KEY POINTS:
BRITAIN
New Zealand had its go at the London Book Fair a few years back, this year it's the turn of Arab literature, prompting an overview in the Guardian.
There's an interview with James Kelman and Alberto Manguel's appreciation of (which some of us remember from childhood television viewings of the 1969 caper movie starring Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg).
Ian Rankin reviews Kate Summerscale's real-life Victorian whodunit The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or The Murder at Road Hill House.
And there's a gripping detective story set against a backdrop of Stalin's Russia, in Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith.
In the Observer, Hilary Spurling reviews The World is What it is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul by Patrick French.
There are also reviews of Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller and Simon Armitage's Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-Star Fantasist.
In the Daily Telegraph, there's another of the 30th-anniversary paeans to Virago, this one by Justine Picardie.
Tim Rice gets dewy eyed about Wisden's.
There is a review of the first Granta under new editor Jason Cowley.
The Times and Sunday Times have interviews with Robert Harris and Khaled Hosseini.
There is a nice guide to the Oxford World Classics series.
In fiction, there are reviews of – title of the year – All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen and Mrs Lincoln (yes, Abraham's wife) by Janis Cooke Newman.
John Carey's lead review is of Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet – A New Life by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Other non-fiction reviews include The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende and The Cricket War: The Inside Story of Kerry Packer's World Cup Series by Gideon Haigh.
More Arab literature in the Independent on the back of the London Book Fair promotion. (Did they get as excited as this when New Zealand came to town? I suspect not.)
There's an extract from Zachary Lazar's novel Sway, which conflates the 60s stories of the Rolling Stones, Kenneth Anger and Charles Manson.
The big essay in the Financial Times is about alcoholic memoirs.
FT columnist Clive Crook gets behind Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming.
Peter Hitchens – brother of Christopher – delivers a typically trenchant critique of Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland by Jonathan Powell. Where? The Daily Mail, where else?
In the magazines, The Economist reviews Khirbet Khizeh by S Yizhar, a reissued Israeli novel from 1949 about the "clearing" of a Palestinian village.
The Times Literary Supplement reviews Norma Clarke's Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington – "an eighteenth-century memoir with a timeless refrain: all men are bastards".
Spectator editor Matthew d'Ancona interviews Salman Rushdie.
The New Statesman's archive spot has a book review by Graham Greene.
UNITED STATES
The New York Times reports on a celebration of Philip Roth on his 75th birthday.
Noel Coward is about as far from Philip Roth as you can imagine, and is the subject of the long essay, which deals to his wartime spying exploits.
Andrew O'Hagan reviews that wonderfully titled All the Sad Young Literary Men and Michiko Kakutani reviews Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays by William Styron.
In the Los Angeles Times, there are reviews of The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life and the same writer's anthology American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau and The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Come back to the raft ag'in, Huck honey!
The Washington Post leads off with Ida: A Sword Among Lions – Ida B Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching by Paula J Giddings.
There's a Q&A with Tobias Wolff and a review of former White Houser (and – more importantly? - West Wing consultant) Dee Dee Myers' Why Women Should Rule the World.
In the magazines, the New York Review of Books has Joyce Carol Oates on All the Sad Young Literary Men, Michael Chabon on Lush Life by Richard Price and – the sort of thing that makes the NYRB the best forum for American political essays – Garry Willis comparing the race speeches of Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln.
The Atlantic Monthly reviews Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein.
Perhaps timely, given all the reviews of All the Sad Young Literary Men, Christopher Hitchens revisits Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly, and there is a review of The Complete Novels by Flann O'Brien.
The Village Voice has a slide-show of a Dave Eggers-curated art show. How Village Voice, how New York, how Dave Eggers.
In the New Yorker, there is an audio podcast of Jonathan Franzen talking about his journey to China. How New Yorker, how Jonathan Franzen.
AUSTRALIA
The Australian, in the light of literary hoaxes a go-go, looks at the tricky question of unreliable memoirs.
It also has an interview with Elmore Leonard.
In the Age, Susan Faludi is interviewed about The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed About America.
The paper also considers the wisdom or otherwise of writers who blog. Hear, hear.
* This posting was compiled to the following soundtrack: Garth Knox (viola d'amore) and Agnes Vesterman's (violoncello) D'Amore (ECM) and Anthony Donaldson Introduces Village of the Idiots' School of Hard Knocks (Explorers Club/Ode) – sonic high-jinx from the veteran Wellington jazz/improv percussionist. Time now, reluctantly, to pass these CDs on to the reviewers for whom they were intended.
