Kids these days. With their iPods and LiveJournals, their lives are simultaneously as foreign and familiar as ours were when we were teenagers. But here’s the important question: what are they reading? Well, I don’t know, but it could be one (or both!) of these books which I am going to review for you now.

Pretty Little Devils by Nancy Holder

Pretty Little Devils is chick lit for the 15-and-under crowd. An interesting amalgamation of the movie Heathers (or the more recent Mean …

Apropos of nothing, this is a good poem:

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes
Thomas Gray, 1747-8

‘Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers, that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
…

There are a few self-indulgent editorial routines I wish the New York Times Book Review would cut out. One that irks me the most is the “I’m not worthy” routine, which always rings phony. The Book Review really should have spared us Garrison Keillor’s aw-shucks display in which Sam Tanenhaus’s quotes the author deprecating his reviewing skills: “This is just plain old journalism, nothing so fancy as criticism. Criticism is the work of giants like Edmund Wilson …” The revolting exhibit of …

(Well, besides the latest scandal expose, of course.) Give us the scoop on your latest picks, pans and plans. Slogging through a tough classic? Discovering a new favorite? Check in here with your latest reads or get some recommendations. And don’t try to fake it, because we will find you out and you will face the wrath of Oprah. And no one wants that.

Two weeks ago, we felt really proud that we managed to avoid adding to the media’s repititive over-coverage of the James Frey memoir-hoax story. We figured we’d serve the literary community by talking about anything but James Frey (or J. T. Leroy), and that’s what we did. Imagine our surprise at the new expose of acclaimed Navajo author Nasdijj, which brings the hoax craze into our backyard.

Nasdijj started participating in LitKicks discussions last July, first showing up to respond to a …

1. Mark Haddon, who wrote the appealing autistic detective story The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is in the poetry business now. LitKicks approves of this entirely, although Ranting Ed has found evidence indicating the new book may not be so great. We’ll have to find out for ourselves.

2. I am trying to think of a way to claim that great gangster films are literature, so that I can announce here the sad news that …

Here’s the second and final installment of my Best American Short Stories of 2005 review. I finished about two-thirds of the stories (I said I read Houghton Mifflin’s BASS book every year, but I didn’t say I finish it). Here are my findings:

First of all, the 2005 collection is much better than average. I do heartily recommend that you buy it (especially since it only costs $14, miraculously, a fair price). I don’t know how useful it is to consider a …

A book review should be well-written, but a poetry book review must be well-written. Why should we trust a poetry critic who can’t turn out a great sentence? It’s fitting, then, that one of the two worthwhile pieces in today’s Sunday New York Times Book Review is Joshua Clover’s study of the career of Charles Reznikoff, whose retrospective has just been published by Black Sparrow Press.

Clover’s article has a rare organic quality; the critic leaps through a small set of significant concepts, establishing …

Below is a list of ten arbitrary pairings. (Yet are they truly arbitrary? You decide.) Out of each pairing, pick the one that you like the best, for whatever reason. No need to explain, because power means never having to say why you pick Jay-Z. Or something like that.

Here goes:

1. Nietzsche vs. Jay-Z
2. The Squid and the Whale vs. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Moby-Dick
3. Moby-Dick vs. Moby
4. James Frey vs. Augusten Burroughs
5. Tom Hanks …

Ed Champion provides an amusingly detailed description of a recent David Foster Wallace reading in Haight-Ashbury.

I recently spent about an hour with David Foster Wallace’s new book of essays, Consider The Lobster, in a comfortable aisle at a Border’s bookstore (apparently my free review copy was “lost in the mail”). I’m finding him far more palatable than I used to.

I used to dislike Wallace on principle, because I don’t want to support a novelist whose page numbers reach four digits …