Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism won a 2007 Bancroft Prize. Also well worth your time are Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.

The Maytrees, Annie Dillard’s new novel, is out. An ever-expanding list of reviews follows. Annie read a passage of the novel for NPR and talked a little about the book (whose original subtitle was “A Romantic Comedy about Light Pollution”) in a Publishers Weekly interview. She did another interview with the Washington Post’s Daniel Asa Rose. A chapter of the book originally showed up as “The Two of Them” in the Nov ‘03 Harper’s.

Here’s the list of reviews:

+Washington Post Book World (by Marilynne Robinson)

+New York Times

+NYT Book Review

+Boston Globe

+LA Times

+SF Chronicle

+Slate

+BookPage

+Publishers Weekly

+New York Observer

+New York Daily News

+Miami Herald

+Seattle Times

+Cape Cod Times

+Cleveland Plain Dealer

+Chicago Tribune

+USA Today

+Hartford Courant

+San Diego Union-Tribune

+Washington Post (where Annie runs neck and neck with Toby Keith)

Buy it from your local independent bookstore or support this site by ordering a copy from Amazon.

Let’s get this straight: the New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear writes an article highly critical of John Barr, head of the Poetry Foundation. The next week, the New Yorker publishes a poem (titled, coincidentally, “After the Diagnosis”) by Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry, which is published by the Poetry Foundation. Around the same time, David Orr, sometime contributor to Poetry, uses his occasional column in the New York Times Book Review to bite back at Goodyear and the New Yorker’s editors, accusing the former of a conflict of interest and the latter of nepotism and bad taste. At least one of the accusations is confirmed a few weeks later, when the New Yorker publishes an editor’s note acknowledging that Goodyear submitted poems to Poetry as recently as 2003. Now this week, the NYT Book Review has published a review by one Dana Goodyear.

May the circle be unbroken.

Andrea Brady’s photos from her visit (with Keston Sutherland, Peter Manson, Matt Ffytche, Sam Ladkin, and Robin Purves) to Chicago, South Bend, Oxford (Ohio), and points east.

Wu Ming’s new novel Manituana has just been published in Italy. Readers of Italian can download the whole book and readers of Italian or Spanish can visit the book’s website. This can’t be the first book to have its own trailer, but it’s the first I’ve seen.

You can download the rest of Wu Ming’s books at their website, including my translations of their stories “In Like Flynn” and “The Emperor’s Three Hundred Woodcutters”. You can also find an interview I did with the group for Chicago Review’s 60th anniversary issue.

Robert Archambeau’s take on Peter Riley’s debate with John Wilkinson in the latest issue of Chicago Review.