"[...] bathroom book for the literary reader"

"If you're an avid follower of contemporary fiction — if you bookmark The Millions, subscribe to Bookforum, grind your teeth over the latest flap involving Jonathan Franzen, and, first thing, pull out the Book Review when you get the Sunday New York Times — then John Freeman’s How To Read A Novelist is the perfect, and perfectly modest, book.

     It’s a bathroom book for the literary reader, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Composed of 55 short author profiles that Freeman wrote between 2004 and 2013 for dozens of newspapers and magazines in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it’s a terrific compendium of insights into what contemporary writers are thinking and how they present themselves. The subjects range from Nobel Laureates (Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Imre Kertész, among others), writers who deserve to be Laureates (Philip Roth, Don DeLillo), top-tier novelists from all over the world (Edmundo Paz Soldán, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie), a raft of younger American hotshots (Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, William T. Vollmann, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mark Z. Danielewski), and other big names like Margaret Atwood, E.L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Haruki Murakami.
     The profiles are usually five to seven book pages and readable in 10 minutes or so: roughly what you’d get in a front-page spread in the 'arts and culture' section of a newspaper. They’re quick glimpses into an author’s life and work, and usually based on two- or three-hour interviews with the authors, held occasionally in their homes or in restaurants or, more often than not, in their publicist’s offices or in hotel rooms while they’re touring in support of their latest books."
— Cornel Bonca, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Tongue-tied

From: P.A.P. Blog, Human Rights etc. 

"An extraordinary coalition of global literary figures including the Nobel literature laureates JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Tomas Tranströmer and Mario Vargas Llosa have come together to call on China to respect its population's right to freedom of expression, and to release those writers 'unjustly imprisoned for exercising this most fundamental right.'

     Over a hundred writers and artists from around the world – also including Ian McEwan, Tracey Emin, Edward Albee, Salman Rushdie, EL Doctorow and Don DeLillo – have put their names to a letter highlighting the plight of the imprisoned 2010 Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo and his wife, Liu Xia, who lives under house arrest, along with 'more than 40 other writers and journalists currently jailed for their work.'
     'We cannot ... listen to China's great and emerging creative voices without hearing the silence of those whose voices are forcibly restrained,' they write."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"Like in America, Chinese citizens can post their thoughts to the internet and communicate with other citizens. But unlike in America, anything that gets too political will be taken down by the hosting company. Through various cyber laws and regulations it is these internet companies – like Baidu and Alibaba – that carry out the government’s censorship of the internet.
     If these companies don’t follow the weekly guidance on what content must be taken down, their licenses to run an internet company could be revoked, putting them out of business. Thus, under Chinese law, the government outsources its censorship: it issues directives but the internet companies are the ones that are liable if specific content makes it through.
     Those companies who do their job well don’t just stay in business, but are rewarded for their vigilant censorship. Every year, the Chinese government awards those internet companies who did the best job censoring a 'Self Discipline Award.'”
— Elizabeth M. Lynch, China Law & Policy
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