KEY POINTS:
Culture Vulture blogger Guy Somerset's round-up from the literary pages of the world's newspapers and websites.
BRITAIN
It is nice for the Listener to get a mention in the Guardian - albeit not by name and not very flattering. This from an interview on Saturday with Man Booker Prize
winner Anne Enright, (pictured above):
Earlier that morning, she had taken a call from a journalist in New Zealand ("Hey, so Anne, hey, so you had a nervous breakdown, hey," is her mirthless impression), who annoyed her by insisting her new stories are dark, obsessed with sex and death. She puts the antagonism down to the fact that she pipped Lloyd Jones, a New Zealander, to the Booker (along with Ian McEwan).
For our writer Caren Wilton's take on this conversation, ahead of Enright's May visit to the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, you will have to read the interview itself in Listener this coming Saturday. It offers a rather fuller account of what occurred - while leaving out (graciously on Wilton's part) the emails that ensued from Enright and her publisher.
"I've been misquoted and misinterpreted!" Wilton says of the Guardian interview.
Find out more on Saturday.
Another author at the Auckland festival, John Grey, tackles Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the rest of the anti-God squad .
Among the reviews, this of New Yorker music writer Alex Ross The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which has just won the National Book Critics Circle Criticism Award in the United States.
Guardian sister paper The Observer interviews Sebastian Faulks about taking on the mantle of Ian Fleming and James Bond.
The Times and Sunday Times have former British politician David Owen analysing Tony Blair's psyche in an extract from his forthcoming book In Sickness and in Power: Illness in Heads of Government During the Last 100 Years.
The papers have also been serialising JG Ballard's new memoir, Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton and are running a competition to design a cover for a limited edition of his novel Crash.. The mind boggles.
Literary suicides make for a nice curio. The papers mean writers who kill themselves, rather than writers who kill their careers.
Julian Barnes ponders death, too, though not at his own hand, but in an interview on the back of his new book, Nothing to be Frightened of.
And Alexander McCall Smith visits Botswana, location of his No 1 Ladies Detective Agency thrillers.
David Baddiel looks at writers' failed marriages.
The Daily Telegraph also reviews Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise..
Lionel Shriver reviews Anne Enright's new short story collection, Talking Pictures.
There is this and this review of the new Louise de Bernieres novel, A Partisan's Daughter.
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World by impolitic and now former Barack Obama adviser Samantha Power is reviewed, too.
More Louis de Bernieres in the Independent, and a review of Michael Burleigh's Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism.
Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened of is reviewed in the Daily Mail.
In the magazines, Barnes is back on his favourite subject, Gustave Flaubert, with a long review in the Times Literary Supplement of Flaubert's last letters, on such enticing subjects as sex, art, bankruptcy and cliffs. Those British literary editors, they know how to write a standfirst.
There is also a review of The Death of the Critic. Perish the thought.
In the New Statesman, you will find another review of Samantha Power's book, and also this from last week but I didn't get a chance to include it in the first Paper Chase, an interview.
And there is a review of We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek, who has just left Wellington and its Writers and Readers Week.
British jounalism is under the spotlight in the London Review of Books, with John Lanchester's review of Flat Earth News by Nick Davies.
UNITED STATES
In the New York Times, there is a review of The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus by Joshua Kendall - under the droll heading: Obsessed (Agog, Beset, Consumed, Driven, etc).
And there is The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present.
The San Francisco Chronicle reviews Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories.
The big essay in the Los Angeles Times is about Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World is being filmed by Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio.
It also reviews The Ten-Year Nap, the new novel from Meg Wolitzer, whose The Position (2005) proved so popular.
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu looks fascinating.
In the magazines, the New Yorker has new fiction from John Burnside, another of the authors heading to Auckland for its Writers and Readers Festival.
In the Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens revisits Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori.
And there is a review of what happened when postwar modernism hit California, in Birth of the Cool by Elizabeth Armstrong.
Another author at Writers and Readers Week in Wellington, Patrick McGrath, is in the reviewer's seat at a Book Forum, reading, exciting news this, I've not heard anything about this before - the new novel from Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project.
James Meek's We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is reviewed, too.
There is also an extract from Rick Perlstein's forthcoming Nixonland, about the US under Tricky Dicky.
AUSTRALIA
Anyone who has spent any time at all in Oz in the past 40 years ought to have read - or seen on television - the movie reviews of David Stratton, who is interviewed by the Australian on the occasion of his new memorably titled memoir, I Peed on Fellini: Recollections of a Life in Film.
The paper also has the longlist for the country's premier literary award, the Miles Franklin.
