An end of week recap

“If I tell you my character has grey hair, you will not see her. If I tell you she has a tiny scar at the upper left corner of her lip from which protrudes one grey whisker—you will make up the rest of her face with absolute clarity. If I tell you my character is waiting in a car, you won’t be ‘caught,’ but if I tell you he pushes his fingers down in the crack of the car seat where the ancient leather has pulled away from the seat frame, and pulls up a small coin purse with a faded note in it—you will be mine.”
– Pat Schneider

Last week’s wind up was of the link lite variety. This week it’s a day late. Yet still I am no nearer to catching my tail.

As ever, 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 and its followers, please let me know. I will happily share your news here with the fabulous array of bibliowonks who read this weekly wind up.

* Irresistible Items *

Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I generally make a point of tweeting/x-ing (not to mention tooting and bsky-ing) a few favourite finds (or adding them to my Facebook group page), but in case you missed anything, there follow a selection of interesting snippets:  

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49^th Shelf: Women at War – “A recommended reading list by [Canadian novelist Genevieve Graham,] bestselling author of The Secret Keeper.” 

LARB: A Novelist with a Fury: Reading Arundhati Roy in the Present – Yogita Goyal explores Arundhati Roy’s wide-ranging non-fiction and unflinching political activism. 

The Irish Times: Dublin Literary Award 2024: Solenoid, by Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu, wins €100,000 prize – “Solenoid, published by Deep Vellum, is the first book translated from Romanian to win the award,” reveals Ellen O’Donoghue.

Nippon.com: “Takaoka’s Travels”: Adrift on the Ocean – “The fantasy novel Takaoka’s Travels recounts a Japanese prince’s voyage across Asia, as he visits strange lands and becomes immersed in dreams.”

Guardian Australia: Peripathetic by Cher Tan review – essays on punk, work and the internet are incredibly good fun – Fiona Wright finds Peripathetic, “Tan’s [collection of] fast-paced, acidic essays are guided by big ideas, drawing on her personal story to speak to the invisible, powerful forces that shape us all.” 

Undark: Book Review: The Hidden Extinction Crisis of Natural Historians – “In Unrooted, Erin Zimmerman connects the loss of species to the loss of the women who study them,” finds Katie Burke.

Havana Times: Sergio Ramirez: “I Live in Nicaragua Through Literature” – “‘To have one’s country taken away, to have the doors of return closed, will always be a sorrow. One must know how to endure it,’ says the writer from exile.”

The New Statesman: Virginia Woolf’s politics of peace – “Published between the wars, Woolf’s essay Three Guineas still has lessons for today’s conflict-ravaged world,” argues Elif Shafak.

The Critic: New life for a dying trade – “The book world is on its last legs. So how we can bring it back from the dead?” asks The Secret Author.

Five Books: The Best Philip K. Dick Books Recommended by David Hyde – “Philip K. Dick was a prolific sci fi writer, publishing 44 novels and over a hundred short stories. Once hooked, you’ll devour them all, says David Hyde, the publisher and festival organiser better known as ‘Lord Running Clam’ within the lively fan community.”

BBC News: International Booker Prize 2024: German win for Kairos – Leisha Chi-Santorelli reports: “German writer Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann have won the International Booker Prize” for historical novel Kairos. 

Literary Hub: The Thrill of Discovery: How Hidden Messages Make Fiction Fun – J. Nicole Jones, author of The Witches of Bellinas, “on the writers who create literary puzzles and the readers who solve them.”

Tablet: What Is an Editor? – “Sara Franklin’s new hagiography of Judith Jones, The Editor, betrays the code of anonymity and mirroring by which true editorial stars operate,” writes Elroy Rosenberg.

Buzz: Paul Baker’s CAMP!: a joyful exploration of a world-conquering attitude – “Paul Baker offers a glorious investigation into camp in his latest book [CAMP!], a triumphant testament to an attitude that has conquered the world.”

Jeune Afrique: Congolese director Dibakana Mankessi wins the Orange Book Prize in Africa – “With The Psychoanalyst of Brazzaville, the author has won the sixth edition of the prize organized by the Orange Foundation to promote literature written and published in Africa.”

Artnet: Could the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Actually Be About Sex? – “A new study posits that the ancient work encodes ‘women’s secrets’” discovers Vittoria Benzine.

The Conversation: Goliarda Sapienza, the flamboyant and elusive author of the “Art of Joy” – Manuela Spinelli explores the history of Goliarda Sapienza’s The Art of Joy – an astonishing, sensual, coming-of-age novel, written over a nine-year period, from 1967 to 1976.

Books Ireland: Tricking around with language—Estelle Birdy talks with Niall McArdle – The author of Ravelling, Estelle Birdy, “talks with Niall McArdle about words which have built a world.”

CrimeReads: Nature and Human Nature in Frankenstein – Olivia Rutigliano with a “close-reading [of] a chilling classic.”

Full Stop: Katya Apekina – “I think of [the Russian soul] as acknowledging our suffering, our collective suffering. I think of it as a connection point with other people. Exquisite pain. I think there’s also a perverse enjoyment of suffering. It’s like, there’s something kinky about it,” Katya Apekina tells Diana Ruzova.

The Nation: The Imperial Gaze Turns on Britain’s Isles – “In Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall, an encounter between English documentarians and a remote Welsh island community provokes questions of sexual and national identity,” writes Emmet Fraizer.

The Point: Autobiography of Influence: Baker, Bernhard and me – “As occasionally happens, a particular novel, read at a particular time, has a profound and instantaneous effect.” For Jordan Castro it was Nicholson Baker’s 1998 novel The Mezzanine, which made him “laugh out loud, and propelled [him] forward.”

Galley Beggar: What Does a Book Cost? – Two or three weeks ago – and as part of a number-crunching brainstorm at Galley Beggar Towers – they got their calculators out and pulled together some rough figures on the current costs and potential profits of a single book. It makes interesting reading.

The Paris Review: Inside Alice Munro’s Notebooks – “The notebooks were where Munro tinkered and experimented, made detours and sudden revisions—where she surveyed the whole field of possibility,” says Benjamin Hedin.

Brisbane Times: Eleven years ago, she won NSW’s most prestigious book prize. She just did it again – Ali Cobby Eckermann always wanted to be a writer. Now she’s received the highest accolade in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for the second time with her verse novel She is the Earth.

China Books Review: What China’s Reading: Short Stories – “Chinese literature has a long-standing, often fantastical tradition of the short story form. Five modern collections, from both the mainland and Taiwan, show that legacy is still alive,” says Na Zhong.

Columbia Magazine: The Wild and Wonderful World of Kelly Link – “With five collections of genre-bending short stories and a recent debut novel titled The Book of Love, the 2018 MacArthur fellow has helped make fantastically strange books the norm.”

BBC Wales: Hay Festival suspends Baillie Gifford sponsorship – Emma Saunders reports: “Hay Festival has suspended its sponsorship deal with management investment company Baillie Gifford, following controversy over the latter’s links with Israel and fossil fuel firms.”

Fine Books & Collections: Ladybird Book Collector Helen Day on the Challenge of Collecting and the Rarest Book of All… – “Generations of readers in the UK have grown up reading Ladybird books, highly illustrated pocket-sized hardbacks at pocket-money prices which provided children with an introduction to reading, fiction, and all aspects of society,” says Alex Johnson. “Helen Day is the leading collector of these titles.”

The Georgia Review: On Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales by Sabrina Orah Mark – Anne P. Beatty reviews Happily, a memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life.

The Millions: Want to Write Better Fiction? Become a Translator – “Around the world, it’s common for fiction writers to moonlight as translators,” says K.E. Semmel. Here he talks with several authors who learned to write fiction through their work as translators.

Commonweal: The Other Side of Silence – Jared Marcel Pollen argues that Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s 1961 novel The Apple in the Dark “wrestles with the limits of language, seeking language to crack the glass between us and reality.”

NZZ: On the death of the writer Walter Kappacher: He started out as a motorcycle mechanic, but he was also enthusiastic about Shakespeare and Goethe – “He was an autodidact and therefore an outsider of literature,” says Paul Jandl, but the “recognition was all the greater when Walter Kappacher was awarded the Büchner Prize in 2009.”

VQR: Little Seed – Author of the experimental memoir Little Seed: A Field Guide to Grieving, Wei Tchou, writes: “At the time of my brother’s first psychotic break, I knew nothing about ferns but that I had one and it was dying. I watched its seashell leaves wilt and drain.”

Al Jazeera: Russian playwright and director go on trial over ‘justifying terrorism’ – “Director Yevgeniya Berkovich and writer Svetlana Petriychuk were arrested over their play entitled Finist, the Brave Falcon.”

The Hindu: A long fever dream | Review of ‘The Details’ by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson – “A bestseller in Sweden, The Details is about memories, relationships and the small details of an entire life,” says Nandini Bhatia.

Psychology Today: Why Do We Still Read Books? – According to Lawrence R. Samuel Ph.D.: “Humans appear to have a primal need for narrative and the written word.”

The Hedgehog Review: Beating Slow Horses – “Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb is a casualty of both the Cold War and its aftermath,” says Brad East in his piece on the spy novels of the British mystery and thriller writer.

NPR: What’s better for the climate: A paper book, or an e-reader? – Books take a lot of resources to make – but so do digital readers. What’s the more sustainable option? The answer is far from straightforward, finds Chloe Veltman. 

Deadline: Who Is Anonymous, The Author Of Hot Book ‘Next To Heaven?’ Deadline Solves The Mystery As TV Rights Deal Closes With Publishing Pact Coming – Mike Fleming Jr reports: “The novel Next to Heaven hit the market this week. Written by Anonymous, it’s a social satire that is being shopped by WME simultaneously for both a publishing deal and a TV deal.”

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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: Elizabeth O’Connor, Genevieve Graham, Jennifer Croft, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hofmann, Pat Schneider, Translation