KEY POINTS:
Culture Vulture blogger Guy Somerset's round-up from the literary pages of the world's newspapers and websites.
BRITAIN
In The Guardian, a paean to Mister Pip - the original, for a change, not Lloyd Jones', with Paul Bailey praising Charles Dickens' greatest achievement .
Amanda Vickery rescues the reputation of "bluestockings" , while Ali Smith delves into the darkness and politics of Carson McCullers .
Among the reviews:
Nothing to be Frightened of , by Julian Barnes.
Something to Tell You , by Hanif Kureishi.
The Omega Force , by Rick Moody.
This week's Writer's Room belongs to poet Simon Armitage .
In The Guardian's sister newspaper, The Observer, the 40th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize is marked by former judges choosing their favourite past winner, a list of those winners and literary editor Robert McCrum on the importance - or not - of the prize.
Among the reviews, this of Alex Ross' National Book Critics Circle award winner The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
In The Daily Telegraph, there is a review of Joseph Stiglitz's The Three Trillion Dollar War and The Brief Wondrous Life of Wao, by Junot Diaz.
You can also find different takes on Rick Moody and Julian Barnes - the latter by the fabulous Lynn Barber.
The Times interviews crime writer Mo Hayder and new soccer convert Joanna Trollope.
The paper gets all saucy with its illustration for a review of A Partisan's Daughter, the new Louis de Bernieres novel.
It also reviews the Junot Diaz and Hanif Kureishi .
There's another perspective, too, on the Julian Barnes and non-fiction reviews of Inside Chechnya by Asne Seierstad and A History of American Screenwriting by Marc Norman.
You can listen to Joshua Ferris reading from his novel And Then We Came to the End.
More Julian Barnes in The Independent, as well as the much-touted Beautiful Children by Charles Bock.
UNITED STATES
The New York Times has an overview of various Irene Nemirovsky reissues/discoveries.
The big essay is on Martin Amis and Islam.
Private eye aficionados will appreciate the review of fictional memoirs of Allen Pinkerton.
On the other coast, the Los Angeles Times has Mark Kurlansky reviewing the new Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.
It also has not one but two essays on fake - as opposed to fictional like the Pinkerton - memoirs.
AUSTRALIA
Across the ditch, where the literary festival season is in full swing, the Sydney Morning Herald takes advantage of all those visiting authors, with reports on events by Ian McEwan and Germaine Greer, and an interview with Paul Auster.
The Age has a profile of their - and the Listener's - regular reviewer and interviewer Kevin Rabalais about his first novel.
There is more Greer in The Australian, as well as McEwan, and also James Meek. Both the latter are at Writers and Readers Week here in Wellington this week, to whence I am now headed, thus ending this surf around the internet.
(This posting was written... in silence. Some of them are.)
