Books, 5/9.

For the Los Angeles Times, August Brown reviews Miranda July's collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You: "Yes, there are much-too-precious scenarios in some of these stories, such as a heroine who gives swimming lessons in her kitchen (kooky!). But there is also an unlikely emotional resonance to many of them."

More from Scott Indrisek in the New York Observer: "Someone like Todd Solondz would take this material and craft a suburban freak show out of it, but Ms July is graced with an unabashed love for the basic humanity of her characters. She's a true anomaly in that she's able to recognize the fucked-up underbelly of the culture while still having faith in that culture's ability to survive and, however impossibly, achieve a few moments of shattering beauty."

Michael Z Newman makes his dissertation, "Characterization in American Independent Cinema," freely available - and explains why.

"In her 2005 book Rebels on the Backlot, Sharon Waxman wrote about the generation of filmmakers who came of age in the 1990s and reshaped American cinema - David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, David O Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh and Spike Jonze," writes Christopher Goodwin in the London Times. Nearly a decade later, however, it's clear that most of the directors Waxman was extolling have lost their way and have not produced anything like the important work done by the previous great generation of American auteurs in the 1970s: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, directors to whom they were, Waxman said, 'nothing if not self-conscious heirs.'"

"Maureen Turim's The Films of Nagisa Oshima: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast, presents an intelligent, comprehensive, articulate and illuminating critical evaluation of the filmmaker's subversive, transgressive, confrontational and provocative body of work," writes acquarello.

Jonathan Letham has edited a new Library of America edition collecting Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K Dick and Charles McGrath wonders what the author "would have made of the fact that this month he has arrived at the pinnacle of literary respectability.... A wary, hard-core Dickian might argue that the Library of America volume is just a diversion, an attempt to turn a deeply subversive writer into another canonical brand name. Another thing that would probably amuse and annoy Mr Dick in about equal measure are the exceptional number of movies that have been made from his work."

Also in the New York Times: "Fictionalizing history has long been standard in Hollywood. But rarely do filmmakers directly hitch their historically inaccurate projects to revered works of nonfiction." Edward Wyatt talks with the team behind HBO's adaptation of Dee Brown's 1971 nonfiction classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

"[L]ike the 'great man' theory of history, the cult of the director provides an easy out when you don't want to work too hard examining the many factors that contribute to make a great movie," argues the Chicago Reader's JR Jones, who's been reading A Scott Berg's Goldwyn: A Biography: "Like many of the Hollywood moguls, [Samuel] Goldwyn was a vain, cold-blooded tyrant, yet most people in Hollywood fell all over themselves to work with him, because his track record spoke for itself."

In the Guardian:

• Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, on The Lives of Others: "It is a superb film, a thing of beauty. But its story is a fantasy narrative that could not have taken place (and never did) under the GDR dictatorship. The film has, then, an odd relation to historical truth, a truth that is being bitterly fought for now."

• Peter Bradshaw argues that Fast Food Nation "has taken a firebrand book and turned it into a whingeing piece of defeatism." Related: The Telegraph's David Gritten talks with Richard Linklater.

• "Is Bollywood really so scandalous?" Urmee Khan asks Shobhaa De, author of hugely popular novels such as Bollywood Nights. Somewhat related: Gautaman Bhaskaran's Bollywood dispatch for the Lumière Reader.

Back to the NYT: Michiko Kakutani on Don DeLillo's latest:

Certainly it's unfair for the reader to expect any work of fiction about 9/11 to come close to the visionary scope and depth of Mr DeLillo's masterpiece Underworld, which so brilliantly captured the American experience of the cold war era: not enough time has passed for any novelist to put the events of that day and its shuddering consequences into historical perspective; perhaps not even enough time has passed for any novelist to grapple convincingly with those actual events, without being eclipsed by the documentary testimony (from newspaper articles, television footage and still photographs) still freshly seared in readers' minds. And yet even within these parameters of reduced expectations, Falling Man feels small and unsatisfying and inadequate.

But Adam Begley, writing in the New York Observer, finds it "a powerful and direct account of the atrocity and its aftermath."

Signandsight looks over "the most talked about books of the 2007 spring season" - in the German papers, that is: fiction and nonfiction.

Posted by dwhudson at May 9, 2007 6:26 AM