“A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.”

- Saul Bellow

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Juliet Nicolson’s Abdication manages only two stars, and Maria Peunte calls it a “ho-hum novel of Wallis and Edward.” (USAToday)

Tyrone Beason declares Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears a “profoundly detailed study of love and grief.” (Seattle Times)

Patrick Anderson is intrigued by Qiu Xiaolong’s Don’t Cry, Tai Lake for its “political edge, but endearing innocence.” (Washington Post)

Michael Berry calls John Irving’s In One Person a puzzling, not-quite-one-thing, not-quite-the-other literary enterprise.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak..surrender to them. Don’t ask first whether it’s permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.”

- Hermann Hesse

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Michael Dirda is impressed with Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, edited by Alex Abramovich and Jonathan Lethem, calling the author a “master of satirical science fiction.” (Washington Post)

Mary Pols calls Sadie Jones’ The Uninvited Guests “a sublimely clever book about generosity, discovered late, yet just in time.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Robin Harding slices and dices Paul Krugman’s End this Depression Now! (Financial Times)

Beth Jones declares Sátántangó by László Krasznahorkai “a Hungarian masterpiece about the nature of storytelling.” (The Telegraph)

“I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.”

― Madeleine L’Engle

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Stephan Lee gives Meg Howrey’s novel, The Cranes Dance, a B+, praising its “an addictive, absorbing take on competition and sisterhood.” (EW.com)

Andrew Riemer points to “the eloquence and vividness” of Andrew Motion’s writing in Silver: Return to Treasure Island. (Sydney Morning Herald)

John Barrell says Andro Linklater’s evidence is “intriguing” (though “impossible to prove”) in Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die. (The Guardian)

Moira E. McLaughlin declares Laura Vanderkam’s All the Money in the World a “welcome primer in how to find meaning in how you spend your money.” (The Seattle Times)

“Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, and constant.”

- Edna Ferber

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Joan Franks says that Tania James’ “prose is clean, deep, limpid; the stories she builds throw strange, beautiful light on completely unexpected places” in her new collection, Aerogrammes And Other Stories. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Yunte Huang compares Wenguang Huang’s The Little Red Guard to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. (Chicago Tribune)

Leyla Sanai discovers “a touching story about love, loyalty and tragedy” in Stephen May’s Life! Death! Prizes! (The Independent)

Dwight Garner calls Buzz Bissinger’s memoir, Father’s Day, “riveting and a bit frightening.” (NYTimes)

Stephen Abell concedes that a lot of Timothy Mo’s story of a Thai ladyboy-turned-spy-turned jihadist, Pure, “sounds rather silly,” but that that’s “part of the charm.” (The Telegraph)

Stephen Lee gives Anouk Markovits’ I Am Forbidden an A-, noting that reading it “richly rewards your efforts and heralds a promising new writer.” (EW.com)

Miriam Di Nunzio joins Gerry Marshall as he “traverses his life’s path — from his upbringing in New York to his college years at Northwestern University (his three children also are grads) to a stint in the Army and to Hollywood, where he experienced the good, the bad and the bankrupt” in his memoir, Happy Days in Hollywood. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Leah Umansky declares Dorothea Tanning’s poetry collection Coming to That “a book full of imagination, creativity and intellect.” (The Rumpus)

“Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one word to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective . . . . When you pass a grocer sitting in his doorway, a porter smoking a pipe, or a cab stand, show me that grocer and that porter . . . in such a way that I could never mistake them for any other grocer or porter, and by a single word give me to understand wherein the cab horse differs from fifty others before or behind it.”

- Gustave Flaubert

Judith Newman says that Anne Enright is “a poet of the gross, explicating our newfound repulsion and fascination with a body no longer completely under our control” in her memoir, Making Babies. (NYTimes)

David Daley says that, in John Irving’s newest, In One Person,  the author is “a master of the big-hearted social epic, but the earnest tone sometimes wears…” (USAToday)

Ian Thompson declares Bernard Wasserstein’s On The Eve: The Jews Of Europe Before The Second World War a “moving and scrupulous history” that “recreates a world on the edge of its extinction.” (The Independent)

Vikas Swarup experiences “a depiction of despair and dreams in an Indian megacity that is as vivid as great fiction” in Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum, by Katherine Boo. (Financial Times)

“If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That’s how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.”

- Shelby Foote

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Mary Ann Gwinn calls Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies a “wonderful, terrible sequel to Wolf Hall.” (Seattle Times)

Thomas Marks is underwhelmed by Tim Parks’ The Server, noting that “this novel’s flaw is not so much its lukewarm plot as its largely uninspiring narration.” (The Telegraph)

Seth Greenland’s The Angry Buddhist is “a wild entertainment as well as a novel about the way we live now that dares to dance with the profound,” says Richard Rayner. (LATimes)

Michiko Kakutani declares Robert A. Caro’s latest installment in his LBJ biography, The Passage of Power, “magisterial.” (San Jose Mercury News)

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”

― E.E. Cummings

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Patrick Anderson says that, in The Family Corleone, (a prequel to The Godfather, based on a screenplay left behind by the author), Ed Falco “has captured Puzo’s rich prose style and eye for detail, even as he equals or exceeds Puzo’s extravagant violence…” (Washington Post)

Toby Litt heaps the praise on Peter Stamm’s Seven Years. (The Guardian)

Richard Rayner finds a “true thriller” in Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer’s The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (LATimes)

Toni Morrison’s latest, Home,  is almost eerie in its timeliness,” according to reviewer Tayari Jones. (San Francisco Chronicle)

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Helen Greenwood reviews a trio of works by food writers that offer “a smorgasbord of culinary reading.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

Ben Fountain’s first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, impresses Janet Maslin, who finds “an artfully detailed microcosm of America in general, and George W. Bush’s Texas in particular, during the Iraq war.” (NYTimes)

Toby Clements declares David Hewson’s The Killing a “huge success.” (The Telegraph)

Alexander Heffner says that, in The Spirit of Compromise Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson “articulately identify the conundrum that has made compromise unlikely, if not impossible, in Washington.” (Philly.com)

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

― Doris Lessing

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Ken Armstrong finds “a stunning description and dissection of a corporation’s struggles to balance technical expertise with occasional forays into social engineering” in Pulitzer Prize-winners Steve Coll’s Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power. (The Seattle Times)

Gregg Allman’s memoir My Cross to Bear earns three stars from Marco R. della Cava, who says, “Allman comes across as a simple man who knows what and who he likes, and can’t be bothered with the rest.” (USAToday)

In Harriet Levin’s new collection, Girl In Cap and Gown, Lori Bassen finds “perspectives are varied but unified by intense focus, much like the eyes of bees.” (The Rumpus)

Peter Carty declares Adam Thorpe’s political thriller, Flight, an “exhilarating trip.” (The Independent)

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public.”

-Paulo Coelho

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