Bookslut has a review of the new Nathan Englander book The Ministry of Special Cases.

The Guardian reviews (sort of) the new Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet.

Chuck Pahlaniuk’s Rant is reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle and by Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe gets roughed up in the New York Times. I don’t think the reviewer “got it” though. She admits, essentially, that she doesn’t follow the author “again and again” through out the book. Then she says:

He chose as one of his central metaphors the bowel movement. The novel features all manner of droppings. We see characters relieving themselves, i.e. their pants are down, i.e. they’re not looking too dignified.

Her point is that Sharpe needlessly provides what the kids call “too much information.” Luckily, the counterpoint to this argument was made in a review of the non-fiction, The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America. It notes how hapless our founding brethren truly were. The “bloody phlux” almost wiped out the entire population. Later, these colonists were found as emaciated skeletons that almost starved to death from their inability to feed themselves in a nation full of game, plant life, and fish. Not too dignified is exactly how I’d describe it. It’s a wonder we stuck around. For more on Jamestown (the fictional one) see an interview with the author at Bookslut or me.

ANYWAY…

You shivered while reading McCarthy’s The Road. You hid under the covers reading Sharpe’s Jamestown. Is The Pesthouse by Jim Crace the heir to the post-apocalyptic crown? Or just a faux-pocalyptic pretender? Find out at the NYT and the San Francisco Cronicle.

The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish by Elsie Blackwell, about Louisiana under water, is reviewed by the Washington Post Book World.

Dave Barry reviews the e-mail netiquette book Send hilariously (as is his wont) in the New York Times Book Review.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño is reviewed in the Washington Post Book World.

The Guardian calls the non-fiction book The Islamist “a wake up call for Britain.”

Update: This just in.  Michiko takes a poop on the new Don Delillo, Falling Man.