“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”

- Thomas Mann

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Dwight Garner finds some interesting history (but not particularly interesting writing) in Christopher Bram’s Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. (NYTimes)

Emma Hagestadt peers into Joanna Trollope’s Daughters-in-law. (The Independent)

Kevin Canfield calls The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth, by Joseph Turow, an “enlightening yet frustrating book. (San Francisco Chronicle)

One link. 32 reviews. (Seattle Times)

“Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

- John Irving

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M. Rebekah Otto is quite enamored with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s collection of essays, Pulphead, going so far as to call it “a landmark debut of a new genre, invented by others but perfected here.” (The Rumpus)

Brian Dillon gets a kick out of the farcical debut novel by Will Wiles, Care of Wooden Floors. (The Telegraph)

Chris Erskine takes an entertaining trip through Steve Boman’s Film School: A Memoir That Will Change Your Life. (LATimes)

Dwight Garner peruses a new translation of The Kama Sutra, now with no drawings but plenty of explicit text. (NYTimes)

“If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent. “

-E.M. Forster

David Annand finds Roy Kesey’s Pacazi “a punishing novel”  but worth it. (The Telegraph)

Jeff Giles gives Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers a solid A. (EW.com)

Heft, by Liz Moore, leaves a mostly positive impression on Katie Crouch. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Andy Woog gets past a few issues with Stewart O’Nan’s The Odds: A Love Story. (Seattle Times)

“Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.”

-Henry Miller

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AP book reviewers team up to rate a quartet of mysteries and thrillers. (Chicago Sun-Times)

David Evans finds Anthony Summers’ Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover “more exciting, and more damning” than the recent Clint Eastwood Film. (The Independent)

Mary Midgley ponders The Science Delusion, by Rupert Sheldrake. (The Guardian)

Jeanette Winterson suggests Frederick Turner’s Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of “Tropic of Cancer” amounts to “a new round of mythmaking.” (NYTimes)

Lynell George recognizes the “pitch and cadence” of Gil Scott-Heron’s “unmistakable burnished baritone” in The Last Holiday : A Memoir. (LATimes)

Stephen Howe finds Bill Schwarz’s The White Man’s World an excellent first step in a planned three-volume set of historical studies.  (The Independent)

David Blair finds some hope for the Middle East in a triple-shot review of three books on The Arab Spring. (The Telegraph)

Nicholas Lezard declares The Oxford Book of Parodies an “essential, pretty much unputdownable anthology.” (The Guardian)

Steve Kistulentz heaps the praise on Adam Goldbarth’s new volume of poetry, Everyday People. (The Rumpus)

“I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively…For words are merely tools and if you use the right ones you can actually put even your life in order, if you don’t lie to yourself and use the wrong words. “

-Hunter S. Thompson

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Susan Balée finds Jo Nesbø’s Leopard “a moral slough” due to its depiction of violence against women. (Philly.com)

Bob Minzesheimer says The Fault of Our Stars, by John Green, is not a “cancer book.” (USAToday)

William Landay’s thriller Defending Jacob scores a B+ from Thom Geier. (EW.com)

Tom Rob Smith closes his trilogy with a bang in Agent 6. (LATimes)

John Banville declares Philip Larkin’s “death certificate and memorial combined,” The Complete Poems, an “exhaustive, awe-inspiring monument” to the poet. (The Guardian)

Adam Gallari finds “a relatively successful effort” at fiction in playwright Alan Bennett’s comedic collection, Smut. (The Rumpus)

Rebecca Armstrong calls Tom Benn’s The Doll Princess a “madly bloody but sometimes brilliant book.” (The Independent)

Art Taylor takes a wild ride through Bret Lott’s Dead Low Tide—”here a murder mystery, there a late-blooming coming-of-age tale, suddenly a political thriller, intermittently a romance.” (The Washington Post)

“Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.”

- William Golding

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Toby Clements offers up a quadruple-shot of historical fiction reviews. (The Telegraph)

In Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper, Malcolm Forbes finds “an epic tale that spans decades and bridges generations while chronicling the predominant chapters of racial persecution perpetrated in the darkest hours of the 20th century.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Chan Koonchung’s dystopian novel The Fat Years (translated from the Chinese by Michael S. Duke) impresses David L. Ulin. (LATimes)

Dwight Garner uncovers a “dignified by mild book” in The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith by Matthew Bowman. (NYTimes)

“Let us begin by clearing up the old confusion between the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading, and point out that there is no connection whatever between the two. A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading. “

- Virginia Woolf

Margot Livesey’s Jane Eyre “homage,” The Flight of Gemma Hardy, “transcends its time,” according to Robin Vidimos. (Denver Post)

Kitty Ferguson’s Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind drifts a little too close to hagiography for Marcia Bartusiak’s taste. (Washington Post)

Joan Silverman fins Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet a “dense and demanding novel.” (The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram)

Richard Marcus takes a fresh look at the 4-book boxed set of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. (seattlepi.com)

“The prime function of the children’s book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it. And that first love affair between the young child and the young book will lead hopefully to other loves for other books and when that happens the battle is probably won. The child will have found a crock of gold. He will also have gained something that will help to carry him most marvellously through the tangles of his later years.”

-Roald Dahl

Helen Dunmore functions nicely outside her normal comfort zone in The Greatcoat, according to Katy Guest, but it might not appeal to fans of her more literary historical novels. (The Independent)

J. Robert Lennon says Ben Marcus’ “first new book in a decade,” The Flame Alphabet, “has the feel of an event.” (NYTimes)

Beth Kephart lays out a road map to approaching Ayad Akhtar’s debut novel, American Dervish. (Chicago Tribune)

Mary Beard finds little new information (and more than a little fawning) in Sarah Bradford’s Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times. (The Guardian)

“I wrote about how my mum put sixpence in the Christmas pudding - which wasn’t true - and he didn’t put it on the wall. I thought he’d rumbled me, but he came up to me later and put his arm round me and said ‘By the way, Simon, that was a really good poem’, and I thought, ‘Well, why didn’t you put it on the fucking wall, then?’ And I’ve wondered since then if I’ve just been pursuing a revenge career. Every time I finish a piece I think, ‘Put that on your wall!’”

- Simon Armitage