to the voiceless. Such a brave, brave child of privilege can conjure a sniffle even in defeat, even while watching her publisher (the Riverhead Books unit of Penguin) recall all copies and cancel her book tour.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

In his article in The Chronicle of Higher Education covering the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, Michael Dirda wonders whether New York is still the city of dreams for young American writers.

The rain was slashing down when my train from Washington pulled into New York. Outside Penn Station, the line at the taxi stand was long, and, with little else to do for the next 20 minutes, I found myself thinking about all those young writers who, year after year, had come to this city of dreams, some bringing with them nothing but their ambition, others already clutching the manuscript for a novel, a play, or a book of poems. Here a few had found great or moderate success — and most none whatsoever. Yet even as the disillusioned gradually drifted home to Nebraska or Indiana, the next generation of hopefuls was already stepping off the bus at Port Authority and looking around at the city they would surely conquer with their pens.

In 1993, Masako Owada, an Ivy League-educated Japanese commoner, married Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan, and the pressures of life in the Imperial Palace soon started building.

Scott Simon of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition talks with John Burnham Schwartz about The Commoner.

Recommended.

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.

Highly recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended.

n+1 has a piece on the worth of e-mail.

Email is good for one thing only: flirtation. The problem with flirtation has always been that the nervousness you feel in front of the object of your infatuation deprives you of your wittiness. But with email you can spend an hour refining a casual sally. You trade clever notes as weightless, pretty, and tickling as feathers.

Recommended with reservations.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Highly recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Highly recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Canada’s Globe and Mail has an article on the woes of author Nancy Huston. Her French-language novel, Lignes de faille, recently won the Prix Femina and was expected to be published in English in North America. Her publishers apparently want her to change or remove passages about George W. Bush, Jesus, and the war in Iraq. They seem to think that the passages, as they stand, might offend Americans, leading to poor sales (all they really care about, of course).

The New York Times is running a piece on Senator George Allen’s (R-VA) sleazy attacks on challenger Jim Webb’s novels.

Today’s “Book World” in the Post was a little sparse, a condition to which I have sadly resigned myself. The most interesting bit was a short (part of a ho-hum roundup of recent mysteries) review of Poppy Z. Brite’s Soul Kitchen. Some time ago, in graduate school, a friend handed me a Poppy Z. Brite paperback. I read it in little fits in my kitchen (with the blinds drawn–it had one of those horror/fantasy covers that would make someone carrying a trashy romance around look sophisticated) as a respite from weighty literary theory texts and found it not to my taste. Even though the book wasn’t my thing, I got the strong sense that Poppy was interesting and, er, bright, an impression long since reinforced by posts at her blog. I have not read her series of New Orleans semi-mysteries, but I think that I will place the first in the queue.

. . .while the future is unlikely to see paper books disappear, a movement from paper to screen is nonetheless taking place rapidly in many domains. . .

Read the rest of the article at The New Republic.

Highly recommended.

When Steve Mandel, a management trainer from Santa Cruz, Calif., wants to show his friends why he stays up late to peer through a telescope, he pulls out a copy of his latest book, “Light in the Sky,” filled with pictures he has taken of distant nebulae, star clusters and galaxies.

“I consistently get a very big ‘Wow!’ The printing of my photos was spectacular–I did not really expect them to come out so well.” he said. “This is as good as any book in a bookstore.”

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

Bowker, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic information, today released statistics on U.S. book publishing compiled from its Books In Print database. Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that U.S. title output in 2005 decreased by more than 18,000 to 172,000 new titles and editions. This is the first decline in U.S. title output since 1999, and only the 10th downturn recorded in the last 50 years. It follows the record increase of more than 19,000 new books in 2004.

Great Britain, long the world’s per capita leader in the publication of new books in any language, now replaces the United States as the publisher of most new books in English. 206,000 new books were published in the U.K. in 2005, representing an increase of some 45,000 (28%) over 2004.

Read the rest of the press release at Bowker.com.

I enjoyed Al Gore’s earlier book on environmental issues and railed against the mudslinging that unfairly tarnished it slightly (type ‘”al gore” unabomber’ into Google to see what I mean). I plan to pick up his latest, which by all accounts is a clear presentation of the scientific evidence for global warming, when I return to the States.

Resources:

• Buy An Inconvenient Truth (Paperback) at Amazon.com
• Read about Al Gore at The Washington Post

Highly recommended.

What did we say? Direct is taking 5400. 5400 x $4.19 = $22,626. Between themselves, the other bookselling outlets are taking 20,000, and they’re all getting (to make it easy) a 60% discount, which means they’re paying $2.796 per book. 20,000 x $2.796 = $55,920.

This book starts out making us $78,546. That is the gross profit.

This book starts out making the author $14,203.68 in royalties.

Minus cost, we’ve made $28,372.32. (At the moment, we are factoring in the author’s royalties, but we are not factoring in frieght [sic], or the cost of warehousing the 9,600 books that don’t get shipped.)

Phew. Tired of math yet? Too bad, there’s more.

Read the rest of the article at ALG.