Reviews: 

• Entertainment Weekly on Scott Smith's The Ruins.
• Usually, newspapers bring out the heavy literary guns to rain down scorn on poor genre books. So it's refreshing to see The Guardian do it the other way around and have Ursula K. Le Guin review the newest novel by Margaret Drabble.
• Tangent Online has recently posted losts of short fiction reviews, covering piles of magazines and several single-author collections.
• SFF World loves Greg Keyes's The Blood Knight -- See! I told you! It's not just me who loves this series. Now go start with The Briar King right now...
  

Interviews:

• Cat Rambo interviews Magazine of F&SF editor Gordon Van Gelder at Suite 101.
• Rick Kleffel talks about interviewing Vernor Vinge for NPR, and links to parts of that interview that didn't make it onto the radio.
  
• John Joseph Adams presents outtakes from his previous Sci Fi Wire article about Sophie McDougal.
• Meme Therapy talked to Mark Budz.
  

There's a new issue of Emerald City, which includes an article on award proliferation, Cheryl Morgan's extended thoughts on the "bribing reviewers" controversy, and reviews of lots of things (including  Glasshouse, Elantris, and The Looking Glass Wars).

USA Today reports that scientists have now discovered over 200 extrasolar planets.

A group of British fantasy writers (including Stan Nicholls, Juliet E. McKenna and Sarah Ash) are blogging as writefantastic.

SF author (and former President of SFWA) Paul Levinson wrote an editorial for Newsday (a paper on Long Island, New York) about "TV's new golden age."

My computer won't play it, but some of you might be able to watch a video and thus meet Jonathan Stroud, author of the brilliant "Bartimaeus Trilogy." [via SF Signal]

Sci Fi Wire has an article about Tanith Lee's new novel Metallic Love (a sequel to her classic The Silver Metal Lover).

Meme Therapy asked a bunch of people about the (technological) future of democracy.

John Scalzi weighs in on the subject of publishing fiction for free online. 

[many of these via Locus Online]