My book review of Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics appears in this month’s Boldtype, Flavorpill’s literary publication.

For all the readers out there, I heartily admonish you to subscribe.

My book by book overview of James Joyce’s career from the Sept/Oct issue of Bookmarks Magazine is up at their excellent new site. You can also check my short review of Lisa See’s Peony in Love.

I’m a week behind in posting this (and months behind in posting, period) but Jim Crace has some good things to say in a recent interview on KCRW’s Bookworm. For example, when Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt suggests that Crace pulls our legs by creating “the texture of a real world and have it revealed to be an imaginative one”:

“It is a legpulling. It’s okay to say it’s a legpulling. That’s a very proper activity for fiction, to be mischievous in that way, be impish in that way. That’s what it’s for. Fiction can do those things without drawing any blood, without delivering any bruises. Remember The Satanic Verses never hurt anybody—it’s the fatwa that hurts people.”

Crace’s new book—a book he thought was going to be a critique of America, yet turned out infused with optimism— is The Pesthouse. You can hear the rest of the interview here.