From TLS, a review of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro (and more and more and more and more and more). From Slate, the Shakespeare apocalypse is coming in 2011. Big ideas (don’t get any): Why Lionel Shriver doesn’t get the respect she deserves. An interview with Juan Goytisolo: "No one emerges unscathed from an encounter with Genet". A review of Burying Bones: Pearl Buck's Life in China by Hilary Spurling (and more and more and more). Mythologist of our age: Nathaniel Rich on why Ray Bradbury's stories have seeped into the culture. Why were there only 8 women on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century, and why is only 3% of the literature Americans read in translation? From LRB, Frank Kermode on Eliot and the Shudder. Jessa Crispin on Girls of Lonely Means: A poet's death sparks a meditation on fiction, longing, and solitude. Far from having writer's block, Ralph Ellison wrote an endless book to match his endless and shifting ambitions. A review of Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds by Lyndall Gordon (and more). From Evergreen Review, a review of Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde by Charles Juliet; and Marek Kedzierski remembers Barbara Bray, Samuel Beckett's long-term companion (and from Bookforum, Albert Mobilio reviews Beckett: Photographs by Francois-Marie Banier). In a new series, Intelligent Life analyses the style of a well-loved author; Tim de Lisle gets the ballpoint rolling with a close look at Philip Pullman. If you had to take one religious poet to a desert island, who would it be? A review of Between the Sheets: The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers by Lesley McDowell. A review of The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography by Robert Crawford.
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