When viewed as a whole, Armenian literature after the Genocide exhibits a striking constant: its transnational character.

Armenian literature, no matter where or when, has a transnational character, because it has always existed at the intersection of cultures as well as power politics.

Which young Azerbaijani authors do you think could interest Western readers?
We have very interesting young writers. This year our publishing house has released an anthology of works by 13 young Azerbaijani authors. I am happy that the anthology has become a bestseller. Currently we are negotiating over distribution of the anthology in Russia and we have also received a proposal from France to translate the book into French.

The cabal's greatest, most mesmerising trick of all has been to fashion novels of true originality and page-riffling appeal.

What saves the Wu Ming crew from romantic sentimentalism is a trademark sophistication about political ideas and their impact on both words and deeds.

• Nicolette Jones' in The Independent (and Jones also reviewed it in the Sunday Times)
• Philip Womack's in The Telegraph

Also increasingly absent are textured stories about rising above the realities of poverty, alienation and racism. Those redemptive works, with their calls for black people to be seen as fully human -- think of Native Son or Invisible Man -- are on the remainder table. It is hard to believe, but legendary black writers telling stories about the full scope of the black experience, from Langston Hughes to Toni Morrison, are being pushed aside. Inspirational books on black history or the civil-rights struggle are now for the classroom only.

The poor might like gangster lit or ghetto lit for its reflection of their lives. But they are a secondary market. What makes the genre dominant at this moment is that middle-class black women have made it their escapist reading. They are the ones publishers seek to titillate and thrill.

The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.

Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information. A story, God knows, is still the most powerful way to understand. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word, in the great narrative that is the Bible, was not written as twitter.

Even Karl Kraus, who loathed Hofmannsthal and seized every opportunity to debunk him, acknowledged that Hofmannsthal was a great writer.

In fact, in McClatchy's hands the story of Hofmannsthal's life and work becomes nobler, but also less complex and therefore duller, than it was.

He has also rendered seven of Hofmannsthal's poems beautifully: witness the lines from "An Experience" cited above, which come from McClatchy's translation. But his renderings seem to be the only new translations in the entire volume, and the quality of the old ones -- some of which date back to the 1940s -- is mixed, with several of the important works, e.g., the "Chandos Letter", being among the least competently done.

• Thomas H. Maugh II's in The Los Angeles Times
• The Telegraph's
• Stephen Miller's in the Wall Street Journal
• Lizzy Davies' in The Guardian

• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• The Angel Maker by Stefan Brijs
• Beyond Suspicion by Tanguy Viel
• Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany
• The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• His Illegal Self by Peter Carey
• Indignation by Philip Roth
• The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez
• The Jewish Messiah by Arnon Grunberg
• The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
• Machine by Peter Adolphsen
• The Only Son by Stéphane Audeguy
• Settlement by Christoph Hein
• Songs for the Missing by Stewart O'Nan
• The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker
• Wanting by Richard Flanagan
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

• American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
• Cockroach by Rawi Hage
• Cosmos Incorporated by Maurice G. Dantec
• The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

The key idea is that for thirty years, the work of García Márquez, with his magical realism, represented Latin American literature in the imagination of the North American reader. But since everything erodes and ends up losing its luster, the cultural establishment eventually went looking for something new. It sounded out the guys in the literary groups called McOndo and Crack, but they didn't fit the enterprise -- above all, as Sarah Pollack explains, it was very difficult to sell the North American reader on the world of iPods and Nazi spy novels as the new image of Latin America and its literature. Then Bolaño appeared with his The Savage Detectives and his visceral realism.

• The Angel Maker by Stefan Brijs
• Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany
• The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov
• His Illegal Self by Peter Carey
• Indignation by Philip Roth
• Machine by Peter Adolphsen
• The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker
• Wanting by Richard Flanagan

• Cockroach by Rawi Hage
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

What is the best piece of advice a parent gave you?
My mother's parting shot when I left home: "Why be happy Jeanette, when you could be normal?" I've carried it with me ever since.

We have so many good works of literature but there are few translated ones). I feel the need of more translated literary works, so someday the Nobel Prize may go to a Korean writer," said Han

Indian English writing needs to look at itself, if it wants to establish what is still lacking: a solid platform of evaluation that would be connected by bridges to the world, but will not come stamped 'Made in the West'. At the moment, this is largely lacking -- or reduced, when it appears, to some kind of a nationalist simplification.

Your Face Tomorrow is one of the great works of modern European fiction.

Now the concluding book convinces me that this is indeed one of the most remarkable novels of our time, utterly compelling, as addictive as Proust, whom Marías resembles in the demands he makes of his readers. That these demands are worth meeting is certain.