Over on the Awl our own Dustin and Sam argue about Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Frank Kermode, one of the single greatest literary critics of my lifetime or yours, has died at the age of 90. Read some of his many pieces for the London Review of Books here. Columbia professor Samuel Moyn discusses the evolution of the Human Rights movement, which he calls the "last utopia", in this week's The Nation. Moyn also reads in our store on September 20th. Remarkable historian and intellectual Tony Judt has passed away. Read his incredible series of last essays, published all this year by the NYRB, including some about his terrifying struggle with ALS. "Pale Fire" -- the poem -- by Vlad Nabokov (or John Shade?) is being released as a standalone edition by Gingko. "Satire disappeared from American fiction, but American fiction also disappeared from American fiction." Bumblingly we are taking our first steps into tumblr. Follow us. Bookshelf Porn. Honestly, I'm a little embarrassed to be looking at this at work. I'm trying, at least, to keep my appreciative moans quiet. Cukurova as Yoknapatawpha: Yeshar Kemal is the dark, wounded heart of Turkish literature. Revealing Rick Steves. Remembering Pierre Hadot. Adam Gopnik read recent books about the gospels for this week's New Yorker. This excerpt from the new book Slow Love about publishing and gardening and pajamas ran recently in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine. Dominique Browning, the author, is here to read and discuss the book next Tuesday. As it turns out, we're not the only thing to see or do in Nolita. Surprising, I know. Here's a clip of the folks at New Directions interviewing one of our All-Star Favorite Essayists Eliot Weinberger (we sent him a plaque). Declan Spring, editor at New Directions, writes about the inception of Anne Carson's exquisite Nox at the Seminary Co-op's blog. Sometimes a jewelery case is not a case. And this, I should say, is not a purse. Elif Batuman talks about her article in the latest New Yorker on a specific traditionalist chef in Istanbul, and her own family memories. Teddy Wayne's pitches for political satire skits playing on President Obama's foibles keep getting shot down. Luckily he has a new book he can fall back on, and reads it for us on April 19th. Octopus Magazine #13 is up. I'd tell you it's good, but it's Octopus Magazine. You already know. The eighth issue of Triple Canopy is up and, if you're in the mood for an extended look at Prussian Blue, perhaps the first synthesized color - which I know you are - it is great. Time Out NY was generous enough to list tonight's planned event with Chriastain Hawkey, MacGregor Card and Glenn Kurtz in their magazine. Unfortunately, that event didn't pan out for this month, so those guys won't be in the store this evening. To tide you over, here's a great piece Hawkey published in one of our favorite magazines, the Siennese Shredder. The National Book Critics Circle has announced the winners of their annual awards. Now that's a great list of books. Here's a great look, over at the Quarterly Conversation, at one of our favorite authors Carmen Boullosa. The store's own Sandy Hall is launching a new online/newsprint litmag, and he could use your help. It's a great literary cause. Here's Hugh Raffles talking about his new book Insectopedia, complete with props. This is one of my favorite books of the spring, and Hugh will be in the store to talk about it (again, with props) on March 30th. Check out some great interviews with this year's nominees for The Story Prize. We'll be selling books at their awards night on March 3rd. Jessa Crispin reviewed the new NYRB reprint of Stephen Benatar's Wish Her Safe at Home for NPR. For the rebuttal (to her decidedly favorable review?) come hear Benatar himself read for us on Monday 2/22. The Times is reporting that an old plantation diary has been discovered as the inspiration behind dozens of names and incidents in the work of William Faulkner. We're open today, in spite of the blizzard, though our Art and Beauty book club has been cancelled. To tide you over, here's Chuck Close interviewing Kiki Smith for Bomb Magazine. Michael Schaub reviews Marisa Meltzer's new Girl Power over at Bookslut. Meltzer is here on 2/11 to talk with her editor and Allison Wolfe from Bratmobile. Are you grrl enough to handle it? A dare: read this passage from John D'Agata's new About a Mountain and try, just try, not to buy the book. On the "crazed desire to be plagiarised." We ask that our customers help send relief to those suffering in Haiti by donating to Dr. Paul Farmer's Partners in Health. Michael Greenberg writes about authors and money for Electric Literature: "[Y]ou can easily find yourself toiling for no pay for decades, falling into a life of monk-like asceticism with diminishing expectation for salvation at the end of the line. Writing becomes like a protracted prayer." "Our contemporary culture, with its loneliness and its materialism and disjointed nature, is typical of left brain dominance. As such, we have autism, which is an almost total dysfunction of the right brain." NPR gives us five slideshows from some of the season's best photo books. The best might be Polar Obsession, in which a leopard seal attempts to feed photographer Paul Nicklen dead penguins. "Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy." Here's a review of the new biography of Thelonious Monk by David Yaffe for The Nation. In GQ Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, discusses editing and excerpting DFW over fifteen years. Clayton Eshleman, the masterful translator behind the recent Complete Poems of Vallejo, has five poems by Aimé Césaire, newly translated, up at Bookslut. Matt Cheney discusses the countervoices in Coetzee's phenomenal new autobionovel Summertime. The book is an enormous accomplishment, confounding our expectations of a "monologic ideal" but maintaining the semi-gothic engagement of his earlier novels. Seed magazine lists their favorite science-ey books of the year. As a certified science-eytist, I fully approve. Lower Manhattan in 1852. Our neighborhood was more or less the same, but with more churches, Chemical laboratories and orphanages. So Ed White is speaking about biography for us tonight, 12/2. I love the man's work. To illustrate why, here's an excerpt from his recent book on Rimbaud. Here's Hari Kunzru, briefly, on Elfriede Jelenik at The Millions Filmmaker Astra Taylor interviewed Rebecca Solnit for the latest issue of Bomb magazine. An additional thrill: you can hear recorded excerpts online. Oh, this is good. Here's Alberto Mobilo in Bookforum discussing Umberto Eco's new book about lists. Nicholson Baker is the author of one of our new favorite novels (the recent The Anthologist) and now one of the most charming reviews I've ever read. He's unrelenting in his efforts to win us over, a Lloyd Dobler of letters. An amazing episode of On the Media this week was entirely about the future of books and bookselling, including discussions with independent booksellers in New York. Also, don't miss Chris Hedges discussing two of our favorite books. David Gates sort-of kind-of pans Nabokov's last unfinished novel The Original of Laura in the Times this weekend. Funny that, because everything he said about the book made me want to read it with such an urgency I can scarcely believe it. Could all novelists please refrain from criticizing their governments? Maybe show a little "duty of reserve?" You know, because timidity and blind allegiance are the attributes we value most in our artists. Why Krzhizhanovsky is your (and my) new favorite unpronounceable dead author. In The Believer, the Barthelme Syllabus. One of our favorite translators, Margaret Jull Costa, is interviewed over at Bookslut. She works with Saramago and Marias among others. It's Heather Christle week over at HTMLGIANT and, if you come down to the store and pick up a copy of her The Difficult Farm and flip through it a bit and let it change you in fundamental and not entirely comfortable ways, I suppose it is Christle week down here, too. If you don't work in books, you might have been outside some recent uproar, but large chain retailers have begun eagerly cutting their own throats on some book prices in a exhibition of classic monopoly-like behavior. James Surowiecki comments in the New Yorker here. When novelists sober up. Two good things from the Times this weekend: first, let Colson Whitehead help you choose your next book's genre. Only know five adjectives? You might be interested in a thriller. Then, Orhan Pamuk walks us through some items from his own Museum of Innocence. Strange and touching, this. Maybe a little creepy? "To those of you alive in the future/ who have somehow found a sip of water/ on this day in the past four syndicated/ series involving communication with the dead/ were televised and in this way we resembled/ our own ghosts in a world made brief with flowers. Books are not just containers of content, but signs in and of themselves. This guy knows what I'm talking about. Thurston Moore, one of my nominees for The Best, is launching his own press for art books this spring. We will, of course, have mountains of them. (The linked interviewer is godawful, I know. Just focus on the answers.) Wally Shawn is in our cafe speaking as I type this. Here's the introduction to his marvelous new book of essays. Eileen Myles (who reads for us 10/26) has been blogging for the Poetry Foundation. It's marvelous. On teachers: "There’s a kind of oblivious surface they excrete. It’s palpable, you can feel it." Are you reading "Five Dials" yet? It's an incredible, free, PDF magazine. It's so good, I honestly shouldn't be promoting it. You know, because we can't sell it. Hillary Mantel's WOLF HALL wins the 2009 Booker. Deservedly, too. The book is just incredible. Have you all been reading the Brooklyn Rail's inTranslation site? They're publishing some of the best short works out there. This new poem by Adonis is stunning. I'll agree that our reader Max Blumenthal deserves to have signs held up for him, though somehow I think my sign might say something different than these. The Millions book blog, along with an amazing list of contributors, is listing the twenty best books of the new millenium (so far). How many of these do you think will still be on the list in a hundred years' time? A thousand? Will our robot overlords love Marilynne Robinson, too? Nicholson Baker on his new The Anthologist: "I grew a bigger beard to do this book." "Are You There God? It's Me, a Sexy Vampire." "Sometimes he wished he could gather all the dogs he loved most and walk off the end of the world with them." Here's a reimagining of classic titles for today's book market. Surprise! They don't gain dignity. Janet Maslin wants to know: can a poorly written review make this book sound any worse? This piece in the Times about David Small is great. It fills in some details around Small's powerful - maybe frightening - graphic memoir. Small is in our store Septemer 29th. "Only she herself had survived, still breathing. And before her, a fresh field" Benjamin Moser is in tonight to talk about the life and work of Clarice Lispector. Here's a short review in Bookforum of Dan Graham's Rock/Music Writing. Dan's in our store next Tuesday at 7. Colson Whitehead wants to sell you the key to time and space. Well, not a key. More of a mallet. Only forty bucks right now. The latest New Yorker is fantastic, maybe better than usual. But of course all the best stuff is behind a subscription firewall. Even Remnick has to eat somehow, I suppose. You know that Lorrie Moore's new book is out, right? The Times sure knows. They've done three features on her since last week. Our own John Turner is in the L.A.Times. Online. For a single sentence. Fame! From Print Magazine, the best book jackets you never saw. Do you think, like some of our booksellers, that the translation of Steig Larsson's books could have used some work? This might be why. Lee Seigel asks: Are you a narrative or episodic personality? My question might be how many of us are one but would rather be the other? The Complete Review counts a whopping 43 separate pre-publication reviews out for Pynchon's new Inherent Vice. Nearly all agree with our staff; it's pretty damn great. Somehow I forgot about Harp and Altar. A terrible crime, that. In the spring issue is Jennifer Hayashida, my favorite poet/translator-from-Swedish, and Lisa Jarnot writing about a young Robert Duncan. Very much worth your time. Octopus might be my favorite poetry magazine. I only mention it because #12 is out now and amazing. Don't worry, I understand if you're too busy for excellence. The latest issue of H_NGM_N is up and entirely readable. Well, let's say mostly. Gay Talese is interviewed in the latest Paris Review. About the necessity of ascots in one's bomb shelter. Frank McCourt has passed away. He was an amazing example for passionate teachers everywhere. The Times Magazine has a long adoring profile of Jack Vance in it. Thank goodness they took time to damn genre writing as a whole, or else I'd have lost all respect for them. Martha Nussbaum takes a little time in the recent Dissent to utterly eliminate all possibility of reasonable objection to the right to equality in marriage. Glad that's finally settled. Fleeing one dictatorship for another - Dorothy Lamb Crawford has a new book out about German emigre musicians and writers in the Hollywood studio system. New Yorker writers know a money quote when they hear it. From Elizabeth Kolbert's review of recent books about our collective American pudge: “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa. We now live in Candyland.” You know what? Yes. Hell yes. I'm on board. Consider me sold. The Millions blog has a great post listing some of the major upcoming titles to watch out for this year, and proving pretty handily that this has been and will continue to be a great book vintage. Biblioage? Maybe I should just say 'year' again. A bumper crop in a great book year, then. Seed magazine chose their science book picks for July. I particularly like 'What's Next?' a collection of essays from the cutting edge of scientific thought. The VQR blog has a long response to Kunkel's discussion in n+1 of the internet and the cultural attention crisis. I read some of it, skimmed some more, then clicked away. From the Travel section of the Times, a pilgrimage to Mary Oliver's Provincetown, Mass, complete with some excellent and unfortunate examples of Ms. Oliver's work. Petina Gappah's 'An Elegy for Easterly' is one of our staff picks this month. You can read her wonderful story 'The Mupandawana Dancing Champion' here, in issue 8 of A Public Space. A U.S. judge has officially banned the much-disputed reworking of Salinger's 'Catcher in the Rye' from being published in the states. The book sounded worthless, but sometimes this use of tort law makes me squeamish. Our own Sarah McNally helps celebrate Canada Day with a piece in the Times. She's definitely my favorite Canadian. Well, top five. Fay Wray was Canadian, after all. James Wood on the dangers - to writers, readers and subjects - of love in Iranian fiction: "Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment." The NYRB excerpts Coetzee's 'Summertime', the third book in his serial fictionalized autobiography. Should I be embarrassed by how much I admire this man's writing? Yomiuri Shimbun has an interesting two-part interview with Haruki Murakami about his latest book '1Q84' (yet to be published in the states), his translation work, and the goals of a literature of alienation. Via Three Percent, my favorite room in the house of my dreams. Why hot new novelists are always so damned old. I'm a week late with this, but Nora Roberts was profiled recently in the New Yorker. Apparently she wears only tangerine or fuchsia? Online you can hear Lauren Collins talk about Roberts and the history of the romance genre. Lists of books that don't, and maybe shouldn't, exist seem to be everywhere right about now. One of my favorites is from Steve Hely's new book 'How I Became A Famous Novelist'. Economy schmeconomy, this is what will kill our bookstore. In The Believer, Rick Moody approaches Artaud and the image of illness. NYTBR featured Kate Walbert's latest 'A Short History of Women' on their cover this week. Kate will be reading from her enticing new book in our cafe on June 24. Michael Thomas' 'Man Gone Down' won the IMPAC Dublin Literary award this week, worth 100K euros. I'm sure it was our staff pick that convinced the judges. Mark Kurlansky takes another turn on the Bat Segundo show to talk about Zola in the mines and racist recipes. Three Percent looks at Francoise Sagan's 'That Mad Ache', a singularly French novel about the burdens of lust and work. Bruce Sterling sees eighteen real challenges facing the world of literature. The list says more about the man's own reading habits than anything else, but still, interesting. Why does the English-speaking world love Constantine Cavafy, perhaps the most subversively placeless of all modern Greek poets, so very much? I have my own reasons, but Peter Green in the New Republic lays out a few more. According to Michael Ruhlman great chefs learn ratios, not recipes. How well can that work in a home kitchen? Slate's Jennifer Reese gave it a shot. Ann Arbor's most famous independent bookshop, Shaman Drum, is closing its doors. Frown. John Freeman takes another look at Randall Jarell's 'Poetry and the Age', one of the greatest books of popular literary criticism to come out of the last century. Janet Evanovich's novels about spandex and exploding cars turn out to be great death-bed reading material. Words Without Borders features writing from Pakistan this month. Also not to be missed, their interview with a 'June 4th thug'. In The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes about the history and turmoil of the academic Creative Writing program. I'm curious about Fiona Maazel's 'Last Last Chance'. It could be brilliant, or it could be just another failed post-Delilo novel. Marilynne Robinson's 'Home' just earned her the Orange Prize. She beat out one of our favorite Brooklynites Samantha Hunt, among others under consideration, but we really can't be sore -- the book is just too damn good. Leo Tolstoy was exactly the petulant man-boy you'd expect. His wife Sofia, however, as revealed in her journals, was as astute and fed-up as you'd hope. Alice Munro has won the Booker International Prize and it's well deserved. Let's all pretend she's from the states now, okay? Cabinet is your favorite magazine. The sooner you accept that fact, (and read this issue's fascinating discussion about deception and history) the more quickly our relationship can grow. Sarcasm: not as cute as David Brooks thinks it is. John Crowley, your favorite novelist of small moments in the lives of Hermetic scholars in upstate New York, is interviewed in The Believer. His new book 'Four Freedoms' drops this week. Sam Anderson has an interesting, if too cute, article in New York about our cultural attention deficit. And, thankfully, he's light on the bemoan. Lee Child writes your dad's favorite books and, unsurprisingly, listens to your dad's favorite songs when he writes them. Ann Enright is dismissive of hotels and airports and businessmen and likely, were she to meet us, everyone you know. Threepenney Review has an excerpt of Philip Lopate's engaging new book 'Notes on Sontag'. Oh, what a coincidence! Lopate also happens to be in our store this evening discussing that same book. Triple Canopy issue 6 is out. Let's all get third-wave metropolitan! So Roberto Bolaño is your literary crush. Don't bother denying it, we all know. You dig the posthumously-rumored-to-have-been-bad boy. Just 'fess up and come to our discussion panel/support group this Thursday. Authors Lethem, Boullosa and Calvo will be here, too. Your new favorite book comes out June 16th. The wait must be killing you. Mathemetician, SF novelist and store favorite Rudy Rucker is a guest blogger over at boingboing. His first post is a discussion of gnarliness in fiction. Guernica had a great interview with Horacio Castellanos Moya (my new favorite Salvadoran novelist) this April. Get reading. Christopher Hitchens reads the newly 'restored' version of Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast', and finds it better than the original, and worthwhile at the very least for the added depth of brutality and hair fetishism. Here's Ron Rosenbaum in Slate on Nostradamus, airport pulps and the 'New Nuke Porn'. Daniel Handler loves Joshua Beckman and his new book 'Take It'. But not as much as I do. I REALLY love it. Most critics have been curious about, if dismissive of, Charlotte Roche's squicky new 'Wetlands'. But Justin Smith, in the new n+1 book review supplement, gives it the best treatment I've seen, along with a crash course in the sex lives of Germans. The NYRB brought some of the nation's biggest writers on economics together for a panel at the PEN Festival. Things got heated, Krugman bit off Ferguson's ear, and they have a recording of it all online. Ben Greenman, who'll be reading in our store May 18th, has a rider for his book tour. Unfortunately, it seems I'm not qualified to provide Mr. Greenman with his required deep tissue massage. Guess I'll be buying the Fresca. Colm Tóibín has a new novel out, sure. It's called 'Brooklyn' even. But I love the man for his essays. Here he is on Liz Bishop and Bob Lowell in the LRB. "Her rustic love-romps shook the English countryside. She was a wanton who needed taming." Real pulp fiction treatments of classic novels. Hilarious. Manuel Prieto's new novel 'Rex' is "filthy with references" to literature and film but still manages to fit in a dose of lust and wrongdoing of the Russian mob variety. At least one of our booksellers loved Whitehead's new 'Sag Harbor'. Greil Marcus most decidedly did not. Ange Mlinko, one of my favorite poets and essayists, recently won the Randall Jarrell award for her criticism. Here's an example of her contagious enthusiasm for language from The Nation. Peter Singer discusses the ethical imperative of charity. Richard Rayner celebrates the re-issue of Moorcock's fantastic Elric of Melnibone novels very appropriately, with quotes that highlight the books' strangeness alongside their lackluster prose. Just for the hell of it, here's Gennady Aygi in the latest issue of Circumference. Seed magazine picks their favorite new science books of the month, about Hubble, synesthesia and, most timely, a new book about our species-wide fear of epidemic. Swamp Dogg, an actual funk singer, has done a cover of a funk song that Ben Greenman wrote for the character in his new book, about a funk singer, called 'Please Step Back'. It is, you guessed it, damn funky. Sam Tanenhaus of the NYTBR invited Jay McInerney into some strange trapezoidal light room to talk about his new collection 'How It Ended'. Surprisingly enough it's a conversation worth watching. Maud Newton has a fantastic quiz up on her blog about authorship, shame and the writing process. The Times Paper Cuts blog has some questions for Paul Yoon whose new collection of stories 'Once the Shore' we've been digging down at the store. He has some great book picks for us. Uganda's literary desert. Aram Saroyan, winner of the 2008 W.C.Williams award and one of the more entertaining poets you'll ever encounter writes on Creeley, Dorn, Black Mountain and middle age. James Wood writes about Ian McEwan, his manipulation of readers, and the role of trauma, surprise and confusion in his fiction. The winners of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. J G Ballard has passed away after a long battle with cancer. A fittingly bleak, subversive malady, that. Zbigniew Herbert and the bus. Here's an interview with Leanne Shapton about her marvelous new novel-as-auction-catalogue. John Ashbery, like many of the New York School, dabbled in visual art as well. In this case, collage. He's begun to create more and the Paris Review has 'em. The Cronicle of Higher Ed has a pretty great essay up about James Wood and his take on the opacity of character in the Bible. Barack Obama just gave me a bad case of Rumpus in my heart. The spring issue of Thuglit is out, and full of stories about folks in love. They also tend to be drunk and angry and in for a bad end, but hey, love'll do that to a body. Amos Oz is either delusional or a coward. There are few more political acts than writing fiction. Liesl Schillinger liked Joanna Smith Rakoff's new novel 'A Fortunate Age', though he wishes she had made the book - a reworking of Mary McCarthy - more her own. You can hear Rakoff read and discuss her novel in the store Monday night Nobel prize winner Wangari Maathai is on the Leonard Lopate show right now, discussing her new book 'The Challenge for Africa'. And, tonight, speaking at Cooper Union. She's telling some hard truths. Art is necessarily unfamiliar. A critic's job is to "guide the reader beyond his or her resistance." It's a job best done with analysis, not summation, says store favorite Matthew Zapruder, and there are too few poetry critics doing it today. Here's an excerpt of "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent", an essay on translation by one of its greatest living practitioners, Anne Carson, from Issue 7 of A Public Space. Consider it assigned reading. Paintings of crowded bookshelves -- because the real thing is just too cheap and useful for some folks. They are lovely though. Some writers (Geoff Dyer) are so charming, even the single most inane list of interview questions I've ever seen can't keep them down. Is Christian tolerance a form of pragmatism? Robert Wright discusses Christ, Paul and globalization in the latest Atlantic. A message from the offices of Proctor, Gamble and Lovecraft. Garcia Marquez may not write anything else. Good for him. Writing is a hellish lonely job, and writers should feel free to retire, too. Flyweights, pork, noise-punk and debris. The fifth issue of Triple Canopy is up and, unsurprisingly, awesome. Prague's Kafka International Airport is ranked last in a recent customer service rating. On Coetzee's anarchistic quietism and late, terrifying, prophetic tenor, David Marcus in Dissent. Everyone in the world is guilty of this sort of lie. Excepting, of course, our staff. "A stream tunes itself over time." Writers in search of the last natural silences in America. I like our sandwiches a whole lot, but I think these folks might have us beat. Really? Am I really excited about this? Am I so eager to kill my childhood? Read an excerpt from David Eagleman's new collection 'Sum' on the NPR site. You will love it. I promise. And you're welcome. Flannery O'Connor, the comic, based on the book, based on the life. Anthony Lane reviews the first of a proposed four volumes of Samuel Beckett's correspondence for The New Yorker. He is led to question the how and, more importantly, the why of the undertaking. A recent book argues that human evolution has accelerated rather than stopped. The punchline is, as always, Neanderthal sex. Bookforum hosts a discussion on "the new geography" that is both as mealy-mouthed and as fascinating as it sounds. Tom McCarthy, one of four artists and writers in the discussion, uses the opportunity to quicken my interest in him and his novels. The spring issue of Zoetrope is dedicated to contemporary Latin-American fiction. Guest editor Daniel Alarcón (a store favorite) explains why a new accounting is necessary, and why, in the end, he just chose stories he liked. The Millions bookblog has posted a walking tour of their favorite bookstores in the city. We're the linchpin, of course. "Bloody deeds are as American as Jesus or money." Lorna Scott Fox reads true crime. Niall Harrison discusses K.J. Parker's 'The Company', a fantasy novel about war that, somehow, doesn't include many scenes of fighting. We are not all socialists now. Socialism is immoderate and romantic and I love it for that, but let's be clear: what you see now is decidedly not it. Sara Barron just sold me her book. Also, wallpaper. I really want some green wallpaper now. Christopher Potter's algebra is as follows: highly-paid publishing job, plus panic attacks and foot-suctioning, equals a book about our place in the history of the universe written by one of the most charming authors you'll ever meet. Can Xue's new novel 'Five Spice Street' is best taken in small doses, but ably translated. This year's NBCC Award winners have been announced. They decided that six male authors weren't enough this time around, so they squeezed another in there. Congratulations gentlemen. Oh no, college kids are buying corny escapist novels! Unprecedented! Quick, to the hyperventi-mobile! Publishers, please either lay people off or give Audrey Niffenegger five million dollars. Stop doing both. It makes you look like schmucks. Sure, bomb the middle-class, just be sure to pay for your cigar first. John Merriman gives us a new history of anarchist terrorism in Paris, 'The Dynamite Club'. Dear Roberto Bolaño, please just stay dead and quiet. I like you too much now, I'm scared all of this other unpublished dross might ruin that. The Financial Times looks at book thieves. Our preferred method of theft deterrence? Sad eyes, quivering bottom lips. Let's talk about Jonathan Littell's 'The Kindly Ones'. Micheal Korda thinks the oedipal, closeted, murderous SS officer protagonist is "rather realistic", and Littell "gets every detail right." Sara Nelson in the WSJ hates the book's hype, the money involved and, not incidentally, the book itself. The most worthwhile review, surprisingly, may be David Gates' in the NY Times Book Review. "It’s hard," he writes "to trust that the author knows what he’s doing." Here's an excerpt from Gail Hareven's intriguing 'Confessions of Noa Weber'. Jessa Crispin calls it more an act of exorcism than a book. Our own Javier Molea, master of Spanish-language books and events, is interviewed on America Reads Spanish. They're bringing two Spanish (as in Spain) authors over for a March 25 event. Stephanie Meyer: abstinence pornographer. Victor Serge's "Unforgiving Years" is a staff pick this coming month. As it turns out the book, full as it is of violence and anxiety, is exactly a tenth as dramatic as its author's own life. Tired of mourning DFW yet? No, me neither. Here's D.T. Max on what the man really wanted from his writing and his great unfinished (soon to be published) novel "The Pale King". I don't know how she managed it, but Fanny Howe seems to have adulterated the near-schizophrenic prose idiom with enough interesting phrases to make me love it. New York photographer Taryn Simon curated the latest issue of Blind Spot. It's utterly gorgeous and powerful. But maybe I'm a sucker for photos grafted to text Zoe Heller's latest is a look at dogma and conscientious adopters. Sounds interesting, and she's a swell writer, but I had to giggle when the reviewer claimed that "Heller doesn’t subscribe to any organized creed herself." Philip José Farmer is beginning work on his riverboat right about now. "Script & Scribble is an unusual, compelling blend of retrospective, lamentation and advocacy." Says Maud Newton about Kitty Florey's new book on handwriting. Really though, isn't this just another bourgeois necessity-turned-nostalgic-hobby to be obsessed and proscriptive about? Must we care? Julian Barnes writes admirably in the NYRB about Eric Blair the younger, Orwell the older, "the writer against", - about his scorn, his deep Englishness and his distrust of human nature. New York author and mensch Joseph O'Neill has won the PEN/Faulkner for his novel "Netherland". It was well deserved. We endorse E. Hamish Plumbrick for Poet Laureate. He is, after all, thrice-published. Looking for a list of the titles discussed at our Feb. 13 panel on Obama's literary influences? Click through for the books and a description of the panel. Ian McDonald is the World Bank, the IMF, of science fiction. He's globalizing the genre the white British way. Still, it's shiny fun stuff. Here's Paul McAuley's introduction to his latest, "Cyberabad Days." Elizabeth Gilbert spoke at TED this year, about creativity, expectations of doom, and seaweed. I think I'm sort of a fan now, maybe? Wake up Sarasota! Stephen King pulled the trigger! He's ruining your celebrity cachet! My van says it all over the place! The New Yorker book blog gives a quick recap of our recent panel on the literature that inspired Obama. Come on Dubai, really? "Let us not just be cowards," you decided, "but cowards with a sadly ironic slogan." The greatest Sudanese novelist you've never read has just died. Your love poems suck. Poetry Magazine tells you why. Congratulations to the winners of our first annual Children's Story-Writing Contest! Come by the cafe this Saturday to hear readings by the next Willems, Rowling, or Seuss. McSweeney's Internet Concern reports on my romantic Valentine's day dinner last night. A strange interview with Mary Gaitskill in The Believer this month, I don't know many writers that would talk about the innate "soul-quality" of their work. "The long white beard makes you look like Santa or a wizard." There's a timely valentine to Darwin in the latest issue of A Public Space. Colm Toibin writes on Edward Carpenter's fearless nineteenth century homosexuality and socialism. Toibin, remember, will be one among many great speakers discussing Obama's literary influences in our store this Friday. Leonard Lopate spoke to belgian novelist Amelie Nothomb on Wednesday and yes she was charming and casually arrogant, but not nearly as entertaining, I promise, as she will be in our store this Thursday evening. Look, Mr. Gaiman, I know you have a new movie to sell us on, but could you please be less British? It's creeping me out. Here's Frank Kermode discussing Milton. Think of it as a dry digestif of smart to follow the course of stupid just below. "But then, Jedediah Killinger III was not an ordinary man. He was a man who made his own rules and called his own game." The Pitch presents "Killinger!", your new favorite book. Bookslut has a lengthy interview up with Brian Michael Bendis, the comics writer who spilled John Hughes in your Spiderman. We haven't posted much about Updike's death here, but last week The New Yorker ran a series of short but lovely remembrances, the best being this by Eugenides. See also Adam Gopnik's brief tribute to the man and, behind a subscription wall, a magnificent collection of excerpts from Updike's own writing for the magazine. Should we trust Google with the entirety of our textual history and intellectual output? Whoops! Too Late! Lou Anders, one of the best SF editors today, fawns over Adam Roberts, one of the best SF writers today. I'd like to mock him for his adoration, but it's too damn deserved. Stephen Colbert would like his Newbery medal now please. What is the worth of the statement if it cannot protect the man? Amartya Sen discusses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the latest New Republic. For more on that great statement of shared value, here's an animated version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which turned 60 this past fall. Good font work, too. Does taking a photo entail an obligation toward its subject? Vollmann discusses photography and social contract in the latest Bookforum. Poor T.C. Boyle. He showed up to the party wearing the same dress as Nancy Horan. Maira Kalman paints, revels in, the inauguration. The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future, in which are discussed Gagarin, Levinas, Heidegger, James Bond, St. Joseph, quivering flesh in a can, and the single best reason you'll ever find for subscribing to the Journal of Hand Surgery. The world of Rae Armantrout's poetry is "someting we recognize intimately - and at the same instant montrous." writes Ron Silliman. Trees into books into trees once again. Wait, you mean Bolaño may not have taken heroin or been imprisoned by Pinochet? Disgusting. I'm going to take his worthless and utterly unreadable books to the curb right now. John Updike died today. He was 76. Who is fit to eulogize a writer of his voice and stature? What do women want? Daniel Bergner discusses the complex science of female desire in the Times and, on February 2nd, in our store. Adam Kirsch is a bit relieved that Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration poem was not soaring, or even memorable. It was, he writes, "not public but bureaucratic." "spent my hours in town in cough on pillow sigh sigh but back now". All interviews should be conducted by email, with no caps, and their subject should always be poet Abraham Smith. Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children, discusses his next novel. He's going to be a wealthy wealthy man. See him talk with editor David Ebershoff in our store this Monday. W. D. Snodgrass is dead. Maybe now is a good time to hear what he has to say. Time Out interviews Paul Maliszewski, a connoisseur of and dabbler in plagiarism, hoaxery, and literary snake oils. He'll be reading in the store February 18th. The classiest book you will ever read. Arne Næss, your favorite Norwegian ecological philosopher, died this Monday at 96. n+1 has reposted an essay on his legacy. Hear Robert Frost's recitation of two poems at Kennedy's inauguration, one from memory and one, thankfully, aborted because he couldn't read the page on which it was written. Thank God for the long tail. Scott Esposito talks to New Directions' Declan Spring about running a small press under the storm clouds. DC will be sold out of cupcakes. Not so our cafe! Come watch the inauguration with us, fellow bookworms and tea-junkies, projected live and large in our cafe this Tuesday morning. Matt Taibbi wants to see Thomas Friedman cry salty well-deserved tears into his silly porn-stache. Bush and Cheney each plan to write memoirs highlighting some of the tough choices they were forced to make in office. Don't bother guys, I think this Harper's Index sums it up pretty well. Verlaine, Rimbaud, and the lice they loved to share, all in an excerpt from Edmund White's incredible new biography of the boy genius. Morton Smith, Carpocrates, and the possible forgery that points to Christ the libertine magician. When storytelling is survival, your vocabulary becomes sexy. Seed Magazine interviews Denis Dutton, author of "The Art Instinct". The NEA says adults are reading more, particularly fiction. I guess that's good news, though I'm unnerved to learn that there is anyone at all who doesn't regularly read for pleasure. Emily Dickinson takes a stroll therough the uncanny valley. Will Sheff of the band Okkervil River reads Tolstaya's "Okkervil River" and all is right with the world. Here's a short but enticing book trailer for a new anthology about money in relationships, "The Secret Currecy of Love". See Hilary Black and contributors discuss the book this Monday in our store. Inger Christensen, one of the greatest European poets of our time, died last Friday. We've taken the plunge and created a Facebook page. Come scribble on our wall. "If I don't win, I won't really mind not having the acclaim, it's not getting the money that I will mind. Because I'm always terribly broke, and how wonderful it would be to get that lovely cheque". Diana Athill, who has indeed won the Costa Award and the accompanying check at 91, as interviewed in The Guardian. Dr. Johnson turns 300 this year. To celebrate, Yale's Beinecke library has started a word-a-day blog of words from his marvelous dictionary. Today's entry: a'fterwit. Jessa Crispin has a long and wonderful interview with Clayton Eshleman up in this month's Bookslut. The latest issue of Words Without Borders features fiction by Indonesian women. One of the more interesting: "Maybe Not Yem" by Etik Juwita. Here's a recording of Amitav Ghosh reading from his new epic "Sea of Poppies." Arthur Conan Doyle believed in voices from beyond the grave. Now hear his, along with Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin and others, all sounding more pompous and ridiculous than you could ever imagine. John Bolton and John Yoo are my new favorite comedy duo. They're so zany! Charles Olson reads "The Librarian", an excellent advertisement for the chemistries of scotch and American poetry, but it left me wondering, who's Frank Moore? From the VQR blog, two views of Bush's departure. Somehow the National Review cover seems the sharper mockery. John Clute is the greatest living critic of genre fiction, and I've rarely seen him better than in this dissection of Jo Walton's "Small Change" series in Strange Horizons. David Grossman remains the most reasoned commenter on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He also remains ignored. Ariel Levy reviews the newly revised "The Joy of Sex" in the latest New Yorker. Conclusions? Less hairy, much less offensive, and maybe less fun. Win McCormack, author of "You Don't Know Me: A Citizen's Guide to Republican Family Values," gives advice on the classiest ways to torpedo a political career. One tip: hypocrisy. Win will be reading in our store Tuesday at 7. Bernard Madoff's literary predecessors. Hillary Mantel has an excellent piece of memoir about her time in Saudi Arabia in the latest LRB. Americans are still terrified of and outraged by penguins. And why not? Their waddle is so lewd, don't you think? Rwanda has become a nation dominated by women. It cannot help but be a better place for it. Thousands of Americans fled to Russia to find some relief during the (first) great depression. Some of them found a gulag instead. Adam Hoschild reviews "The Forsaken" by Tim Tzouliadis. I will never ever fall out of love with Roberto Bolaño. Exhibit A: "And then there is no choice but to write." "I sold my hair to buy you these BRAINS." Harp & Altar has posted their fifth issue. Of particular note, poems by G.C. Waldrep and Claire Donato and three excellent stories by Robert Walser. And it is Mark and Scott — not "Chad and Ted” — who partake of cigarettes and “furtive man-on-man action.” It's about a month old, but I quite like this interview on the Granta site with Nigerian priest and writer Uwem Akpan about his twinned vocations. Maud Newton discusses the tropes of "atrocity kitsch fiction" with short story writer Anya Ulinich. Mark Sarvas argues for books (bought from indie stores) as the best gift and even backs it up with fake math. Cheryl Sucher, bookseller and resident tap-dance aesthete, has a piece in the latest Publisher's Weekly discussing finances, our store and particularly you, our book-hungry customers. Cynthia Ozick has been given this year's PEN/Nabokov award. Her acceptance speech is a beautiful discussion of ghosts, both literary and political, and PEN has made it available in text and audio. Here is perhaps the best reason I've seen to throw over taste and ideals and write whatever the hell will keep the cash coming. The Quarterly Conversation is excellent this time around. Of particular note: Gaddis as the last Protestant, an audio interview with Aleksandar Hemon, a contest to win all the Bolaño you'll ever need and a dozen solid reviews.