Clips
Slate
The New York Times
Do We Need Professional Critics?
Satantango by Laszlo Krasnahorkai
Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives by Brad Watson
The New Inquiry
The New Republic’s The Book
The Problem with Tweeting a Revolution
The Warlock: Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory
Rebels and Collaborators: Purge by Sofi Oksanen
Los Angeles Times
Juliann Garey impresses in sharp-tongued debut novel
Roberto Bolano’s ‘Woes of the True Policeman’ a sketchy work
The Sandbox by David Zimmerman
Love and Obstacles: Stories by Aleksandar Hemon
Map of the Invisible World by Tash Aw
The National
Second Person Singular: straddling cultures as an Arab-Israeli
Alif the Unseen is missed chance to fictionalise post-Arab Spring shift
Drifting House: Koreans search for a place to call home
Guantanamo Bay represents a legacy of shame for US
Where the Wild Frontiers Are: America comes up short in South Asia
Albert Cossery, the dispassionate anarchist [PDF]
Fantastic voyage: Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama
Voices of the People: Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East
Mockery into feeling: Dezso Kosztolányi
The Collaborator: A fictional story too close to the reality of Kashmir
The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages by Sophie Hardach
Los Angeles Review of Books
Trading Faith for Wonder: On Judaism’s Literary Legacy
Tablet & Jewcy
Holiday Movies As History Books
Shani Boianjiu and the Problems of Youth
Stop Calling Porn Star James Deen a ‘Nice Jewish Boy’
Watching the Anti-War Documentary ‘Tears of Gaza’
The Jews of HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’
Andy Zaltzman, Radio Comic for an Internet World
Gary Shteyngart’s Blurbs: A Journey to the End of Praise
How Poverty Became Merely Another Spectacle
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Slow Fade of Memory
Harvey Pekar’s Unfinished Lament
Hoaxocaust! The Satirical Play About Holocaust Denial
The Campiness of Camp, a Summer-Long Pageant
Jon Stewart’s Happily Ignorant Jew Routine is Getting Stale
On Twitter, Grief is Just Another Meme
Rosenberg Boys Appear at ‘Daniel’ Screening
Capital New York
Edwidge Danticat and Salman Rushdie share stories of violence and fear, well-leavened with humor
A comedians’ live show, ‘Thrilling Adventure Hour,’ comes east from L.A.
On stage, the pleasant ‘purple-state’ feminism of Amy Poehler
Margaret Atwood on debt, an old Tasmanian prison, a new documentary, and why she’s not an activist
‘Game of Thrones’ is bloodthirsty and depraved, but its pleasures shouldn’t feel like guilty ones
Why flash fiction is an overrated genre, and why Etgar Keret is a master of it
In Brooklyn, Aleksandar Hemon and Nicole Krauss make the case for internationalist literature
Author Hari Kunzru on the culture wars, meth, and his ambitious new novel, ‘Gods Without Men’
Adam Wilson, author of ‘Flatscreen,’ talks about sex, drugs, and misery
The circuitous return of Steven Van Zandt, wise guy (via Netflix, and Norwegian comedy)
The Daily Beast
Not Trying to Cause a Big Sensation
From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra
Jonah Lehrer’s ‘Self-Plagiarism’ Scandal Rocks The New Yorker
Consumerism: the Purest Kind of Politics
In the Land of Babel: Best European Fiction 2012
Jesse Ball’s War Against Conventional Fiction
The Rediscovery of Hans Keilson
Molotov’s Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History by Rachel Polonsky
Albania’s Dark Horse: Ismail Kadare and The Accident
Russia’s Wicked Satirist: Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik and Ice Trilogy
The Atlantic
The Case Against ‘Twilight’: One Author’s War on Wimpy Vampires
What Makes the Arab World Laugh
The Dodgers: Los Angeles’ Answer to General Motors
The Forward
A Wild Beast Of a Novel: Dolly City Finally Arrives in America
Bloodsuckers, Serbs and Ghostly Kabbalists
Bookforum
Drugs without the Hot Air by David Nutt
Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden
The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Sweet Heavy When I Die by Jeff Sharlet
The Virginia Quarterly Review (online & print)
The Activist Novelist: David Grossman’s To The End of the Land [PDF]
A Gentle and Angry Instrument: Robert Walser’s Short Fiction
The Art of the Negative Review
‘I Have Decided Not to Die,’ an essay about one family’s experience of the Armenian Genocide (also featured as a Powell’s review of the day)
Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City by Catherine Corman
The New Ludditism in Literature
In Praise of Plagiarism: a review of Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak
The Accordionist’s Son by Bernardo Atxaga
The Christian Science Monitor
Barnes & Noble Review
The Life of Irene Nemirovsky by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt
Bookslut
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (featured as a Powells review-of-the-day)
Cairo Modern by Naguib Mahfouz
The Jewish Husband by Lia Levi
The Complete Fiction by Francis Wyndham
Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever by Walter Kirn
The Age of Orphans by Laleh Khadivi
Asian Geographic
We Great Apes: Reassessing Connections Between Humanity and the Natural World
[Deep Cuts]
Museum of Tolerance premieres documentary about ‘Arab Schindlers’ who saved Jews
A Strange and Extraordinary Week
Huffington Post Adds a “Books” Section
Kids Kicking Cancer Comes to L.A.
Week’s Highlights: Litigation Nation
Week’s Highlights: Inventing Myth
UNESCO Delegates Make the Right Decision
Week’s Highlights: Sorry, So Sorry
Maccabiah B’nai Mitzvah Large Draw for Team USA
Week’s Highlights: Israel, Really
A Book Reviewer Succumbs to Reefer Madness
Week’s Highlights: A Nanotrend, Each of Us
Week’s Highlights: “An Ambiguous Purity”
Week’s Highlights: Rising Up, Rising Down
Week’s Highlights: “I Award You No Points”
I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski
The Vicissitudes of Categorization
Does Every Book Deserve a Review?
The story behind Infinite Summer
Previewing The Road Film Adaptation
Censorship in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
The Tactile Beauty of The Lazarus Project
Is the Authors Guild the New RIAA?
Book Reviews Are Moving from Print to Podcasts
The Ironic Metaphysics of Stephen Colbert’s Mash-up Style
Nigerian Novelist Elech Amadi Kidnapped, Released
“We are walking to hell, toward a very dark future”
Finding Balance in the Literary Blogosphere
Politics and Magic in Etgar Keret’s The Girl on the Fridge (For this piece, I was named a finalist in the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Young Reviewers Contest.)
Notes