Paper Cuts

There are plenty of blogs about books around, but few as wide-ranging, erudite and entertaining as Paper Cuts, by The New York Times Book Review editors. Contributors are uniformly good; these are people who know their subject intimately and have access to all sorts of authors and inside info.

But it's not a round-up of industry gossip, nor a run-through of new releases. One post might be on how Sol Yurick's pulp novel The Warriors (filmed in 1979), about a Coney Island gang on the run, was inspired by Xenophon's Anabasis, an eyewitness account of 5th Century BC warfare. Another might record a literary vending machine spotted in Barcelona. And the regular author playlists, in which writers give a rundown of the music tracks they're listening to at the moment, and why they like it, make for reliably good reading.

Whatever the topic, the coverage is smart, thoughtful and informative. Not surprisingly it is somewhat US-focused, but there is still a strong sense of the wider world out there. A must-read for booklovers.

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