KEY POINTS:
The Listener's arts and books editor Guy Somerset and his weekly literary round-up from newspapers and websites around the world.
BRITAIN
In the Guardian, Paul Theroux tells us how he came to reinvent the travel book and, in an interview, Will Self sings the praises of satire at the expense of "preposterous" naturalism.
There is an extract from Philip Pullman's new book, Once Upon a Time in the North, which goes back to the very beginning of His Dark Materials, and Kate Figes feels for the adolescents in Anonymous' Living with Teenagers.
The Daily Telegraph has an interview with Isabel Allende and extracts from a new biography of VS Naipaul.
There is a review of The Dog of the Marriage: Collected Stories by Amy Hempel.
The Financial Times reviews Dinner with Mugabe, which attempts to get to the bottom of the Zimbabwean dictator.
After The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad brings us The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya.
In the Independent, a review of the first novel - and only the fourth book - from one of Britain's best book critics, Adam Mars-Jones. Has Pilcrow been worth the wait?
Tony Parsons tells the paper about his cultural life.
The Guardian has the extract, the Times and Sunday Times have the 'exclusive' interview with Philip Pullman.
Philip Hensher is another book critic with a novel out, in his case The Northern Clemency.
There are reviews of Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast by Kevin Myers and Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland by former Tony Blair chief of staff Jonathan Powell.
For those of a quieter disposition, there is the latest from one of Britain's finest non-fiction writers, Simon Garfield - The Error World: An Affair with Stamps.
Want to know about Jeffrey Archer's reading life? The Daily Mail - where else? - is the place for you. It's got to be better than his writing life.
In the London Review of Books, diarist Jonathan Raban tells us why he's for Barack Obama.
For students of the more rarefied echelons of British journalism, it doesn't get better than Peregrine Worsthorne in the Spectator reviewing The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes. The headline just tops it off: "Putting the Boot in."
Sticking with the subject of British journalism: so much for the value of the word "exclusive" - the Spectator also has an interview with Philip Pullman.
The New Statesman has a nice archive review by VS Pritchett, as well as Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century.
(Talking of Ross, earlier in the week there was this interview in the Guardian - who'd have thought he was so young?)
Two books about Tibet come under scrutiny in the Economist.
UNITED STATES
In the New York Times, Colm Toibin reviews Nicholson Baker's pacifist history Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation.
The big essay is about children in the stories of JD Salinger.
The Los Angeles Times reviews Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff.
There are also a couple of examples of posthumous publishing: Fidelity: Poems by Grace Paley and a restoration of James Agee's original text for A Death in the Family.
In the San Francisco Chronicle, there is a Q&A with Tom Wolfe about, of all things, neuroscience.
There's a new short story from Jeffrey Eugenides in the New Yorker.
The Q&A in the Atlantic Monthly is with Jhumpa Lahiri.
There are reviews of Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford - A Personal Biography y Charlotte Chandler, The First Day of the Blitz by Peter Stansky, and United Kingdom by Ian Robinson, a lament for the decline of English and by extension the English.
Christopher Hitchens reviews - deep breath - A David Moody's Ezra Pound - Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work: Volume One - The Young Genius 1885-1920.
AUSTRALIA
A novel about the fraught relationship between an interviewer and interviewee makes for a fraught relationship between an interviewer and interviewee when the Australian profiles Virginia Duigan, sister of film-maker John Duigan and author of the new novel The Biographer.
There is an extract from a fascinating book about Wilfred Burchett, a foreign correspondent who cosied up to the Communists he was reporting on.
The Age interviews Deborah Moggach and Hanif Kureishi.
Emily Maguire's Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity is reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The Courier-Mail looks at the rocky relationship between writers and the film-makers translating their books to the big screen.
In the Australian Book Review, there is Rupert's Adventure in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife by Bruce Dover.
