Conrad and the Web

A Bookman's Daybook by Burton Rascoe includes a noteworthy item on Joseph Conrad. Rascoe wondered how someone who lived in an "inland hamlet" seemed to know everything that was going on -- unlike most novelists, he said, "who are concerned only with themselves." The answer was that Conrad used a clipping service to send him news that might reasonably interest him. This saved him the time of plowing through all the papers himself. Convenient, yes, and also preceding by about 90 years the "invention" of the RSS feed.

Scott-King's Modern Europe

When Mr. Scott-King, a middle-aged schoolmaster in the classics, hears that parents "want to prepare their boys for jobs in the modern world" and that "you can hardly blame them, can you?" he replies: "Oh yes. I can and do." In Evelyn Waugh's 88-page story, Scott-King travels to the fictional nation of Neutralia to deliver a speech on a late Renaissance poet. His travails in this ex-Hapsburg state that evinces all the grubbiest aspects of modernity are told with Waugh's typical dry wit and elegant style. Returning to this author will never disappoint.

Books: A Memoir

Larry McMurtry's bookshop in Archer, Texas, contains nearly 400,000 volumes; his personal library about 30,000. This slim, entertaining memoir about reading and the pursuit and sale of books carries an ominous undertone, neatly captured in a line from Cyril Connolly that reading has become a mandarin pursuit.

The Excursion to Tilsit

The title story in this collection by the German writer Hermann Sudermann is the basis for F.W. Murnau's great film Sunrise. Sudermann's ending is more poignant: The husband accidentally drowns after, full of regrets, he abandons a plan to drown his wife. In the film they both live happily ever after. The stories, set in Prussia's borderlands where Germans and Lithuanians mix, are full of strange, harsh elements. In Jons and Erdma, a couple builds a home and life in a marsh, rising literally out of the muck. They survive half through hard work and half through pilfering and cunning. These are the European Snopses and Bundrens.

The Moviegoer

There is something overheated and unattractive about The Moviegoer. The novel is rich in ideas, contradictions, poetical prose and sly humor. And yet.

Acquainted with the Night

Heinrich Boll's novel of postwar Cologne depicts a ruined city and its half-ruined people struggling to emerge from the rubble and dust. There was a Blitz here, too, as non-Germans may forget. Fred and Kate, whose marriage has been deformed by the destruction of the city, narrate alternating chapters. They are both ordinary and exemplary, as good literature requires. With Boll, too, there is a Catholic element that leavens the text.

The White Tiger

After reading putrid novels by Ian McEwan and J.M. Coetzee, both of whom have been honored with the Booker Prize, it should not have been a surprise that this novel, the 2008 prize winner, is a disaster. It is less challenging and less subtle than many comic books. Stylistically, it is inert. There is plenty to learn about modern India in its pages, but it is hardly literature. Or is the Booker Prize for children's books?

The Incomparable Atuk

After three overheated and over-serious "young man's novels," Mordecai Richler found his voice in 1959 with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Atuk, published in 1963, is an attack on human folly of the type that Richler would soon come to perfect in both novels and essays. "I'm world famous," one character says, "all over Canada." That one-liner sums up Richler's wit and his purpose perfectly.

Presence

The six stories in this collection by Arthur Miller are direct and engaging. Themes of loss and longing are treated with transparent sensitivity and flashes of humor. A New York Times reviewer gets it exactly right in saying that the stories "depend little on the pared nuance and carefully staged epiphanies" of much contemporary literature.

One More Story

A few of the stories in this collection by Ingo Schulze are slight or drizzle to an end, but others show the polish and concluding snap that the best short stories require. Schulze's insights into human connections are commonplace, but his settings -- rural Estonia, a Germany in transition, Egypt -- often provide the needed spark.