Links, links, links

- The first proper review in the Trinidad and Tobago press of Patrick French's Naipaul biography, The World Is What It Is--by Suzanna Clarke in Newsday.

- Naipaul's most recent book, A Writer's People, has only just been published in the US--his American publisher there is lagging six months behind his British one, for who knows what reason. Richard Eder reviews it in the Boston Globe:

"All my life I've had to think about different ways of looking," V.S. Naipaul tells us at the start of yet another footsore stage (the 29th, including novels, essays, memoirs, and ruminations) in his lifelong trek to locate an estranged self in an estranging world.

The Trinidad-born writer is 75, a Nobel Prize winner, and as touchy, coldly aggrieved, and solipsistic as ever. And as always, just as one might give up on him, come moments in this new collection when self-absorption, afflicted by genius, turns into a visionary vantage over the wider human condition.

- Geoffrey Philp is celebrating US National Poetry Month all April long by posting poems by Caribbean and South Florida poets. Most recently: an excerpt from the late Anthony McNeill's Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child. (By the way, when is someone going to put together a book of McNeill's unpublished and uncollected works?)

- Guyanese writer Ruel Johnson solicits essays on the topic of Guyana's "Feared Generation" for a possible book inspired by this blog post.

- And Marlon James interrupts work on his third novel to post a short essay called "I'm Too Old to Rock and Roll".