• “The Legend of Colton H. Bryant” by Alexandra Fuller
from The Boston Globe
This “is a highly unusual [book], difficult to categorize. It might be seen as investigative journalism, a meditation on the American West, or an ambitious, epic prose poem about one man’s tragic death. Whatever its genre, it is beautifully crafted and suffused with an unspoken desire for a better world.”

• “Rancid Pansies” by James Hamilton-Patterson
from The Financial Times
This Booker-winning writer is comedic king of mordant wit with a special talent for Italy and the most perverse cooking imaginable.  You’ll love him and you’ll hate him but you’ll be laughing too hard to know which for certain.

• “The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War” by David Lebedoff
from The Australian
Deliciously snotty review: The author, “deceived by the fact that he and his subjects speak the same language, keeps missing the point. He can read music but he’s tone deaf.”

• “Home" by Marilynne Robinson
from The Washington Post
“As a disquisition on the agonies of family love and serial disappointment, Home, is sometimes too illuminating to bear.”

• “Fine Just the Way It Is” by Annie Proulx
from The New York Times
“Bears Proulx’s brand of hard drama, hard irony, hard weather, and hard and soft characters blown about and many times destroyed by the powerful mix. Her sense of story is admirable, her sentences are artful, and she writes like a demon. She has nicely disrupted the mythology of the Old West.”

• “The Nineteenth Wife” by David Ebershoff
from Newsday
This novel "is a compelling portrait of the beginnings and ends of Mormon polygamy, and a marvelous examination of its effects on women (the obvious sufferers) and men (also brutalized, the author shows). The 19th Wife is an exploration of how and whether community is possible after a loss of belief.”

• “A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano” by Katie Hafner
from Salon
“A piano, a piano tuner and his insane client.”

• “Telex from Cuba” by Rachel Kushner
from The New York Times Book Rview
This “novel [is] a dreamy, sweet-tart meditation on a vanished way of life and a failed attempt to make the world over in America’s image. Out of tropical rot, Kushner has fashioned a story that will linger like a whiff of decadent Colony perfume.”

• “Intercourse: Stories” by Robert Olen Butler
from The Times-Picayne
“The stories in Intercourse are really less stories than performance pieces, meant to be heard as much as read.”

• “Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement” by Harper Barnes
from The Los Angeles Times Book Review
What happened in East Saint Louis in 1917 is just about as ugly as it gets which is just one reason this book is important. “Barnes brings fresh light to a troubling past that white Americans would prefer to forget and black Americans cannot.”

• “Oxygen” by Carol Cassella
from The Denver Post
This “is the work of a writer who is in full command of her craft. In lesser hands, the story could have bogged in medical minutiae, but Cassella never loses sight of the fact that stories are most compelling when they are about people.”

• “House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family” by Paul Fisher
from The New York Times Book Review
Hermoine Lee finds much fault in this new biography, which she thinks might more aptly be titled “House of Horrors.” Lee notes “Fisher’s most disconcerting decision is to refer, throughout, to Henry James as ‘Harry.’”

• “Farewell, My Subaru” by Doug Fine
from Salon
“Fine makes his low-carbon Odyssey sound like fun, albeit involving a ton of hard manual labor and the occasional coyote- or hawk-inflicted tragedy.”

• The Gods of New Spain
from The Times Literary Supplement
A round-up of recent scholarship on the conquest of America. “In the conquest of pre-Christian America, the traffic between late-medieval beliefs and local religions was not all one-way.”

• “Attachment” by Isabel Fonseco
from The Financial Times
Fay Weldon gives this debut novel a rave review.

• “McMafia: Crime without Frontiers” by Misha Glenny
from The London Review
“Since the millennium ... a hostile United States, an incompetent European Union, a cynical Russia and an indifferent Japan have combined with the unstoppable ambition of China and India to usher in a vigorous springtime both for global corporations and for transnational organised crime.”

• “Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West” by Deanne Stillman
from The Los Angeles Times
“One cannot read Mustang ... without realizing there is no way to even consider the history of the American West without first considering the horse.”

• “Mustang” by Deanne Stillman
from The Economist
Meanwhile, it takes a UK reviewer to show Stillman’s book is an obituary-in-advance of a species.

• “Breath” by Tim Winton
from The Washington Post
Reviewer Carolyn See is pretty much gobsmacked by Winton’s latest novel, which she pronounces stunning.

• “The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal” by Gore Vidal
from Salon
Louis Bayard avers Vidal’s strength as a critic is that he “refuses to matriculate into anyone’s school.” He also notes Vidal has confessed that “his primary passion in life is not writing but reading.”

• “Scottsboro: A Novel” by Ellen Feldman
from The Independent
“Feldman’s clear-sighted vision of the Scottsboro case reveals not only violent racism in the South, but also anti-Semitism, sexism and a contempt for poor whites. Ruby, in her rather predictable folksy way, observes: “Nothing brings white folks together, no matter if they’re nose-in-the air church ladies, fresh-with-their hands mill bosses or plain old linthead trash, faster than a colored boy, a piece of rope and a tree.’”

• “The Lost Dog” by Michelle de Kretser
from The Financial Times
No less a contemporary literary lion than A.S. Byatt dubs this “the best novel I have read for a long time.”

• “Personal Days” by Ed Park
from The New York Times Book Review
Regarded highly as a “witty and appealing first novel” and another in the growing ranks of office fiction (à la Joshua Ferris).

• “The Size of the World” by Joan Silber
from BookForum
“While her characters struggle with their demons, [Silber] draws their lives out with ease and tenderness, generously leaving the reader with what evaded them: their own private Walden, for a few moments at least.”

• “Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative” by Priscilla Wald
from BookForum
This looks to be an interesting “critique of the stories that the media and the medical profession have constructed about disease outbreaks from typhoid to HIV/aids to Ebola.”

• “Angel of Brooklyn” by Janette Jenkins
from The Independent
“Jenkins, a fluent and concise storyteller, moves her narrative between New York and rural Lancashire, though Beatrice’s [the protagonist’s] memories of her boardwalk past outshine the more pedestrian accounts of Northern penny-pinching and parochialism.” I imagine this novel is at least partially perfect because Beatrice was born in Normal, Illinois.

• “White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement” by Allan J. Lichtman
from The New York Times Book Review
David Frum is outrageously unfair in this review (another in the NYT’s series of “pick the wrong reviewer for the job”) but he’s funny, too, so it’s an entertaining way of keep up with the factotums of the right.

• “The Kiss and Other Stories” by Anton Chekhov
from The Independent
Julian Evans scooped up this book in a secondhand bookshop and wonders why anyone ever would part with it; “the book of a lifetime” he proclaims.

• “The Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh
from The Financial Times
The reviewer notes flaws “but Poppies remains a hugely absorbing and enjoyable book. It is observant, intelligent and passionately written, and deserves to be placed on the same shelf as such masterpieces of anti-Imperial fiction as Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger.”

• “Supercapitalism” by Robert Reich
from The Australian
“Robert Reich, one of the more readable economists, believes both capitalism and democracy would work better if we stopped pretending the two are somehow connected.”

• “Say You’re One of Them” by Uwem Akpan
from The London Times
“This outstanding short story collection proves that Uwen Akpan is very much the real deal.”

• “Bird” by Sophie Cunninham
from The Melbourne Age
“Cunningham never puts a foot wrong in relating a fabulous story, as unpredictable as it is convincing, as thoughtful as it is absorbing.”

• “Slumberland” by Paul Beatty
from BookForum
“Offers present-tense pleasures — but very little comfort, and no sense that the fun house (which is also a torture chamber) has an exit.”

• “The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon
from The Boston Globe
Maud Newton says “Hemon’s characters eschew the notion that truth is tidy, or literal.”

• “Snowdon: A Biography” by Anne de Courcy
from The Guardian
“The rake’s progress of Lord Snowdon, his marriage to Princess Margaret and his tangled love life, is deliciously revealed.”

• A Roundup of Recent Crime Fiction
from The Chicago Tribune

• “Phallic Frenzy, Ken Russell and His Films” by Joseph Lanza
from The London Times
“This delightful biography of the eccentric British film director could be the most fun you’ll have with a book this summer.”

• “Slumberland” by Paul Beatty
from The Los Angeles Times
“An L.A. disc jockey leaves white America for what he believes is a more tolerant Berlin but instead finds a city with its own historical baggage.”

• “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” by David Wroblewski
from The Chicago Tribune
Bruce Olds, a sometime Rvillian, loves this debut novel even unto its modest flaws “diminish[ing] the incandescent power of a novel that can only be declared a critical success. Is it not, after all, the blemish in beauty that most enchants us?”

• “Cost” by Roxana Robinson
from The Chicago Tribune
“Loss, grief and regret are the central subjects of Roxana Robinson’s harrowing new novel, which applies the writer’s trademark gifts as an intelligent, sensitive analyst of family life to the darkest subject matter she has tackled to date.”

• “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It” by Elizabeth Royte
from The New York Times Book Review
“Bottlemania is an easy-to-swallow survey of the subject.”

• “A Choice of Enemies” by Lawrence Freedman
from The Financial Times
The writer “has taken ... the most analysed and controversial subject in modern politics — US policy towards the Middle East — and set himself two near-impossible tasks ... to write a book that will be perceived as scholarly and impartial, and ... to say something new ....”

• “Wolf Totem” by Jiang Rong
from The Toronto Globe & Mail
Now translated into English, this Chinese novel won the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize.

• “The Lost Dog” by Michelle de Kretser
from The Guardian
Ursula K. Le Guin finds flaws in this novel but is charmed by the writer and sees much promise.

• “The Road from Damascus” by Robin Yassin-Kassab
from The Guardian
This novel “is most alive in its more intimate exchanges, and in glimmers of a gentle and vital wisdom that outshines the satirical fireworks.”

• “The Morville Hoursn” by Katherine Swift
from The Independent
“Readers will find this book” — ostensibly a memoir of a garden — “engaging in different ways.”

• “A Fraction of the Whole” by Steve Toltz
from The London Times
Pronounced an “exuberantly funny debut novel that you should just go away and read.”

• “Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939” by Katie Roiphe
from The London Times Book Review
Roiphe “succeeds triumphantly” in her gifted examination of the unconventional marriages of Rebecca West and H.G. Wells, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Elizabeth von Arnim and John Francis Russell, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Ottoline and Philip Morrell, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Vera Brittain and George Catlin. I lust after this tome.

• “The Legend of Colton T. Bryant” by Alexandra Fuller
from The New York Times Book Review
“[W]hew boy, can Alexandra Fuller write.”

• “Nation of Whims: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting” by Hara Estroff Marano
from The Boston Globe
Scathing commentary on current trends in parenting. 

• “Stonehenge” by Rosemary Hill
from The London Times Book Review
“A wonderfully thoughtful look at the mad theories that have clustered round Britain’s most famous ring of stones.”

• “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by Leonard Mlodinow
from The New York Times Book Review
Oh my, this looks tasty.

• “What Was Lost” by Catherine O’Flynn
from The Los Angeles Times
Jane Smiley pronounces this mystery “a moving novel, bespeaking not only the energy and inventiveness of its author but also the power of good old realism.”

• “The Other: A Novel” by David Guterson
from The Australian
“At times The Other feels a little contrived, but it is always engaging and frequently moving. Moreover, it is extraordinarily well written. As always, Guterson’s descriptions of nature are worth the admission price: ‘Notable, too, is the silence here, broken infrequently by the winter wren’s trill — reminiscent of a hysterically played flute — at other times by the ventriloquy of ravens.’”

• “Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain” by Martha Sherrill
from The Christian Science Monitor
How a Japanese family saved the Akita from extinction.

• “Scenes from a Revolution: the Birth of the New Hollywood” by Mark Harris from The New Statesman
“Take the five Best Picture Oscar nominees of 1967 - Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate and In the Heat of the Night - and detail how they came to be written, produced, cast, directed, edited, promoted and received, and the effect that their various commercial successes and failures had on a racially nervous America and a Hollywood clinging like a maniac to the old ways.”

• “Shatter” by Michael Robotham
from The Melbourne Age
A “compelling new thriller.”

• “The Enchantress of Florence” by Salman Rushdie
from The Los Angeles Times
Amy Wilentz says that for some “the winks of brilliance” may suffice, but overall “[t]he writer bumbles and fumbles, and finally the reader crumbles.”

• “The Garden of Last Days” by Andre Dubus III
from The Boston Globe
John Dufresne says up front this isn’t a feel-good novel but it is “storytelling of the finest kind: unforgettable and desperate characters caught up in a plot thundering toward catastrophe.”

• “Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science” by Richard Preston
from The Denver Post
Preston writes “movingly about a wild menagerie of brilliant mathematical geniuses who are able to obliterate their own time and space while chasing obscure truths about the universe.” I can’t wait to get my hands on this collection of essays!

• “Devil May Care” by Sebastian Faulks
from The Financial Times
Christopher Hitchens pronounces Faulks a failed Ian Flemming whose tale is shaky rather than stirring.

• “The Legend of Colton H. Bryant” by Alexandra Fuller
from The Economist
This novel “hangs so faultlessly on its high-altitude, big-sky, oil-drilling bones that it seems not so much to have been written as uncovered by the wind and weather of the American northwest.”

• “The Zookeeper’s Wife” by Diane Ackerman
from The Financial Times
This real-life Holocaust story “is such an odd confection of sensuous nature writing that the effect is sometimes nearly surreal itself.”

• “The Sorrows of an American” by Siri Hustvedt
from The Guardian
Jane Smiley says this “novel is most interesting for the way in which it fails” but deems it “readable” nonetheless. 

• “Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War” by Virginia Nicholson
from The London Times
“This is a riveting biography, full of great quotes ... intimate, sympathetic ... but the publisher should be kicked for packaging it to look like a wartime love story and cramming it with tiny print.”

• “Inventing Niagra: Beauty, Power, and Lies” by Ginger Strand
from The New York Times Book Review
“It’s a wonder that a book this fun can be so thoughtful, so deeply felt at times.”

• “Dear American Airlines” by Jonathan Miles
from The Chicago Tribune
You might call this a just-in-time novel considering American’s latest luggage announcement.

• “Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population” by Matthew Connelly
from The Economist
“The road to controlling population growth in the 20th century was paved with good intentions and unpleasant policies that did not work.”

• “The Secret Scripture” by Sebastian Barry
from The Guardian
“Joseph O’Connor is impressed by Sebastian Barry’s lyrical and energetic novel of troubled Irish memories.” [O’Connor is Sinéad’s brother.]

• “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War” by Benny Morris
from The Australian
“… a significant work that is likely to become the standard account of the first Israeli-Arab war.”

• “Bleeding Heart Square” by Andrew Taylor
from The Independent
“Taylor is the modern master of a very Dickensian underworld: that of the seedy, the shifty, the down-at-heel who cling to shreds of social acceptability.”

• “The Lost Dog” by Michelle de Kretser
from The London Times
“… [O]pens up rich vistas with its central idea and introduces the reader to a world beyond its fictional frontiers.”

• “Beijing Coma” by Ma Jian
from The Los Angeles Times
Set in Tiananmen Square, “this is a strange, and long, book, by turns dull and riveting.” Ten years in the writing and two years in the translating.

• “The Household Guide to Dying” by Debra Adelaide
from The Melbourne Age
A very successful Australian novelist not much known in US. 

• “Black Flies” by Shannon Burke
from The New York Times Book Review
This “searing and morally resonant new novel follows a rookie paramedic through his ghastly duties.”

• “Standard Operating Procedure” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
from The New York Times Book Review
What happened at Abu Ghraib makes for ugly but necessary reading.

• “The End of Food” by Paul Roberts
from The New Yorker
Is the world’s food system collapsing?

• “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill
from The New York Times Book Review
Dwight Garner pronounces this “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”

• “The House on Fortune Street” by Margot Livesey
from The Denver Post
This “addictive” novel “is constructed of four narratives, interlocked so that it feels like a series of novellas that build around a tragedy.”

• “The Honey Spinner: On the Trail of Ancient Honey, Vanishing Bees and the Politics of Liquid Gold” by Grace Pundyk
from The Australian
The honey business is byzantine; who knew?

• “Wit’s End” by Karen Joy Fowler
from The New York Times Book Review
“Jane Austen meets Nancy Drew,” opines the NYT reviewer.

• “Blue Horse Dreaming” by Melanie Wallace
from The Guardian
Hilary Mantel says this novel’s “deepest theme concerns the loss of language.”

• “Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids” by Julie Salamon
from The Los Angeles Times
Deemed an “unnecessary” book by the reviewer, this review is, nonetheless, a hoot.

• “Deaf Sentence” by David Lodge
from The Financial Times
A “funny, humane novel.”

• “The Collected Stories” by Lorrie Moore
from The Guardian
All hail Lorrie Moore!

• “Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind” by Philip Ball
from The London Times
Read this, then see the real thing.

• “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” by Rick Perlstein
from The New York Times Book Review
Thumbs way up from George F. Will for this “sprawling, rollicking book.”

• “The Revelation” by C.J. Samson
from The London Times
“Terrific” historical whodunnit.

• “Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood” by Robyn Scott
from The New York Times Book Review
“Beautifully written and lovingly told.”

• “Stage Directions: Writing on Theatre, 1970-2008” by Michael Frayn
from The Spectator
Good stuff from this dramatist, novelist: “this is writing on theatre as it ought to be.”

• “Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System” by Raj Patel
from The San Francisco Chronicle
Timely and then some.

• “Exiles: A Novel” by Ron Hansen
from The Los Angeles Times
Semi-tepid review but I’m still going to read the book.

• “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out” by Mo Yan
from The New York Times Book Review
The China issue leads off with this “wildly visionary and creative novel” that is “constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary.”

• “Lavinia” by Ursula K. Le Guin
from Salon
Laura Miller: “In addition to not being one of those books in which a spunky young tomboy learns to kick-box and wield a sword, “Lavinia” is also not a revisionist fiction in which a minor character from a famous book (Mr. Rochester’s wife or Dr. Jekyll’s maid, for example) finally gets to correct the official record.”

• “The House on Fortune Street” by Margot Livesey
from The Los Angeles Times
Martin Rubin says Livesey’s latest starts well and gets even better from there.

• “The Hakawati” by Rabih Alameddine
from the San Francisco Chronicle
This one’s part review, part interview — about one of the more hotly anticipated books of the season.

And a good Sunday read:
An Original Adventure
The life of Elizabeth Hardwick

• “Dictation" by Cynthia Ozick
from B&N Review
Mark Sarvas finds that “themes of deception, posterity, and, above all, the glory of language ... knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick’s formidable talent.”

• “Shakespeare’s Wife” by Germaine Greer
from The New York Times
Greer puts her doctorate in Elizabethan drama to use in this dissection of the critics’ construction of Ann Hathaway. Katie Roiphe is the Times’ reviewer.

• “Unaccustomed Earth” by Jhumpa Lahiri
from The New York Review of Books
Sarah Kerr takes an NYTBR-length look at Lahiri’s latest in the context of her oeuvre.

• “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” by Rick Perlstein
from The Atlantic Monthly
Ross Douthat found Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus a “near-masterpiece” and dubs this follow-up “a great success.”

• Plus Daniel Mendelsohn for The New Yorker on a pair of new Herodotus volumes

• “A History of Histories” by John Burrow
from Slate
Anglocentric but worthy.

• “Wit’s End” by Karen Joy Fowler
from Salon
Louis Bayard likes Fowler’s ear and voice but is puzzled by her choice of the mystery format.

• “Wild Nights! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway” by Joyce Carol Oates
from The New York Times
Hilarious and harrowing.

• “The Journey Home” by Dermont Bolger
from The NYT Book Review
A “fiercely beautiful” novel.

• “Cathedral of the Sea” by Ildefonso Falcones
from The Independent
An “exciting, very readable adventure novel, enriched by realistic descriptions of medieval life, work, finance and politics.”

• “Diego Rivera: The Complete Murals” edited by Luis-Martin Lozano and Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera
from The Spectator
“A triumph, the first complete and scholarly account.” Careful, though, it’s a coffee-table breaker weighing in at 20 pounds!

• “The Enchantress of Florence” by Salman Rushdie
from The Australian
It’s all about magic.

• “The Third Angel” by Alice Hoffman
from The Economist
The august Economist liked it!

• And the Los Angeles Times looks at a pair of “complex new mysteries” set in Africa

• “Bright Shiny Morning” by James Frey
from Publishers Weekly
A page-turning train wreck.

• “Clean: An Unsanitized History of Washing” by Katherine Ashenberg
from The Guardian
All the fascinating dirt on cleanliness.

• “Dictation: A Quartet” by Cynthia Ozick
from The Washington Post Book World
Color Michael Dirda impressed.

• “Dog Years” by Mark Doty
from The London Times
Illuminating and perceptive.

• “Lush Life” by Richard Price
from The New York Review of Books
Michael Chabon discusses Price’s latest and his oeuvre too.

• “Pilcrow: A Novel” by Adam Mars-Jones
from The Financial Times
This clever writer’s latest novel is a bit of a “trudge” but also “intelligent, linguistically brilliant and, at times, funny.”

• “The Rain Before it Falls” by Jonathan Coe
from The NYT Book Review
This new one by Coe is “peculiar” and disappointing.

• Marilyn Stasio on some tasty thrillers
from The New York Times