From New Statesman, a review of You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem. The seven stories that comprise Walk the Blue Fields explore the abyss that separates men and women. From Financial Times, the stereotyping of Japanese women is rife but Kickboxing Geishas, a compelling collection of interviews, reveals the true picture.

From Forward, juggler of the moral and the aesthetic: A review of At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches by Susan Sontag; and an interview with Hungarian writer György Konrád, oracle of humanism's survival. Slavoj Zizek on how The Lives of Others fails to capture the true horror of the GDR. The god of war is my muse: The Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka tells Helen Oyeyemi why literature must struggle against injustice. Scathing and scurrilous opinions are the stock in trade of author Gore Vidal. Serve lunch and stand well back.

A review of Chaucer's Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio. Boris Akunin spent 20 years translating novels before deciding to write his own. What's the point? An article on summer reading on the arts. From Salon, a review of Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived by Daniel H. Wilson. From The Chronicle, can one Rudolf Steiner fan be wrong? Particularly if it's Saul Bellow? Carlin Romano investigates. A post-office box in Fayette, West Virginia, is the backdrop for Famous Writers School, a hugely enjoyable satire on writers and writing. Dear Book Doctor, I keep saying that I’m only going to stay one more year, but I never leave. Is there any escape?

An interview with Howard Zinn on American newspapers’ winnowing down of book reviews. The Bookish Set: LA Weekly goes inside the indie booksellers. Mental floss? More like mental fluff. This magazine is full of trivia, and while most of it is far from useless, the stuff nevertheless gets wadded into the back of your mind, only to be pulled out for special occasions. Small Magazines, Big Ideas: An impending rate hike could silence small independent magazines of all political stripes that make a key contribution to the conversation of democracy. The price of cast iron: Few people notice Reuters, but it is a very big player in global news and its independence matters. An interview with Joseph Farah, author of Stop the Presses!: The Inside Story of the New Media Revolution.

From First Monday, what is popular on Wikipedia and why? Philip Rosedale, the founder of the virtual world Second Life, believes that his company, Linden Lab, is at the forefront of the internet's next big revolution: The 3D web. The first comprehensive global survey of Internet filtering shows that online repression is on the rise worldwide.