KEY POINTS:
A literary round-up from newspapers and websites around the world.
BRITAIN
Which writer's mum is this: "This individual, who alas! came out of my tummy, is a liar, an impostor, a parasite and especially, especially, a little upstart ready to do anything for fortune and fame"? One can think of many possible candidates, but it's Michel Houellebecq's, (above) as reported in the Times and Sunday Times.
The papers have an extract from a tremendous-sounding memoir, The Bolter by Frances Osborne.
Osborne is the wife of Britain's shadow finance minister, which doesn't sound like the most promising material, but her great-grandmother - more embarrassing relatives! - was Lady Idina Gordon, the debauchee at the centre of the Kenyan Happy Valley demi-monde that gave rise to White Mischef and "one of the greatest sexual scandals to hit the British Empire". Prosaically by comparison, but tantalisingly by any other measure, Gordon was said to have taught "at least one man how to touch four strategic points on a skirt that would make a pair of stockings slide to the floor". I bet there's nothing like this in Mary English's family cupboard. More's the pity.
Reviews include the provocatively titled The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain and Body Shopping: The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Blood by Donna Dickenson.
There is also Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1915-1923 - Behind the Mask.
List mad at the moment (what with its recent 110 best books: The perfect library and all), the Daily Telegraph presents the 50 best cult books.
The Olympics is coming and along with it a whole bunch of New China books, including Beijing Coma, a novel by Ma Jian.
In non-fiction, there is a review of the Guantanamo Bay book Torture: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law by Philippe Sands and Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships by David Levy.
There is also The Three of Us, another tremendous-sounding memoir, this one from Julia Blackburn.
In the Daily Mail, chief reviewer Craig Brown - a great humourist and source of all those Private Eye parody diaries - tackles Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation.
How's this for critical impartiality: "First, to declare an interest, I was for some 12 years David Lodge's publisher and we have been friends for more than 30 years." Tom Rosenthal is reviewing Lodge's Deaf Sentence. The verdict? He likes it, strangely enough. Hasn't a word to say against it.
Lodge, meanwhile, is the subject of this week's short Q&A in the Financial Times.
The big essay review is of four state-of-Britain-today novels.
And there is a review of the new novel from Auckland Writers and Readers Festival- bound poet John Burnside, Glister.
In previous weeks, we have had writers' tributes to Virago; on Saturday, the Guardian went straight to the horse's mouth, with the memories of co-founder Carmen Callil.
There's more looking back elsewhere, with reappreciations - if that's a word - of Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 Cat's Cradle and Beryl Bainbridge's 1972 The Dressmaker.
Among the new books, John Gray reviews Tony Judt's Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century and Michel Faber reviews James Kelman's Kieron Smith, Boy.
Sister paper the Observer has a review of Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.
In the magazines, the Economist has a short early review of the new Tim Winton novel, Breath.
UNITED STATES
Now, Culture Vulture needs little excuse to divert his attention towards Scarlett Johannson, so may he point you to the New York Observer and its piece about the literary cameo in her new video (she's making music now, didn't you know? And why not?). The writer in question? Surprise, surprise: Salman Rushdie. And apparently he's playing a gynaecologist in a new movie. Words fail.
Is it any surprise Americans aren't reading books any more, they're all too busy writing them? Self-publishing, the bane of a books editor's life, is the subject of the New York Times' big essay this week.
There's an interview with Tony Horowitz about his new American history book, A Voyage Long and Strange.
Michiko Kakutani puts her talons away for an enthusiastic review of the new Louise Erdrich novel, The Plague of Doves.
And there is a review of Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House by Carol Felsenthal.
In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Chabon seeks "to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences".
There is also a review of Sidney Poitier's Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter.
The new Louise Erdrich novel is reviewed, as it is in the Washington Post.
The Post has David Leavitt on The Lazarus Project, the new novel from the wonderful Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon. (All the best American writers these days are hyphenated Americans.)
America is only now getting Joanne Harris' Chocolat sequel, The Girl with No Shadow. (Or The Lollipop Shoes, as it was titled here.) Lucky America.
And it is only now getting - or the Post is only now getting around to - The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad by John Stape.
In the New Yorker, John Updike reviews The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli.
The magazine's editor, David Remnick, reviews 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris.
AUSTRALIA
Not surprisingly, more reviews of Tim Winton's Breath, including this in the Australian and Matt Condon on the novel in the Courier Mail.
The Age has an interview with Winton.
CK Stead's Book Self: The Reader as Writer and the Writer as Reader is reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald.
* This posting was compiled to the following soundtrack (why do I keep forgetting to do this? Does anyone care?): Flight of the Conchords (Sub Pop/HBO) - beautifully packaged, immaculately conceived and realised song parodies from the television series . . . but somehow not quite so funny when you can't see Jemaine; Gigi (Palm Pictures), a 2001 album in which the exquisite vocals of the eponymous Ethiopian singer are backed (if "backed" is quite the word in these circumstances) by Bill Laswell, Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders and Wayne Shorter, among many others, with a fusion of jazz, dub, funk and African styles that makes for constant rhythmic and melodic intrigue. It's hardly been off the stereo in my household (and car) since Charlie Gillett played a Gigi track on his Radio New Zealand National/BBC World Service World of Music show a couple of weeks back, reminding me that a copy had been sitting neglected on my shelves since, well, pretty much 2001, actually (at which time its many delights had gone ignorantly unnoticed).
By the way, listeners to Gillett's show may be interested to read the following email received recently by those of us who used to be on his mailing list back when he presented a longer world music show (not to say, institution) on BBC Radio London [http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/radio/], till illness intervened:
I know, I know, I know. When I signed off two years ago, it was with a promise that you would never hear from me again. But if Ken Livingstone can run for a third term as London Mayor after promising he wouldn't do so, I'm sending just one more bulletin.
Assuming that I would one day recover from my strange ailment, I did wonder what I would do to satisfy the itch to do a longer show than I am allowed in A World of Music on the World Service. Several radio producers offered their assistance if I decided to have a bash at some kind of podcast. But just as I started to wonder if I might try something along those lines, fate intervened and I began to fill in on an occasional basis on Monday Nights on Radio 3. There was no pattern that I could predict or tell you about, until now, when the slot has been named World on 3 and three of us take turns for two consecutive weeks each, Mary Ann Kennedy, Lopa Kothari and myself. The rota will run to the middle of September, and then the situation will be reviewed.
The first of my next pair is this Monday, April 28, at 11.15 pm on Radio 3, a timeslot so late that nobody wants to do it live. The guest is Son of Dave, a one-man-band who has intrigued me ever since I first saw him at the Balham Arms about five years ago. Originally from Canada, he has been based here for more than ten years and has just released his third album, much his best so far.
He is joined by backing singers Cathy Coffey and Julie Higgins on all four songs, and also joins me for an hour of taking turns to play records and say a few words about them. I don't want to spoil the fun by listing the records in advance. You'll find them posted on Tuesday morning in the playlist section of the forum at www.soundoftheworld.com and also in the World on 3 section of Radio 3's website www.bbc.co.uk./radio3/worldon3
As is now the norm for music shows on the BBC, you can Listen Again online for seven days at the same location.
Don't worry, I won't be sending this bulletin by email on a regular basis - you can check what I'm up to at the above-mentioned website - but I did want to reassure you that I haven't gone away, not yet.
Charlie
