Quoted:too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in tradition to embrace American mores fully. These Indian-born parents want the American Dream for their children — name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy house in the suburbs — but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land, and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but completely at home in neither;..

Quoted: On-demand publisher Lulu.com has churned out 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002, and its volume of new paperbacks has risen each month this year, hitting 14,745 in November. Retail giant Amazon.com got into the game this summer, offering on-demand publishing through its CreateSpace,

Quoted: These are the books that are disappointing only because they have to end.

Funny stuff :-)

THREE-FOR-A-DOLLAR FEEDER FISH: Steve Almond
Has sex once a month with fans he meets through MySpace. Receives up to three e-mails a day from a mix of MFA students at community colleges, Centipedes in the Darkness wanting blurbs, and 14-year-old girls who have lived their entire lives in gated communities. Will not be forgotten easily even after he is dead and his books are out of print because of how easy it is to talk shit about him...

USED HONDA CIVIC IN "GREAT" CONDITION: Jonathan Franzen/ Rick Moody/David Foster Wallace
Published novels at first, then got distracted and published nonfiction books, story collections, essay collections, and other things that made them less powerful. Also held back by their inability to write about the Holocaust, genocide in Africa, racism, or the immigrant experience;

Quoted: The Book Review picks the best works from the last year.

Quoted: The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 3, 2006.

A useful list- with direct links to reviews. Includes works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Quoted: her vision is mournful, bleak, and infernal, and is punctuated, in Atwood style, with the occasional macabre joke—perhaps not unlike Dante’s own literary vision.

Read his short story collection a while ago and liked it...

Quoted: ...and he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a k a New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities ...