By Bill Marx
Sigmund Freud sets out a weirdly Brobdingnagian survival scenario for kids. Young children rely on their parents, dependent on the intimidating bounty and emotional whims of “adult” giants who could easily dish out too much smothering love or unconscious hostility.
Novelist Peter Stephan Jungk weaves a playfully tragicomic variation on this primal generational [...]

By Bill Marx
In the latest World Books podcast I talk to Robert Chandler, who along with his wife Elizabeth and Olga Meerson has translated Andrey Platonov’s novel “The Foundation Pit” for New York Review Books.
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ArtsFuse editor Bill Marx speaks with Gail Pool, the author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, about the slow decline of literary criticism in the United States.

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Given the shrinking amount of column inches for book reviews in mainstream newspapers and magazines, it is no surprise that book review editors are reluctant to print negative criticism. Why waste precious space in the paper to pan a book? Reviewers know this, and they calibrate their consumer guide judgments — upwards — accordingly. Of [...]

Why are print book reviewers and litbloggers fighting over which group talks about literature better? On the one hand, the battle is less ferocious than we are led to believe: whenever they are given a chance a small number of online commentators scream about old media elitists stomping on the democratic virtues of the Web. [...]

Bloggers are concerned about the fate of book reviews, so raising questions about the quality of book commentary online, especially asking how it can become better, is worth the effort. But any discussion about the future of reviews must be based in reality rather in wishful thinking or defensive delusion.
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