FICTION
James Ellroy, Blood's a Rover (Knopf). "The concluding volume of James Ellroy's astonishing Underworld USA trilogy, Blood's a Rover, has just been published. The trilogy is biblical in scale, catholic in its borrowing from conspiracy theories, absorbing to read, often awe-inspiring in the liberties taken with standard fictional presentation, and, in its imperfections and lapses, disconcerting." Norman Rush, nybooks.

Escono postumi due libri di William Styron, Letters To My Father (Louisiana State Univ.), e The Suicide Run. Five Tales of the Marine Corps (Random House). wp.

Richard Powers, Generosity. An Enhancement (FS&G). Uno scrittore ossessionato da una giovane studentessa algerina affetta da "hyperthymia", eccessiva felicità. Secondo James Wood i personaggi e i loro intrighi non sono all'altezza delle discussioni scientifiche e filosofiche del libro. nyer.

Tao Lin, Shoplifting from American Apparel (Melville House). Novella quasi autobiografica: due anni della vita di un giovane scrittore newyorchese. sfc.

NONFICTION
Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes. Wrestling History With the President (Simon & Schuster). Durante gli otto anni di presidenza Clinton e Branch si incontravano regolarmente e registravano le loro intense sedute, che sono in larga parte riprodotte in questo volume. lat.

Karen Armstrong, The Case of God (Knopf). Un'ex suora cerca di spiegare che cos'era la religione nei tempi antichi e che cos'è oggi. "To that end, she doesn’t just argue that her preferred approach to religion — which emphasizes the pursuit of an unknowable Deity, rather than the quest for theological correctness — is compatible with a liberal, scientific, technologically advanced society. She argues that it’s actually truer to the ancient traditions of Judaism, Islam and (especially) Christianity than is much of what currently passes for “conservative” religion. And the neglect of these traditions, she suggests, is “one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so troublesome today.” Ross Douthat, nytbr.

Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, A New Literary History of America (Harvard UP). Monumentale antologia (1000 e passa pagine, 200 saggi) delle varie voci dell'America nella storia. lat.

Edmund White, City Boy. My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s (Bloomsbury). In questa autobiografia gli ultimi anni di White a nyc prima della notorietà. nytbr.

Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs (HarperCollins). Saggi sulle difficoltà di essere padre. lat.

DA LEGGERE
James Wood - che vale sempre la pena leggere - su The Children’s Book di A.S. Byatt: "Again and again, Byatt makes explicit and overdetermined what might have been more lightly suggested. The loss of childish innocence is the great subject of her novel, but does that mean that everyone in the book has to have some relation to fairy tales or children’s stories – write them, or study them, or present dramatic performances of them, or put representations of them on pots? LRB.