An end of week recap

“I know that V. will not come across the garden from the Lodge, and yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned and yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that this is the last page and yet I turn it over. There is no limit to one’s stupidity...”
– Leonard Woolf (born 25^th November 1880)

This is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming features, see what’s on the nightstand and keep readers abreast of various book-related happenings.

CHATTERBOOKS >> 

If you are planning a reading event, challenge, competition, or anything else likely to be of interest to the book blogging community, please let me know. I will happily share your news here with the fabulous array of bibliowonks who read this weekly wind up.

* Books Right Up Your Street *

For the second year running, Liz Dexter of Adventures in reading, running and working from home will host Dean Street December – a celebration of “the indie publisher devoted to finding and republishing good [vintage] fiction and non-fiction” – its list incorporating literary, general and crime fiction as well as factual titles on a plethora of subjects ranging from music and entertainment to history, biography and memoir. On 1^st of next month, Liz plans to create a post inviting readers and book bloggers to share their DSP related content. Head over to Dean Street December is coming!! for all the specifics, and please use the #DeanStreetDecember23 hashtag when discussing this event on social media.

* Irresistible Items *

Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I generally make a point of tweeting/x-ing (soon, perhaps tooting or bsky-ing) a few favourite finds (or adding them to my Facebook group page), but in case you missed anything, there follows a selection of interesting snippets:

****************************

Esquire: The Mainstreaming of Historical Fiction – “The genre is suddenly everywhere—but why? Turns out, there’s a reason—and it may just be a perfect antidote to these charged times,” says Sam Paul. 

EL PAÍS: Is there a European literature? – “The narrative of the continent continues to be burdened by the absence of a common strategy in a space of miscegenation with no shared language,” asserts Antonio Monegal.

Faber: Writing Modern Belfast – “How do you write a city that hasn’t decided what it’s going to be next? In the latest of [this] series of long reads, writer Róisín Lanigan explores the literary history of Belfast, and the new generation of writers chronicling the city’s post-Troubles era.”

The New York Review: A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China – Perry Link writes: “Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow, a fictionalized account of the life of the actress Sun Weishi, depicts the hypocrisy of the Communist elites and the fate of those who embraced new ideals after the revolution.”

The Millions: José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature – Chilean writer, journalist and professor José Donoso has, according to Zachary Issenberg, largely been forgotten outside his homeland – yet describes him as “the single greatest writer to come from the [Latin American] Boom” of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Atlas Obscura: The Low Down on the Greatest Dictionary Collection in the World – “From ‘unabridged’ to ‘slanguage,’ Madeline Kripke’s library is a logophile’s heaven (or hell),” says April White.

The Sydney Morning Herald: An inconvenient truth missing from this story of wartime horror – According to Juliette Hughes, Heather Morris’s historical novel, Sisters Under the Rising Sun, steers clear of an uncomfortable fact about the Bangka Island massacre.

New Scientist: The best new science fiction books of November 2023 – “A fresh vision of the Culture universe from Iain M. Banks plus new books from Brandon Sanderson and Naomi Alderman are among the science fiction treats in store this November,” reveals Alison Flood.

JSTOR Daily: Dervla Murphy: The Godmother of Hitting the Road – “Perhaps the greatest female travel writer of her generation, Murphy defied the narrative of the dutiful Irish daughter—and motherhood—to find freedom,” says Imogen Lepere.

The Christian Science Monitor: Moscow’s Metropol Hotel served as a ‘gilded cage’ for Western journalists – “In The Red Hotel, Alan Philips unfolds the difficulties faced by British and American reporters in Moscow during World War II,” writes Terry W. Hartle.

The Guardian: Orbital by Samantha Harvey review – the astronaut’s view – “Six people make an ecstatic voyage around Earth” in the English authors science fiction novel, Orbital – described in Alexandra Harris’s review as a “finely crafted meditation on hope, beauty, the ordinary and the spectacular.” 

Cultured: Why Is Gen Z So Obsessed With Fran Lebowitz? In CULTURED’s Winter Cover Story, Author Nicolaia Rips Investigates – “Nicolaia Rips, who published a memoir about her New York upbringing at 17, explores the enduring and intergenerational appeal of the 73-year-old writer and consummate New Yorker.” 

BBC Somerset: Somerset GP’s WW1 book will benefit PTSD charity – “A retired GP who worked with shell-shocked veterans has published a novel in aid of a veteran’s charity.”

TNR: Big Publishing Killed the Author – Scott W. Stern explains how “corporations wrested creative control from writers and editors—to produce less interesting books.”

The Express Tribune: Books are here to stay – “Expats show keen interest in Pakistani fiction at the Sharjah Book Fair,” finds Riaz Ahmad.

Public Books: Toward the Next Literary Mafia – Josh Lambert strongly believes those excluded from the publishing industry can ultimately overwhelm its bigotry—if they all work together.

The Phnom Penh Post: Diverse talents shine at literary competition – “The Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts wrapped up the Indradevi Literary Competition 2023 with an award ceremony, honouring outstanding achievements in Khmer literature,” reports Hong Raksmey.

Penguin: Where to start reading Clarice Lispector – “The translator of Clarice Lispector’s books explains where you should start with one of the most popular but least understood Latin American writers.”

Africa is a Country: The man behind ‘Uganda Renaissance’ – Ismay Milford explains “how an experimental periodical led by an individual editor thrived in Nasserist Cairo even though it never joined the canon of revolutionary print.”

Jewish Book Council: Writing My Life Story During War – As part of an ongoing series spotlighting “Israeli authors and authors in Israel,” Diana Bletter writes: “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t concentrate enough to read a book. And I’ve always loved reading! But what could I read, anyway, during the war?”

LoveReading: Nero Book Awards Announces Inaugural Shortlist for 2024 – Caffè Nero recently revealed the 16-strong shortlist for the inaugural Nero Book Awards. Among those selected is Fern Brady’s Strong Female Character, “a book about how being a woman gets in the way of people’s expectation of what autism should look like and, equally, how being autistic gets in the way of people’s expectations of what a woman should look like.”

Images: Allama Iqbal was an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause – “Though he died before the creation of Israel, the poet had written about the intentions [of] the British to give Palestine to the Jews,” discovers Rauf Parekh.

The Yale Review: Interviews:  Michael Cunningham – The American novelist chats with deputy editor Elliott Holt about “time, Instagram, and keeping the faith.”

The Paris Review: Teetering Canaries – “Figures of speech are never innocent, and even canaries are less innocent than one might imagine,” says East German writer Judith Schalansky in a piece about environmental “turning points” – translated into English by Imogen Taylor.

BBC Culture: Radicals and Rogues: These subversive 1910s women made New York cool – but were written out of history – “According to a new book [Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern], New York’s transformation in the 20th Century into a vibrant, modern city is largely thanks to a cohort of radical women artists who were overlooked by history, writes Cath Pound.”

FSG: A Gathering of Lonely Figures – “A conversation between [Costa Rican-Puerto Rican writer and academic] Carlos Fonseca and his editor Ben Brooks about Carlos’s forthcoming novel Austral.”

Asymptote: Casting the Spell: Damion Searls on Translating Jon Fosse’s A Shining – Damion Searls talks to Georgina Fooks about “following rhythms, the translator as reader, […] making his own rules” and translating the new Nobel laureate’s novella, A Shining, into English.

Firstpost: Sohini Chattopadhyay’s new book is a celebration of India’s women athletes – “The author of The Day I Became a Runner argues that women who run ‘pose a direct challenge to patriarchy’ as running is a solitary activity conducted in the public sphere.”

Santa Barbara Independent: Book Review | ‘The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters’ by Benjamin Moser – The Upside-Down World is a “melding of art history and memoir by a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer,” says David Starkey.

City Journal: Grave New World – First published in 1920, Storm of Steel, “Ernst Jünger’s unblinking literary vision captured an age of technology, political upheaval, and destruction,” finds Ian Penman.

The Bookseller: Yong wins £25k Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize – Renowned science writer, Ed Yong, has been named the winner of the 2023 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize for An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

The Armenian Mirror-Spectator: Kalle Käsper: For Armenia – the Country of His Love – Artsvi Bakhchinyan has an in-depth discussion with Estonian writer Kalle Käsper about the history of Armenian-Estonian literary relations, Russian-speaking readers and his late wife, the Armenian Russian-language writer Gohar Markosian-Käsper.

Literary Review of Canada: One by One – Canadian writer Katherena Vermette concludes her ‘Stranger’ trilogy with The Circle, described by Kelly Baron as her “most exciting novel to date.”

The Critic: A teenager, strangers and a pair of apes – “Spend time inside the mind of your most eccentric, sometimes maddening friend,” suggests John Self in this piece on “late works” by Rose Tremain, Lydia Davis and Brigid Brophy.

Electric Literature: 7 Novels About Characters Driven by Their Cravings – “Garnett Kilberg Cohen, author of Cravings, recommends books about characters shaped by what they desire most.” 

Counter Craft: Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick – Attention all novelists! “Why not put some whale facts chapters in your [work in progress]?” suggests Lincoln Michel.

Nieman Storyboard: Peek inside a successful book proposal – “Author Kim Cross annotates the lengthy proposal that landed a contract for the book that revisits the 1993 Polly Klaas kidnapping.”

Jacobin: Blacklisted Communist Writer Albert Maltz’s Last Novel Will Finally Be Published in the US – “When Communist writer Albert Maltz was blacklisted in the McCarthyist era, no commercial publisher in the United States would touch his novel A Tale of One January. A new edition slated for US distribution means his 70-year blacklist will finally end,” writes Taylor Dorrell.

The Conversation: I’ve had enough of Sad Bad Girl novels and sensationalised trauma – but I’m hungry for complex stories about women – Author, journalist and Associate Lecturer in English & Writing at the University of Tasmania, Liz Evans, is sick of “Sad Bad Girl novels,” but is “hungry for complex stories about women.”

Penta: Historic Typewriters Used by Literary Giants and Celebrities Up for Auction – Eric Grossman on the Heritage Auctions sale of celebrity-typewriters on 15^th December.

****************************

FINALLY >>

If there is something you would particularly like to see on Winding Up the Week or if you have any suggestions, questions, or comments for Book Jotter in general, please drop me a line or comment below. I would be delighted to hear from you.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I wish you a week bountiful in books and rich in reading.

NB In this feature, ‘winding up’ refers to the act of concluding something and should not be confused with the British expression: ‘wind-up’ – an age-old pastime of ‘winding-up’ friends and family by teasing or playing pranks on them. If you would like to know more about this expression, there is an excellent description on Urban Dictionary.

Categories: Winding Up the Week

Tags: #DeanStreetDecember23, Books, Dean Street December, Leonard Woolf, Reading