“The way to do it is to put as much life into the song as I can. You can either get it to breathe or you can’t.”

- Levon Helm

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Rachel Shteir calls Liz Mundy’s The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family an “ambitious new book,” but feels that “one of the maddening things” about it “is that Mundy never met a sociologist she didn’t like.” (NYTimes)

Dwight Silverman declares Christopher Moore’s Sacré Bleu “big fun”—if “you don’t mind some occasional narrative aimlessness.” (San Jose Mercury News)

Ron Charles says that, despite a previous misstep, Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here is “an extraordinary novel, the work of an artist with profound insight into human nature and the mature talent to deliver it just the way he wants.” (Washington Post)

ManOfLaBook.com finds a great deal of depth in Moshe Arens’ Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. (seattlepi.com)

The Scottish crime writer and playwright talks about a typical day of work:

“Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.”

- Amiri Baraka

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Agnes Torres Al-Shibibi discovers a “touching, uplifting memoir of the happiness and hardship of living and loving in star-crossed Haiti” in Julia Alvarez’s A Wedding in Haiti. (Seattle Times)

John Bateson’s The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge is “the first book to be devoted exclusively to the continuing problem of suicides off the bridge.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Ceri Radford finds the worldview that would go on to inform the Millennium trilogy in The Expo Files: Articles by the Crusading Journalist by Steig Larsson, in which the late author “rails against violent prejudice in various forms, devoting particular energy to the mistreatment of women.” (The Telegraph)

Pamela Paul declares Jorge Aguirre’s Giants Beware! “a rollicking fun story if not entirely high-minded literature.” (NYTimes)

From the YouTube description:

From Governor General’s Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition. Assiniboia is a richly textured imagining of a Western Canada that could have been. Theatrical, operatic—a masque and a pair of choral performances—the book breaks new formal ground in Canadian poetry. The huge spectacle of Tim Lilburn’s eighth collection gives us a new land peopled by figures from the visionary governments of Louis Riel and from the western mysticism, as well as land forms with the power of speech, all acting together as a kind of ghostly army bent on overturning more than a century of colonial practice.

“I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.”

― Cormac McCarthy

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Gayle Brandeis says Terry Tempest Williams “displays a Whitmanesque embrace of the world and its contradictions” in When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Kevin Allman counts the myriad ways Joseph Olshan’s mystery, Cloudland, falls short. (Washington Post)

Lesley McDowell is underwhelmed by Kimberly Cutter’s debut Joan of Arc novel, The Maid. (The Independent)

Jessica Gelt says that Cheryl Strayed turns a journey across the Pacific Crest Trail into “an exercise of triumph over grief” in her memoir, Wild. (LATimes)

From The Guardian’s YouTube description:

Interviewed at the Guardian’s, Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif speaks about a new wave of creativity that has followed the revolution in Egypt last year. She discusses the street art that has sprung up across Cairo — much of it influenced by Banksy — and how writers’ imaginations have started to roam beyond Egypt’s borders

“Words are loaded pistols.”

― Jean-Paul Sartre

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Leah Greenblatt gives Annalena McAfee’s The Spoiler a B+, largely on the strength of “the author’s synapse-crackling prose: spiky, vivid, and almost pathologically clever.” (EW.com)

Matthew Zingg discovers “a burgeoning tension between the spiritual life of the imagination and its blood and guts container—the forehead, the hips, the heart—that is both dire and light” in Melissa Broder’s second poetry collection, Meat Heart. (The Rumpus)

Rhonda Dickey says there’s “not a moment of preciousness or sentimentality” in Helen Simpson’s collection, In-Flight Entertainment. (Philly.com)

A.N. Wilson’s Hitler: A Short Biography is “a fascinating portrait” according to Bruce Ramsey, but falls short of solving the mystery of the notorious dictator. (Seattle Times)

“I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book — let him relate the events of his own life with honesty — not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.”

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Liesl Bradner enjoys the “witty, personal account” of Jane Maas’ Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond. (Chicago Tribune)

Helen Oyeyemi is impressed by Children in Reindeer Woods, Icelandic writer Kristin Omarsdottir’s first work to be translated into English. (NYTimes)

Theo Tait finds that Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting prequel, Skagboys, is too long and covers too little new ground. (The Guardian)

Gillan Tett declares White House Burning The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why it Matters to You, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak, a “wake-up call on the budget deficit. (Financial Times)

Peter Mack finds a “glimpse at a nation of people free to seek their own revelation, with all the messy pluralism of democracy” in essay collection, Sweet Heaven When I Die, by Jeff Sharlet. (The Rumpus)

Daphne Guinness says that Carrie Fisher’s Shockoholic falls flat, and that the “belly laughs have gone AWOL - packed their bags and vamoosed.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

Bob Minzesheimer casts John Grisham’s “baseball morality tale,” Calico Joe, as “no World Series thriller decided in the last at-bat. It’s more like a pleasant, midseason afternoon at the ballpark when the home team creeps back in the game and wins 4-2.” (USAToday)

Paula L. Woods discovers “a thrilling, irresistible masterwork of love, guilt and revenge” in Olen Steinhauer’s An American Spy. (LATimes)

“The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.”

- Martin Amis

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John Wilwol discovers a “zany new version” of the death of painter Vincent van Gogh in Christopher Moore’s Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d’Art. (Washington Post)

Martin Chilton finds that Kurt Vonnegut “does not come out well as a person” in Charles J Shields’ biography, And So It Goes. (The Telegraph)

Melissa Allison says that Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business “makes a compelling case about a pervasive but little-known aspect of how we operate as humans, businesses and societies.” (Seattle Times)

Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God produces “fantastic results,” according to Philip Zaleski. (San Francisco Chronicle)

“A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.”

- Anton Chekhov

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Robert Bianco declares Jacqueline Winspear’s latest mystery, Elegy For Eddie, “another Maisie Dobbs masterpiece.” (USAToday)

April Rabkin says Michelle Dammon Loyalka’s Eating Bitterness: Stories From the Front Lines of China’s Great Urban Migration is “fascinating,” with the “lasting power as a historical record of the biggest, fastest urbanization in human history.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

In the afterglow of the short story collection Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, Jessica Freeman-Slade calls author Kevin Moffett “brisk, funny, whip smart, and worth forming a habit for.” (The Rumpus)

Kevin Telfer finds Andrew Motion’s sequel Silver: Return to Treasure Island,  “playful,” but finds it falls short in the suspension-of-disbelief department. (The Telegraph)

“The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”

- John Berryman

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Andrew Motion calls Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears “an impressive achievement.” (The Guardian)

David E. Hoffman breaks down Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. (Washington Post)

Fiona Sturgess finds a great deal to admire in singer/songwriter Carole King and, more to the point, her autobiography, A Natural Woman. (The Independent)

David B. Williams says that John Maxtone-Graham’s Titanic Tragedy reflects the author’s “deep passion and knowledge” and recommends it, despite the deluge of books on the subject. (Seattle Times)