David Peak takes on the monumentally challenging task of reviewing a book of poems written in Russian, Novaya Yunost’s A Fire-Proof Box. (The Rumpus)

Lionel Shriver comes away unimpressed with Miranda July’s It Chooses You, which “interweaves memoir with cameos of strangers she sought out while struggling to finish the script of her second film.” (Financial Times)

Catherine Taylor discovers a “self-denying yet resonant work” in Samantha Harvey’s “troubling second novel of a modern-day Socrates,” All is Song. (The Telegraph)

Ben Ratliff takes trip in the wayback machine in Ed Sanders’ FUG YOU: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side. (NYTimes)

“Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.”

-Gustave Flaubert

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Dwight Garner comes away impressed with Gil Scott-Heron’s posthumously published memoir, The Last Holiday. (NYTimes)

Peter Lewis lauds how Julian Flynn Siler “fashions a sense of intimacy in mood and atmosphere” in Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Adrian Turpin finds Tessa McWatt’s symbolism a bit overbearing in her newest novel, Vital Signs. (Financial Times)

Carol Memmott discovers the fascinating history of one of America’s favorite handguns in Paul M. Barrett’s Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun. (USAToday)

“Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.”

-Edward Albee

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M.E. Collins finds a continuation of the “popularity and charm” of V.I. Warshawski in Sara Paretsky’s Breakdown. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Michael Moorcock salutes Alastair Brotchie’s take on “one of the most influential writers of modern times” in Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life. (The Guardian)

Connie Schultz goes between the covers of The Obamas by Jodi Kantor. (NYTimes)

Steven Rea acknowledges his fascination with the subject of (though he laments the dry writing in) Richard Rhodes’ Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

“The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.”

- Richard Wright

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Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish earns a B+ from Rob Brunner. (EW)

In Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery, Sinclair McKay ends up “feeling, despite all the darkness, that Eco is one of literature’s greatest optimists.” (The Telegraph)

Craig Wilson dives into Roger Rosenblatt’s “meditation on the universal experience of grief,” Kayak Morning. (USAToday)

Carolyn Kellogg peruses he “big, important story” in Connie Rice’s memoir Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman’s Quest for Social Justice in America, from the Kill Zones to the Courtroom. (LATimes)

“There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.”

- Terry Pratchett

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Peter O’Brien has mixed feelings about Robert Hughes’ Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History. (The Globe and Mail)

Nick Owchar offers up a twofer, as he reviews Stephen Mitchell’s Jersey Shore-esque take on Homer’s classic, The Iliad, and Harold Bloom’s study of the King James Bible, The Shadow of a Great Rock. (LATimes)

Emma Hagestadt gives (brief) approval to The London Train by Tessa Hadley. (The Independent)

Richard Williams finds The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years by Greil Marcus rather flimsy, mostly due to the flimsiness of its subject matter. (The Guardian)

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”

- George Bernard Shaw

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Mike Fischer is less than impressed with David Snodin’s inability to breathe life into Shakespeare’s greatest villain in Iago. (JSSOnline)

Charles Isherwood finds a quirky, funny (but not all that effective) romp through the minefield of etiquette in Henry Alford’s Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?: A Modern Guide to Manners. (NYTimes)

Boyd Tonkin revels in the “startling snapshots and vivid discoveries” contained within Charles Nicholl’s Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations. (The Independent)

Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel, by Nicholas Blanford, offers “an intimate window into Hezbollah’s theater of operations,” but reviewer Tony Badran finds some of the author’s analysis lacking. (Washington Post)

“If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you. “

- Dorothy Parker

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James Camp wonders if Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, The Map and the Territory, isn’t deliberately stale. (New York Observer)

Shawn Syms gets a contact high from the short-fiction anthology The Speed Chronicles. (The Rumpus)

Gregory Rodriguez lauds Tom Zoeller’s “quirky, uneven, brave and astonishingly heartfelt” book A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Ken Dilanian finds some unpleasant realities in Matthew M. Aid’s Intel Wars. (LATimes)

“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.“

- Erica Jong

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Malcolm Forbes enjoys the ride of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s long-lost account, The Cruise of the Rolling Junk. (The Rumpus)

Alan Cheuse finds Tom Clancy “at the top of his game” in his new thriller, Locked On. (Chicago Tribune)

Stephan Lee gives Penelope Lively’s How It All Began a B+. (Entertainment Weekly)

Dwight Garner discovers “mostly slack and unsustained” work in William Gibson’s non-fiction collection, Distrust That Particular Flavor. (NYTimes)

“Doing something does not require discipline.  It creates its own discipline – with a little help from caffeine.”

- Annie Dillard

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In Joseph Epstein’s Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, Holly Bruback finds a worthy addition to the author’s “entertaining and idiosyncratic catalog of human nature.” (NYTimes)

Christopher Hirst takes a literary roller coaster ride through PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe. (The Independent)

Jacob Silverman recommends some”great weekend reads.” (The Daily Beast)

Chloe Joan Lopez applauds Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort’s second book pf poetry, Collected Body. (The Rumpus)

“The moment a man begins to talk about technique, that’s proof he is fresh out of ideas.”

- Raymond Chandler

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Andrew Ervin welcomes the posthumous publication of The Third Reich, a piece of Roberto Bolaño juvenilia, with a lukewarm review and a recommendation only for those with an abiding interest in the author’s body of work. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Boyd Tonkin gives Christie Watson’s Tiny Sunbirds Far Away a thumbs up for the “vigour of its characters and the pace of its prose.” (The Independent)

Tony Perry finds a powerful punch packed in Lewis Sorley’s Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam. (LATimes)

Jonathan Rée savors the provocative nature of Roger Scruton’s Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet. (The Guardian)

Elizabeth Hand sees some fresh moments in an oft-used fiction trope in Alma Katsu’s The Taker. (Washington Post)

Blogcritics’ El Bicho surveys the “grand collection” of pieces in Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson. (Seattlepi.com)

Nick Owchar finds “a pleasing introduction for lay readers to a fascinating, murky topic” in Caroline Alexander’s Lost Gold of the Dark Ages: War, Treasure, and the Mystery of the Saxons. (LATimes)

Michael Berry reviews the “best science fiction and fantasy books” of the year. (San Francisco Chronicle)