So does Dustin Long’s Icelander live up with the rest of the McSweeney’s fiction books that have been overseen by Eli Horowitz (specifically, The People of Paper and Here They Come). Laura Miller seems to think so. She’s called the book an “endearingly wacky puzzle novel,” a phrase that, if you’ve read Miller’s reviews, doesn’t come from her lips all that often. The verdict’s in on a look see until more reviews trickle in, but this does sound promising.

Reuters: “Nobel prize-winning German author Guenter Grass has admitted for the first time that he served in the Waffen-SS, Adolf Hitler’s elite Nazi troops.” (via The Millions)

Kirkus Reviews offers thoughts on Stephen Elliott’s latest: “Elliott (Happy Baby, 2004, etc.) explains in his introduction that enough of these pieces contain autobiographical components to make the whole collection serve as a memoir. If that’s true, too bad for him, not because he’s had such a hard time finding the right partner to dominate him in a consensual S&M relationship, but because his relationships are so mind-numbingly dull.”

Ouch.

Brilliant. (via WE)

Congratulations, Rake!