At RSB Carey Harrison has a nice post on The Kindly Ones. Carey takes into account Daniel Mendelsohn's lengthy, considered review in the NYRB, and both Carey and Daniel try to understand why Littell has made his book so dirty. Here's some of Carey's take: Mendelsohn’s conclusion grants The Kindly ...

Natasha Wimmer doesn't get too many words for her New York Times review of Ghosts by Cesar Aira, but she does make them count: Aira likes nothing better than to probe the obscure workings of the mind, but he also writes scenes of great prosaic beauty. The modest, lovely New Year’s Eve party on the...

For several years now, Jamaican-American author Michelle Cliff has been mapping out a fictive terrain at the intersection of Jamaican, American, and queer identities. With novels such as Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven , she established herself as a major postcolonial voice. Earlier this winter, I ...

Last month I excitedly reported the news that University of Texas was adding new life to its translation series. They'll be making more efforts to bring important work to everyday readers, and they'll be breathing new life into their backlist. U of T has been responsible for publishing in English so...

This LA Times piece on Obama and a possible resurgence in arts funding has been getting some play. It's hard to get too excited though, as the piece is whole bunch of speculation and very little substance: Other early signs that the arts may get to share the Obamas’ spotlight were opera star René...

The Guardian provides the first UK review I've seen of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. This is a decidedly positive review, and it provides some extra-literary info that I was not aware of: The first significant work of Jonathan Littell, Francophone son of American spy author Robert, it was an e...

Matt Cheney makes an important distinction between why we shop at Amazon and why we shop at brick and mortars: I use the internet to buy books I already know about; I use bookstores to make discoveries. The latter is much more fun -- browsing is an addiction -- and also leads to much more impulsive ...

This essay on several recent books by or about Kafka turns up this gem from the ossified Austro-Hungarian empire: At the fin de siècle, the state bureaucracy already held considerable sway over people's lives and selves, and Kafka wrote from the center of the age's contradictions and anxieties. Whe...

Over at The Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg has diagrammed a sentence of Barack Obama's, building on the central insight Zadie Smith laid out in her recent essay: This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine... or rather, it may be one facet...

Chad picks up on Gideon Lewis-Kraus's worthwhile Harper's essay ($$$) on the latest Frankfurt Book Fair. For sheer wide-eyed staring at the spectacle, it's a great essay, and recalls what David Foster Wallace used to do for that magazine, as an observer of serious people acting unseriously (although...