Quoted: The seven stories display an amazing confidence and range for so young an author, moving from a religious festival in Tehran to the days before an atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima to the cardboard shantytowns of Colombia where 14-year-old boys yearn to get “an office job,” slang for work as a hired assassin.

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;..

This website is new but it has some interesting videos from interviews on a variety of topics.

Quoted: The 10 Questions are at the core of Big Think. They are our way of starting the conversation, and giving it shape. They may seem simple and straightforward, but you'll be surprised at the answers they can elicit. Take a look at some of the notable brains we've picked, think about the 10 Questions and share your answers with the world.

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:What does it mean for an undergraduate to pass the morning reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and the afternoon parachuting from a helicopter? To spend the summer learning to control vehicle checkpoints or call in air strikes, the winter writing a senior thesis on the poetry of William Butler Yeats or the novels of Virginia Woolf?