Now that even Dan Brown's new book is being described in reviews as "Harry Potter for Grown Ups," can we please please please ban this phrase from ever being used in criticism ever again?

The Nation has a piece on the equally genius and reviled journalists Janet Malcolm and Renata Adler. And, as an aside, there's a wonderful little examination of the kind of comments such women writers face on the Internet:

Commenters are men and women in real life, presumably, but on the Internet they are disembodied pixels of pure judgment that trade little more than an e-mail address for the privilege of hearing themselves speak in the virtual pages of publications otherwise inaccessible to the voice of the layman, in this case, the venerable Gray Lady. Many do so anonymously or with a user name, believing that though their words may be read, they are in no danger of facing the consequences of their free speech, least of all the very real consequence that working writers must face when they put fingers to keyboard: a libel suit.

Katy Derbyshire on the difference between German and American critics, using the first person in book criticism, and the retiring nature of translators. (And, narcissism alert, she says nice things about me in there.)

Critics, not unlike translators, don’t tend to put themselves in the foreground. Oh, no doubt they’re as vain and self-obsessed as the rest of us, but a traditional book review rarely reveals much about the reviewer. At least in concrete terms; we may of course notice that the critic is patronising or boastful or fond of flowery metaphors. It must get rather tiresome after a while, writing away and never getting to say anything about yourself.

Gary Shteyngart has become the first American to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, given to a work that "has captured the comic spirit of PG Wodehouse". America, fuck yeah! His novel ">Super Sad True Love Story wins him a jeroboam of champagne (that's a bigass bottle of champagne) and some Wodehouse books, and as is traditional, a pig will be named after his book.

Literary scuttlebutt corner: I heard from a reliable source that it's always the same pig.

Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo and his translator Edith Grossman have won the Independent Foriegn Fiction Prize for the political thriller ">Red April. Prize judge Boyd Tonkin profiles Roncagliolo and explains why the book impressed the award panel:

To the reader of modern English classics, Red April's chilling, colourful portrayal of the frail forces of reason and order beset by revolt, repression and superstition may recall forays into the indigenous life of Latin America by Malcolm Lowry and Graham Greene. To those who know the continent's more recent home-grown fiction, Death in the Andes by Peru's Nobel laureate in literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, will inevitably spring to mind. Red April, it could be argued, digs deeper and strikes harder than works by any of those august excursionists.

Literature's most nebulous award, the Ondaatje prize, has been given to Edmund de Waal's ">The Hare with Amber Eyes. The prize is £10,000 for a book which "best evokes 'the spirit of a place'", aka money for jam, but at least Sarah Waters made an attempt to link 'let's give a bunch of dosh to a lovely book we all like' to the trifling point of the excercise, saying that de Waal's book was "a stunning piece of writing, conjuring up one memorable location after another with economy and grace".

John Banville, possessor of the driest sense of humour this side of the Gobi desert, has won the Franz Kafka Prize for 2011. Currently promoting his latest Benjamin Black crime thriller A Death in Summer, he said of the award: "Speaking as Benjamin Black, all I can say is that John Banville and Franz Kafka deserve each other".

‘My personal life,’ Ayn Rand says, ‘is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence: “And I mean it.”’

Oh yes, you do actually want to read thousands of Jenny Turner's words about Ayn Rand, from the London Review of Books archive.

How does someone even write a column titled "What's Up With the Jews?" without first suffering a psychotic break? Has anyone checked in on Stanley Fish lately, to see if he's wearing an aluminum foil hat?

Wendy Macleod would like to hire a poet to write about her feelings.

One time, I was sitting in the hot tub and it was April and something just reminded me of Mexico. And it wasn’t even like I’d had Taco Bell for lunch. Was it the sunshine? Was it the smell of chlorine? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure a poet would. Another time I found my college yearbook in the garage when I was looking for my shin guards and I looked myself up. And there I was, only younger. And I was like, OK I didn’t feel young then, but I was, and I don’t feel old now, but I guess I am, comparatively. And isn’t that a paradox? And couldn’t a paradox be a poem?

Katie Geha has a fascinating look at Dial-a-Poem, which was exactly what it sounds like, and was around in New York in the late '60s and early '70s.

The program changed regularly; one could make a phone call each day and encounter a different work by a new artist. Aram Saroyan stated simply: “Not a cricket / Ticks a clock.” Joe Brainard recited a litany of remembrances: “I remember ponytails.” Ted Berrigan reveled in the “[f]eminine, marvelous, and tough.” Diane di Prima read her “Revolutionary Letter #7”: “Meditate, pray, make love, be prepared/ at any time, to die.” Taylor Mead mimicked the sounds of a motorcycle: “Brrrrruuuumm, brruuuuuum, craaaaaash, craaaash!”

And speaking of nonfiction reviewing, my latest Smart Set column is up, about Yeats and his deal-with-the-devil girlfriend, magic, people who spell magic with a k, and why it doesn't really matter if the Druids didn't really exist.

I'm rather interested in the idea of reviewing nonfiction. Like, how up to the task should the reviewer be? How knowledgeable, how willing to call someone on their bullshit? (I obsess over this a little bit, actually, since I've been reviewing nonfiction exclusively at my books column for the Smart Set.)

So there's Dwight Garner's review of Chester Brown's Paying for It, his graphic memoir about patronizing prostitutes. In it, he makes some sweeping statements about how he thinks the sex trafficking and abuse and rape are all exaggerated, and he thinks that most johns are simply shy introverts who have trouble getting laid. Garner pretty much lets this slide. He doesn't argue, he re-presents his arguments with very little comment.

At the same time I was reading Garner's review, coincidentally, I was reading a Vanity Fair article about sex trafficking in the States, about abusive pimps, and about how the idea of being a john and paying for sex is becoming more and more "normal." From the story:

One 60-ish man, a former Fortune 500–company administrator, bragged, Sergeant McKee says, that his retirement plan consisted of having sex with as many prostitutes as possible. Most of the johns were startled to learn that the girls were not acting of their own free will—75 to 80 percent of prostitutes don’t. The men believed the ads, and the legend of the Happy Hooker. Each of them also assumed they were the one exception to the rule of the repulsive customer. Says Karen Stauss, the former staff attorney for Polaris Project, a D.C.-based not-for-profit anti-slavery-and-human-trafficking organization, “Johns don’t understand what they’re contributing to. It never occurs to them that the woman who is smiling is being abused. They really don’t know what’s going on—and they don’t care.”

The whole story is pretty gruesome. And I'm not making a statement like, prostitution should remain illegal because of these goings on. I'm really just wondering how much a reviewer should know about these things when they are presented with such a book to review. And if you're reviewing someone's memoir, and it happens to be full of shit, how much you're allowed to yell about that.

One Story lists their favorite short stories of all time.

Hello, Portlanders! Do you have a question about books? Would you like that question answered by some local book nerds, and possibly win free pizza? Then head on over to Questionland and ask us! By "us," I mean a bunch of nice, smart people, and also me. My friend Alison Hallett, arts editor of The Portland Mercury, explains how it works. Alison has a cat named Queequeg! That is how smart about books she is. I have a pug named Maeby, after a character in a television show. So you should probably pay attention to Alison's answers more than mine.

Novelist Sam Lipsyte (The Ask) is working on a comedy series for HBO. Literary hipsters who love saying things like "Oh, are you referring to a television program? I wouldn't know, because I don't own a television" are now conflicted and their brains are about to explode.

I'm still not exactly sure what a Tumblr is, but NYRB Classics has one, and it's great.

At Kirkus Reviews, I strongly encourage you to buy and read, as soon as possible, Ryan Van Meter's beautiful essay collection If You Knew Then What I Know Now. It's always hard to write these reviews, the ones where you're talking about a book you really, really love. I was tempted to just write that this book will make you want to give Ryan Van Meter a hug and a puppy, but apparently Kirkus reviews have to be longer than 16 words. So, you know, lesson learned.

Umberto Eco on not reading:

There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.

We periodically have to give thanks for the existence of Rebecca Solnit, for pieces like "Men Explain Things to Me." And now, her piece on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, asking why the storyline has to be so goddamn obvious, so metaphorical.

What makes the sex scandal that broke open last week so resonant is the way the alleged assailant and victim model larger relationships around the world, starting with the IMF’s assault on the poor. That assault is part of the great class war of our era, in which the rich and their proxies in government have endeavored to aggrandize their holdings at the expense of the rest of us. Poor countries in the developing world paid first, but the rest of us are paying now, as those policies and the suffering they impose come home to roost via right-wing economics that savages unions, education systems, the environment, and programs for the poor, disabled, and elderly in the name of privatization, free markets, and tax cuts.