Often, good reviews read like skilled long-distance kills: the target may be as quick and nimble as human thought itself, but one well-aimed shot, balanced by a pair of steady legs, can kill the target's animation in an instant. Village Voice reviewers, on the other hand, tend to throw down rifles for machine guns, shooting rounds of ammunition with maniacal abandon until every blade of grass is charred, and every bird is crisped. They get the kill, but the commotion overwhelms and obscures our ability to follow how the kill was gotten.

From the Voice's recent review of James Ellroy's Destination: Morgue! (due out Sep. 28):

... Not only has [Ellroy] flogged his sleazeball credentials into tiresome mythomania, his clipped, alliterative style has devolved into unintentional caricature. Destination: Morgue!--a double-edged title if ever there was one--also shows Ellroy's fixation with police procedure (on display here in the cold-case cul-de-sacs "Stephanie" and "Grave Doubt" and a hagiographic profile of L.A. County D.A. Steve Cooley) congealing into an infatuation with cops themselves. This identification somehow emboldens Ellroy to pass judgment on public reprobates like Robert Blake and Bill Clinton (for whom he expresses, in a characteristically self-righteous assessment, "a well-reasoned and morally sane hatred"), and removes any doubt that Ellroy shares the retrograde conservatism that gives his characters their loathsome dimension. All this makes approaching the collection's fictional second half, which contains some of the old Ellroy magic despite titles like "Hot Prowl Rape-O" and "Jungletown Jihad," a bit like being invited for a swim after having seen your host pee in the pool.

Recently spotted at Pestiside.hu, "The Daily Dish of Cosmopolitan Budapest":

Local Writers Celebrate Failure of Novelist's Second Work
The author who put Budapest on the map as an important expat literary capital has gotten some downright dismal notices for his second novel, causing widespread rejoicing among the region's legions of struggling unpublished writers. While hopes were high that the follow-up to Arthur Phillips's phenomenally successful 2002 debut Prague would be bad, local scribes are overjoyed by just how chilly the reception The Egyptologist is receiving. Phillips, who lived in Budapest for a brief period in the early 1990s and now resides in Paris, received in excess of a half-million dollars for his first novel, and is also tall and handsome.

(This daily dish of Schadenfreude, via Sarah's CIM.)

• The Observer's Rachel Donadio (soon to be relocating to the NYTBR) tracks Tim LaHaye's rise to industry prominence, and lists the Left Behind creator's upcoming projects, which include a four-book Babylon Rising series -- sold to Bantam for about $40 million -- and another four-book series titled The Jesus Chronicles, sold to Viking for --unsurprisingly -- "many millions of dollars."
• Scholastic reports that, in the absence of a Harry Potter V, revenue dropped 32% over the last quarter.
• Bloomsbury, though also lacking a new Harry Potter, "looks on course to have another strong year with a second-half publishing list that is virtually guaranteed to produce a string of best-sellers," reports This is Money. On a different note, Bloomsbury is now admitting that over $4 million in stock options were "mistakenly" distributed to its chairman and company board.
• The Financial Times reports e-book sales are up 28% from last year. Meanwhile, the Olathe Unified School District has begun employing e-book technology to save "an estimated $20 per student."
• After four trips back to press, Paris Hilton's Confessions of an Heiress is now up to 150,000 copies.

The Independent's profile of Norman Sherry, Graham Greene's biographer, reads like a novelized biography -- tracking the biographer's health and hurdles with an attention and intensity found mostly in fiction.

Sherry's The Life of Graham Greene: Volume 3, 1955-1991 comes out in the UK on September 30, but Sherry tells the Independent that, for a long time, he was obsessed with the notion he might not live to see the triology's completion. "With my recent health problems, I still worry." Most of these health problems, though, were -- rather than rude impediments to the writing process -- the cost of writing an accurate biography. To quote the Independent,

For seven years, he followed in his obsessively peripatetic subject's footsteps, and the effort almost killed him. In Panama, he contracted gangrene of the intestine ... In Liberia, he passed out from tropical diabetes and was lucky to be rescued by a Peace Corps doctor who gave him bottle after bottle of 7-Up to restore his blood sugar. Also in Liberia, a roadside thug pushed a revolver deep into his ear and permanently damaged his hearing. It did not help, on that trip, that he was still wearing an eye patch from a car accident that left him blind for six months.

Sherry's susceptibility to accident was so alarming that Greene himself discreetly intervened to prevent him visiting a leper colony in the Congo.

Stranger than Sherry's "susceptibility," though, was Sherry's chronological duplication of Greene's health problems. By writing Greene's biography, Sherry was essentially retracing and reliving Greene's life. (After Greene had began spying on Sherry's progress, the author told a friend, "Norman Sherry is my doppelganger. I don't see why I shouldn't be his.")

Related Readings:
-Maud notes the BBC's serialization of Graham Greene's dream diary.
-The Independent reports on Greene's newly published letters.
-The British Library hosts Graham Greene: Beyond the Novel, an exhibit of published works and first editions, running from Sep. 21 to Oct. 31.
-Zadie Smith extolls the author's virtues in the Guardian.

• Tim Rutten takes over the LA Times Book Review.
• Julienne van Loon takes home the $20,000 Vogel Prize for Road Story, set in her hometown of Dubbo. "When people talk about finding a voice in writing, it's the voice you grew up with," van Loon comments.
• The Gaurdian looks at the "the uniquely French phenomenon of La rentree litteraire."
• Researching a historical novel? Well, it's "a bit like asking someone to go to bed with you for the first time," says Richard Zimler.
• Kentuckians protest The Plot Against America's "branding" of Kentucky as "the anti-Semitic concentration camp state."

Blogger Jody Pryor relays the origins of the synopsis. An excerpt:

The agent smiled. For the past week, he'd planned and plotted. He knew how to help the devil and make his life easier. "Remember those writers we viewed last week?"

The devil nodded.

"We'll make it harder on them. Instead of sending me truck loads of manuscripts, they'll have to summorize their novels into two paragraphs for the 'query' letter."

The devil leapt to the ceiling in delight. "I love it. I love it. They'll gnash their teeth. Beautiful."

"Wait, there's more," said the sly agent. "Not only will they have to submit a query letter, they must submit a synopsis. Instead of making the synopsis a clearly defined term, we'll let each agent determine their own terminology. Is it a synopsis or an outline? Will it be one page or twenty pages? Each agent will require different types of a synopsis."