James Woods reviews Rivka Galchen's first novel.

Quoted: That was the stage of loss I was in then I suppose, like the first days after someone dies, when you bend down to pick up every piece of lint, and you wonder what the dead person, when you meet her next, might have to say about her death (or about lint), and you worry, a little bit, about how that is going to be a very awkward conversation, the conversation with the recently dead.

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

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

I've been curious about E-ink. Amazon's product doesn't look as slick as Sony's reader but it does have a larger book database[and the free wireless].

Quoted: The screen uses the same astonishing E Ink technology that Sony’s Reader uses. It looks like black ink on light gray paper: no backlight, no glare, no eyestrain — and no need to turn it off, ever.That’s because E Ink draws power only when you turn a page. At that point, millions of particles are drawn into a pattern of letters (or four-shade gray-scale images) by a brief electronic charge — and there they can stay forever, even if you take the battery out. You don’t turn this thing off; you just set it down, like a book.

Quoted: The Kindle goes online using Sprint’s 3G cellular data network — the same service that costs $60 a month for corporate laptop luggers. The Kindle’s price tag stings less when you realize that Amazon is going to pay your entire wireless tab. The Kindle store offers best-seller lists, Most Popular lists and a Search box. The catalog includes 90,000 books so far, including 101 of the 112 currently listed as New York Times best sellers.

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 ...

Quoted: A million years from now, a collection of mysterious artifacts would remain to puzzle whatever alien beings might stumble upon them: bank vaults full of mildewed money; obelisks warning of buried atomic waste in seven long-obsolete human languages, with pictures. The faces on Mount Rushmore might provoke Ozymandian wonder for about 7.2 million more years. ... Weisman stops short of calling for our full green burial, arguing instead for a universal “one child per human mother” policy. It would take until 2100 to dwindle to a global population of 1.6 billion...