Linda Lovelace and James Fenimore Cooper, together at last: Welcome to Harvard’s wacky New Literary History of America, arriving in bookstores as we speak (and more and more and more). Li'l Lionel Trillings will have to fend for themselves: Columbia English professor James Shapiro’s undergraduate seminar, “The Book Review” is on indefinite hiatus. Why are wonderful writers sometimes such dull conversationalists? The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint that will focus on publishing books on a much shorter schedule. This is your brain on Kafka: Does absurdist literature make you smarter? Penguin’s Great Ideas series is too Eurocentric, too male, but at least it’s made it cool to pull a volume of Edmund Burke from your pocket. What does your bookcase say about you? Prune that prose: Learning to write for readers beyond academe. Publishers be bold: Why it's time to ditch the subtitle. On the occasion of its 35th anniversary, Linda Wolfe provides a brief concise history of the National Book Critics Circle (and more on NBCC's 35th anniversary). A new wave of posthumous releases from authors like Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace and Ralph Ellison raises thorny questions about what the writers intended. The sincerest form of lawsuit bait: Sequels are a constant lure for authors who didn’t write the original. Curling up with hybrid books, videos included: Publishers are looking to “vooks,” which intersperse videos in electronic text that can be read and viewed online. A review of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover (and more).

From LPBR, a review of Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law by Philip K. Howard; and a review of Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics by Gordon Silverstein. A review of The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution by Barry Friedman. The first chapter from Weak Courts, Strong Rights: Judicial Review and Social Welfare Rights in Comparative Constitutional Law by Mark Tushnet. P.J. O'Rourke on twittering the Constitution: All the Founding Fathers go tweet, tweet, tweet. Let Citizens United speak: Why the Supreme Court should abolish political speech limits on corporations and unions. Here is the Supreme Court's secret go-to chart for easy answers. Benched: Barry Friedman on why the Supreme Court is irrelevant. More on Packing the Court by James MacGregor Burns. A review of Melvin I. Urofsky’s Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (and more). Do women make better judges? Asked and answered, with data. From NYRB, Ronald Dworkin on Justice Sotomayor: The unjust hearings. Are Obama’s judges really liberals? Jeffrey Toobin investigates. Spoonfuls of sugar: Dahlia Lithwick on Americans' continued love affair with the John Roberts Court. A review of Justice Kennedy's Jurisprudence: The Full and Necessary Meaning of Liberty by Frank J. Colucci. A review of Death Justice: Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and the Contradictions of the Death Penalty by Kenneth W. Miller and David Niven. Ardor in the court: A Texas court affirms the right of a judge and a prosecutor who slept together to condemn a man to death.

The first chapter from How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns by Audrey Kurth Cronin. Al Qa’eda’s tactical power is impossible to gauge, but its real strength still lies where it always has — in public relations. New studies of suicide bombers say that most have three important qualities in common: testosterone, a narrative fantasy, and a desire to make theater. A review of Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War by Jonathan Pieslak. A review of Master of War: Blackwater USA's Erik Prince and the Business of War by Suzanne Simons (and more and more and more). From Policy Review, an essay on how to measure the war: Judging success and failure in counterinsurgency; and a review of The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East by Joshua Muravchik. It sounded like a good idea: Swarms of social scientists would help U.S. troops better understand local customs and avoid cultural mishaps — but is the program creating more problems than it solves? Fred Kaplan on two questions Obama must ask before sending more troops to Afghanistan — and how to judge the responses. The Vietnamization of Afghanistan: Obama's choices in Afghanistan will either break the Democrats' association with Vietnam or confirm it. Afghanistan is a mess, suicide bombs are still going off in Iraq — is nation-building doomed to failure? It's time to consult the original insurgent, T.E. Lawrence.

From Slate, keep your subsidies off my ovaries: William Saletan on the pro-choice argument against health care reform; and Timothy Noah on how the Senate finance committee strangled the public option, health reform's best idea (and more). Going Dutch: Jonathan Cohn on life after the public option. A look at health care options in Europe and the balance between individual and centralized concerns. Talk to the invisible hand: Darshak Sanghavi on the promises and perils of treating patients more like consumers. The first chapter from Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs are Destroying Our Health Care System by Daniel Callahan. More on The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T. R. Reid (and more). From Vanity Fair, an article on the sick business of health-care profiteering. Rick Scott profits off the uninsured: A leading foe of healthcare reform owns a chain of clinics aimed at people who would benefit from a public option — and had strange criteria about who could work in his clinics. From NYRB, Elizabeth Drew on health care: Can Obama swing it? Obama's four-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new kinds of political confusion; to boldly go where no rational health-care reformer has gone before. Obama vs. the Lobbyists: A scorecard for the future of American politics. Thomas Frank on Obama and the K Street Set: Whatever happened to "change"? A-OK Street: Is lobbying becoming more efficient? In defense of lobbying: The Constitution protects the right to petition.