It’s time for the Festivus season book review bonanza. I’ ve got a lot of books to review, so I’m going to do half of them today and get to the rest next week. I hope you’ll check some of these books out.

• The Sleeping is a small and elegant poetry chapbook by Caroline Maun, published by Marick Press. The poems are thoughtful, taut and sardonic:

I have no power over you
she said, her red hair glowing.
Not knowing as she said this …

Finance your own movie with credit cards and a loan from your parents and you’re hip and indie. Make a bunch of CDs yourself and sell them out of the trunk of your car and you’re passionate about sharing your music. Print out 100 copies of your book at Kinko’s and staple them together yourself and you’re… a hack who can’t get published the right way. Just as litbloggers aren’t as good as real critics, so self-published writers aren’t thought …

1. What! Thanks to Lauren Cerand for the very surprising news that singer-songwriter Lou Reed is debuting a concert performance of his greatest album, Berlin. Berlin, released in 1973, is a narrative cycle about obsessive love. It’s the story of an American man who visits Berlin and falls for a beautiful but selfish and decadent woman who forces him to beat her, sleeps with every other guy in town, loses her children for immoral behavior and finally kills …

1. Apparently it’s not duck season, and it’s not rabbit season. It’s blogger season. Well, I missed the jump on Rachel Cooke’s condescending piece trashing bloggers as talentless “pooters” in the Guardian, and plenty of other
people have already let Ms. Cooke know what they think of her calculations.

So I’ll keep this short: I read professional book critics and I read literary bloggers. I’m quite sure that many literary bloggers can stand up to their “professional” peers on …

I must be in a mellow post-Thanksgiving mood or something, because I have barely a complaint with today’s New York Times Book Review. There’s some good reading here, like Liesl Schillinger’s cover piece on Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day. Once again, Schillinger writes with more clarity and erudition than most NYTBR regulars. Here’s her opening paragraph:

In “Against the Day,” his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for …

It’s easy to say that poetry is important, especially for writers and readers, because this is something we’re supposed to believe is as true as the blue of the sky. Yet how important is it really? In a world full of things like war, starvation, and pollution, how much difference do words make? Can a poem stop genocide? Or is that asking too much? Of course there are different levels of importance. On which level does poetry exist?

I think …

I’m in a bit of a rush, but here are a few quick notices:

1. I’ve just been one listen through the new Jay-Z CD, Kingdome Come, which is released today. It’s too early for a verdict as to whether or not this is another classic, but I can happily report that it’s a well-crafted album, as musically complex and lyrically dense as a Jay-Z CD should be. The opening sequence evokes the opening of Reasonable Doubt, Jay’s gritty 1996 debut album, and in …

I’ve been reading an anthology, We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs, edited by Nasrim Alavi and published by Soft Skull. This is a collection of excerpts from numerous Iranian bloggers, all of it translated from Farsi. Farsi blogs are a vast world, Alavi explains in an informative introduction. For reasons not entirely known, there are more blogs in this language than in Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese and Russian.

Alavi’s book is a wide overview of a semi-underground society at various variances with …

Let’s start with the most annoying article in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, in which Rachel Donadio reviews the history of literary feuds and turns up an utterly conventional set of findings. Norman Mailer, in a literary feud? Fresh stuff. But Donadio also takes a snobbish sideswipe at literary blogs:

The blogosphere would seem an ideal forum for literary feuding, but more often than not Web feuds devolve into baroque strings of sub-literate name-calling.

Yeah, we’re so sub-literate here. We …

In honor of Richard Powers winning the National Book Award for the superb Echo Maker, I’ve got duplicate copies of three earlier Powers novels, Gain, Galatea 2.2 and The Time of Our Singing, to give away to anybody who really plans to read them. Email me at levi.asher@gmail.com letting me know that you really want one or more of these books (and, if you’d like, telling me why you think you deserve them) and you may find yourself with a whole lot of …