KEY POINTS:
The weekend book pages from around the world.
BRITAIN
The Small Talk Q&A in the Financial Times is with Lloyd Jones.
The paper's big essay gathers together three memoirs about London's East End.
And there is a review of Scenes from a
by Mark Harris, about the post-French New Wave (or, if you must, Nouvelle Vague) American New Wave of filmmaking.
In the Daily Telegraph, Melvyn Bragg gets "nakedly autobiographical" (thank heavens, not just plain naked) with his new novel, Remember Me.
Philip Kerr has a new novel from his postwar Berlin detective Bernie Gunther, A Quiet Flame.
It's a good week for non-fiction, with reviews of Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend by Richard Stoneman, The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya by Asne Seierstad, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting by Marc Norman and Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing by Katherine Ashenberg. (Shouldn't that be Washenberg?)
In The Guardian, Margaret Atwood salutes her fellow Canadian Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables.
Ursula K Le Guin reviews Salman Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence.
And there is Drinking for England: The Great English Drinkers and their Times by Fergus Linnane. Cheers to that.
The Observer vies to outdo the book publisher in its review of the biography of (as the paper has it) "a Rennaisance It-girl" - Isabella de Medici: The Glorious Life and Tragic End of a Renaissance Princess by Caroline P Murphy.
There is also a joint review of the new offerings from two "female polemicists" - The Sexual Paradox by Susan Pinker and The Terror Dreamby Susan Faludi.
A failing literary novelist discovers the sales joys of writing porn in The Independent, while a Cambridge University French lecturer discovers the joys of Lee Child.
Salley Vickers tells us about her cultural life.
In The Times and Sunday Times, the latter's chief fiction reviewer, Peter Kemp, reckons The Enchantress of Florence is the worst thing Salman Rushdie has ever written. Quite a feat.
John Carey reviews The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul by Patrick French.
There is also a review of Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs.
And this of Rock On: How I Tried to Stop Caring About Music and Learn to Love Corporate Rock by Dan Kennedy.
Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-Star Fantasist is poet Simon Armitage's memoir about music.
In the magazines, the Times Literary Supplement has a nice long review of the new and later poems of John Ashbery.
UNITED STATES
How sniffy are you about your partner's reading habits? Is it a deal breaker? That's the subject of this wonderful essay in the New York Times.
Mary Roach, who brought us Stiff, about the dead, now offers the similarly succinctly titled Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.
There is also a review of the trashy biography Clark Gable: Tormented Star by David Bret. Frankly, my dear...
As an antidote to such things, there is a Julie Andrews biography and autobiography.
And Michiko Kakutani gets to grips with The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll.
The Los Angeles Times has an appreciation of Richard Yates, whose Young Hearts Crying is currently on my own bedside table - and who was also subject of this recent appreciation in the Guardian. I hope he isn't about to become fashionable - that wouldn't do at all.
There is also Charles Frazier's appreciation of Anthony Minghella , who directed the film version of his novel Cold Mountain.
Politicians everywhere will be pleased to know there is a new "clear and highly readable" translation of The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli.
And there is a review of Unaccustomed Earth, the new short story collection from Jhumpa Lahiri.
The Washington Post looks at the "biopiracy" that devastated Brazil in a review of The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power and the Seeds of Empire by Joe Jackson.
There is also a look at the consequences of imperialism (French, in this case), invasion and occupation in Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed by Martin Evans and John Phillips.
Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation gets the once-over, too.
And on a lighter note (as they say on daytime TV), a review of Wit's End, Karen Joy Fowler's follow-up to The Jane Austen Book Club.
In the Chicago Tribune, there's more help for those grubby powermongers with Safire's Political Dictionary by William Safire.
The Village Voice has a review of Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's unpublished war writings.
James Wood really is loosening up in his focus these days (as he said he would), with a review in the New Yorker of Richard Price's Lush Life. Mind you, he does manage to bring Henry Green into it.
The New Republic has a trenchant exchange of letters on whether or not Irene Nemirovsky was an anti-Semite. The Jewish Irene Nemirovsky, for those of you who don't appreciate the added layer of the argument. The Jewish Irene Nemirovsky who died in Auschwitz.
AUSTRALIA
All sorts of vexing questions are raised by this story in The Australian about how Kevin Rudd has reserved the right to overrule the judges of the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
There are reviews of The Spare Room by Helen Garner and God of Speed by Luke Davies.
The Age has an interview with Garner, along with this review.
There is also a review of Listener contributor Kevin Rabalais' first novel, The Landscape of Desire.
* This posting was compiled to the following soundtrack: New Orleans Funk: The Original Sound of Funk Volume 2(Soul Jazz), which actually manages to find some surprises from this exhaustively anthologised city; Crazy Rhythms by The Feelies (A&M), prompted by an excellent appreciation by Alan Holt in the March issue of Real Groove magazine; and The Paris Concerts 1965-1966 by Ornette Coleman, part of the fantastic reissue programme of Gambit Records.
