Writer is being sued by the president of the Italian senate, for libel -- for 1,3 million euros. There's quite a bit about this in the European media, but not a single English-language article I could find; last week, Le

apparently Iran's richest -- the: "top winner receives 110 Bahar Azadi gold coins worth over $270,000" -- have been awarded and, as MNA report, . I've written about before; the win doesn't come as that much of a surprise. Troubling,

They've the shortlists for the multiple-category -- or, as they nicely put it at the site (trying to remind you that these no longer are the Whitbreads -- good luck with that --, as well as trying to get the

The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Andrzej Stasiuk's . Coincidentally, Gerhard Gnauck just had an interesting (in German) of Stasiuk's Polish publisher, the admirable publishing house, in Die Welt.

at the Complete Review

In Shanghai Daily Sonia Jarrett writes at some length about this being a , wondering first:With such a long-standing literary tradition, why is it that few people outside of China have never heard of any famous Chinese novels, let alone

Book-chain is apparently in deep trouble -- they've closed down sales via the site, for example -- and there's lots of coverage about what this might mean. At The Bookseller Philip Jones and Catherine Neilan report that . Among the

Just a reminder that tonight, at 18:30, I'll be Josef Haslinger -- about his tsunami book, , and more ! -- at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York.

Maniyambath Mukundan is an important Malayalam (the language they speak in Kerala, India -- not in Malay(si)a) writer, and I finally got around to one of his books; unfortunately that was -- as the American edition, translated by Mary T.

at the Complete Review

The French have all the fun, as president Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to move the remains of Albert Camus to the Panthéon has exploded into a huge story there -- even though, as David Jolly in The New York Times:"No decision

In The Observer Louise France profiles , Maj Sjöwall -- co-author of the Martin Beck series (which I hope to eventually get to, if I can get my hands on the books ...).

At New York they've started , inviting 'seven writers to submit short stories featuring contemporary political figures'. Among the authors: Adam Haslett, Lionel Shriver, and Walter Kirn.

The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis' classic, , in Gregory Rabassa's 1997 translation. (I really should go back to the William L. Grossman translation -- Epitaph of a Small

where newspapers and magazines ask their contributors or people in the public eye for their best reads of the year, have begun to appear. Today The Observer asks a variety of people -- including Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Cameron,

Stephen Marche pits Charles Darwin's against the Biblical Genesis, 'putting two great works to the readability test', in the Toronto Star, in . He concludes:And so we are forced to the conclusion that, in almost every respect, Genesis is a

at the Complete Review

I'll be with Austrian author Josef Haslinger at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York on Tuesday, 24 November (at 18:30), with John Cullen reading from his (unpublished) translation of Haslinger's , describing his experiences during the tsunami of 2004.

at the Complete Review

They've (apparently) announced the longlist for the (though not, of course, at the official site -- few and far between are the prizes and sites that manage to coordinate that ...). The Khaleej Times article, , lists the sixteen longlisted