My latest e-book, the third in a series of twelve, is out, and this one means a real lot to me. Chiaroscuro: Assorted Literary Essays is my own selection of the best literary essays I've written on this blog since 2004.

I wanted this to be a short book, so I forced myself to choose only ten pieces (and, in a Spinal-Tap-like moment, ended up choosing eleven). You can see the table of contents if you click through to the official book page, where you can also read the blurb I solicited from my good buddy Ed Champion (hey, what are friends for?).

I'm being flippant, but the truth is that the eleven pieces in this book mean more to me than I can say; they are my gems, my blows against the empire, my big fish, my keepers. This book is also arranged to represent a progression of ideas and literary notions -- transgressive visions, comic visions, great writers, overrated writers -- that encapsulates something I believe about the meaning of literature in all our lives. Mostly, this book contains the eleven essays that moved me the most when I wrote them, and I hope you'll give the book a chance and see if they move you too.

1. Billy Joel had a contract to write a memoir, but got cold feet. Too bad. We know this Long Island boy can write, and I bet he had some stories to tell. The alleged book (my personal guess is that he never began it, though the cover artwork was finished and released) was supposed to have been called The Book of Joel.

2. You know I've been wanting to read this Long Island boy's life story. Jay-Z's recent semi-memoir Decoded had its moments, but Jay hardly dug deep. Good hiphop memoirs or biographies are rare, but I eagerly snapped up Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office, a new unauthorized biography by business writer Zack O'Malley Greenburg, who has covered hip-hop culture and money for Forbes magazine. I suppose it works as a business book, but I found it very disappointing. This white boy, unfortunately, does not know hiphop. The author also seems to think Jay-Z's best years must be right now (naturally, because this is when he's making the most money) which proves, once again, that he doesn't know anything about hiphop.

(Please welcome a debut Litkicks piece by Michelle Glauser, who runs her own blog and describes herself as "a Mormon chocolate-lover who studied English at the University of Utah and American Studies at the University of Leipzig in Germany, where I focused on women's autobiographical writing and wrote a master's thesis on mommy blogging". -- Levi)

Have you ever found something in an old book that took you by surprise? It's not unusual to find a name or maybe even a phone number. Sometimes you'll find evidence that the book once belonged to a library. But extensive notes and criticism of an author as well-known as Edgar Allan Poe and his biographer? Maybe in a textbook. I certainly wasn't expecting what I recently found.

1. A Stanford University "Digital Humanities Specialist" named Elijah Meeks has created a series of rich visualizations based on the email archives of poet Robert Creeley. The lines describe connections and context, with frequency mapped to vicinity. We can glean interesting discoveries from the diagrams, such as the fact that the tech-savvy Black Mountain/Beat Generation's poet's BFF was clearly his fellow poet (and one-time Warhol scenester) Gerard Malagna. I wonder what the two poets emailed about so often? Anyway, before Robert Creeley died in 2005, he was kind enough to put in a few appearances on Litkicks, so it's exciting to think that a couple of emails from us must be represented in that pink jellyfish above.

Here's the challenge I gave myself, after I was invited to write a brief review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom for The Book Studio: think of something to say about this book that hasn't already been said.

It's no easy challenge, since this is the big book of the year, and also since I've already written about the book twice on Litkicks. But I was determined to come up with at least one or two original angles for my Book Studio piece. I was also determined to write about the book and only the book, and not to review the media coverage (as so many other reviewers have done).

Jonathan Franzen's much-awaited novel Freedom hits bookstores tomorrow morning.

I'm about to start reading this book, and will be reviewing it for another publication. I've also been enjoying (for whatever humor value it can provide) a nascent Franzen backlash including a gender-minded protest by Jennifer Weiner and a Twitter parody that pokes fun at the author's perceived arrogance.

Well, it's hard not to be arrogant when you get fawned over by the likes of Lev Grossman of Time or Sam Tanenhaus in the New York Times Book Review, who says:

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom,” like his previous one, “The Corrections,” is a masterpiece of American fiction.

1. This image of P. G. Wodehouse's bookshelf is just one of the incidental delights to be found in the BBC's literary video archive, In Their Own Words. Other authors showing their remarkable presence in these historical broadcasts include Virginia Woolf, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark, William Golding, Robert Graves and E. M. Forster and J. R. R. Tolkien (via drmabuse).

(Just one minor note about the text accompanying the P. G. Wodehouse interview, in which the shy humorist plays incessantly with his pipe and tries to give honest answers to tough questions: Wodehouse did live in Eastport, on Long Island's East End, but Eastport ain't the Hamptons, not really even close. But what would the BBC know about Long Island?)

2. Jonathan Franzen's upcoming novel Freedom is getting major, major news coverage, including the cover of Time magazine (he's the first novelist on the cover of Time since Stephen King ten years ago). I haven't read the novel yet, but I liked his previous family saga The Corrections and am looking forward to reviewing Freedom for another web publication as soon as my review copy shows up. In the meantime, here's a piece from The Millions about all the other writers who have been on the cover of Time since the magazine was founded in 1923.

We’re into the home stretch now in our pondering of Proust -- four volumes down and three to go. We have been introduced to a fascinating and vast cast of characters, from the cook Françoise to the Prince de Guermantes. We have found out that Charlus is gay, and that the Duc de Guermantes is a Dreyfusard. Let’s take a break, then, before we tackle the last three tomes, and reflect on a new addition to the Proustian literature: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time, by Patrick Alexander.

Outside of Alexander’s offering, there are two books that stand as must-reads to gain insight into Proust’s massive work. The first is Marcel Proust: A Life by William C. Carter, an excellent biography of the author of A la Recherche. The second is How Proust Can Change your Life by Alain de Botton, a witty look at how this author's writings can be applied to everyday living. Certainly there are numerous other books on Proust, but you can safely read these two and remain a serious but sane aficionado. Go beyond these and of course you risk entering into the dark realm of Proustian obsession. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing.

As the newspaper business shrinks, the hazard of insularity increases. Three weeks ago the New York Times Book Review put Christopher Buckley's rave review of the roman a clef The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman of the International Herald Tribune on the cover, ignoring the fact that 99% of the NYTBR's readers have no need for a winking tell-all about newspaper office shenanigans. The "Up Front" column in today's Book Review features Lloyd Grove of the New York Daily News sharing gossip about Rupert Murdoch, subject of War at the Wall Street Journal by Sarah Ellison. One wonders if this type of thing might be better handled by internal email.

But a broader insularity emerges when Graydon Carter (yawn) reviews The Pregnant Widow (yawn) by Martin Amis (yawn) on this week's front cover (yawn). Sex jokes and alcohol jokes abound. Replace the name "Martin Amis" with "Christopher Hitchens" and you've got a ready-made review of Hitch-22, which will surely be lauded as a major work on the cover of the New York Times Book Review very soon (yawn). Here goes the shoveling:

Amis is one of the true original voices to come along in the last 40 years. The fizzy, smart linguistic fireworks, with their signature italicisms, riffs on the language and stunningly clever, off-center metaphors are certainly evident in "The Pregnant Widow".

Five years ago on this day, Sunday, May 15 2005, I decided to start reviewing the New York Times Book Review on Litkicks. Early that morning I posted the first entry in what has become an enduring series, and a big part of my identity within the literary scene.

I had no idea what I was in for when I began this. I remember sitting in my living room wondering what to blog about that calm Sunday morning, and I remember turning to Caryn and saying "I think I'm gonna review the Book Review every weekend". "Sounds like quite a thrill," she said, and I was off.