An end of week recap

“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”
– Susan Sontag

Tomorrow I will be heading off to one of my favourite places, the Scilly Isles, for a much-needed break, which means you are unlikely to hear from me again until 22^nd June. However, I plan to create a lovely fat wind up upon my return because, no doubt by then, there will be a glut of literary links waiting to be shared.

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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Chicago Review of Books: “The Duality of Heaviness Within Joy:” A Conversation with Melissa Mogollon – Rachel León talks to Melissa Mogollon about her comedic coming-of-age novel, Oye.

Balkan Insight: Home in Alexandria of Greek Poet of ‘Ithaca’ Opens to Public – “The building where the acclaimed Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy lived in Alexandria, Egypt, has been lovingly restored and opened to the public,” finds Eleni Stamatoukou.

The New Criterion: The masterpiece of our time – “When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation appeared in 1973, its impact, the author recalled, was immediate…” Gary Saul Morson looks back at a Soviet classic.

Bookforum: Comyns Core: An English novelist’s art of getting by – Lizzy Harding reviews Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence – first ever biography of the English novelist of “domestic tragicomedies,” who died in 1992.

The Scotsman [MSN]: JK Rowling writes essay on ‘standing up for women’ for new book on campaign to protect rights – “The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht is a new book by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, which charts a five-year campaign to protect the ‘sex-based rights’ of women in Scotland.”

Reactor: Five Works of SF Inspired by Pseudoscience – From ancient astronauts to Fortean phenomena, here are five works of science fiction based in highly dubious pseudoscience.

The Bookseller: Are editors still tastemakers? – Sarah Moorhouse attempts to answer the question: “How much influence do—and should—editors’ personal tastes have on the books they commission?”

Quill & Quire: Fredericton’s Goose Lane Editions marks 70 years of publishing – “Goose Lane Editions – the oldest independent press in Canada – celebrates its 70th birthday this year,” says Cassandra Drudi.

Slate: Call Your Local Wizard – Laura Miller declares Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic – Tabitha Stanmore’s history of “service magicians” – an “entertaining history of everyday magic in the Middle Ages.”

Huffington Post: Should I Feel Guilty For Checking Out A Book Instead Of Buying It? – Brittany Wong “asked authors how they feel about readers borrowing their books from the library, rather than buying them.”

AnOther: Summer Reads: Ten New Books to Read by the Pool – “With new titles being released by Philippa Snow, Olga Tokarczuk, Constance Debré and more, here are ten books [from Holly Connolly] to add to your reading list over the summer months.”

New Scientist: Sci-fi author Martha Wells on what a machine intelligence might want – “The author of All Systems Red, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club, on why her novella takes on the thorny topic of what a machine intelligence might do, if it could make its own choices.”

Nippon: “Wahon”: The History of the Japanese Book – “The word wahon refers to a variety of traditional books produced in Japan until the late nineteenth century. This history examines how they changed over the centuries as technology advanced and the reading public expanded.”

3 Quarks Daily: Theories Of Art And Rachel Cusk – Derek Neal discusses Rachel Cusk’s “theory of art” in her latest novel, Parade.

Esquire: Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch? – “For first-time writers, it’s harder than ever to break out,” says Kate Dwyer. “That poses an existential crisis for publishing—and disturbing limits on your access to exciting new voices.”

Jacobin: How Writers Survived Fascism – Gustav Jönsson tells us: “The last years of the Weimar Republic are often thought to have witnessed an outpouring of politically engaged literature. But the history is more complicated. Writers more often avoided antagonizing a resurgent right to protect their lives and careers.”

Asymptote: To Tear Down Since They Won’t Let Us Build: Katerina Gogou and Her Impressive Invasion of the Poetic Realm – “Since they won’t let us create life, we’re going to ruin what’s existing, and the new will follow” – Christina Chatzitheodorou translates a 1980 interview between Dimitris Gkionis and Greek poet and actress Katerina Gogou.

Arts Hub: Book review: Ordinary Human Love, Melissa Goode – Ellie Fisher reviews Australian writer, Melissa Goode’s debut novel, which studies “intimate relationships and the nature of desire.”

Livres Hebdo: Laure Murat, winner of the 2024 Jean d’Ormesson Prize – “The writer Laure Murat has been awarded the 2024 Jean d’Ormesson Prize for Proust,” for a novel exploring the role of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in the life of the author.

Open Magazine: Equally Ever After – Sharanya Manivannan describes And They Lived… Ever After, a book featuring 13 Indian and Sri Lankan women, as “an anthology that changes the fairy tale into a space of inclusion.”

Africa is a Country: The limits of self-professed hypocrisy – “In Revolutionaries’ House, Nthikeng Mohlele explores the moral decay within South African politics through a disaffected politician tortured by his personal indiscretions,” finds Khanya Mtshali.

Kyiv Post: Europe’s Literature on the Edge Breaks Into the Mainstream – “Why has Central and Eastern European literature written in languages other than Russian had such difficulty gaining traction in Western European and American markets?” asks Beata Stasińska.

The Collector: Eastern Enchantment: The Impact of the Arabian Nights on the West – “The stories collected in the Arabian Nights have dazzled Western audiences since their first translations. They are entertaining, but also represent freedom and fantasy,” writes Katrina Jefferson.

ActuaLitté: In the heart of India, vampires from here and elsewhere clash – “Written by writer Ram V and artist Sumit Kumar, These Savage Shores plunges the reader into the southwest of India in the 1760s, during the Anglo-Mysorian Wars – a time when the British Crown and the East India Company exerted their influence and served as a backdrop for a deep exploration of the horrors of colonialism, metaphorically represented by vampires,” says Nicolas Gary.

The Baffler: Hag About Town – Love Junkie, originally published in 1992 and recently reissued by New Directions, offers a lively and unrestrained portrait of gay life.

Aeon: Quantum dialectics – According to the award-winning British science writer – author of Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement – at a time when “quantum mechanics posed a threat to the Marxist doctrine of materialism, communist physicists sought to reconcile the two.”

The Christian Science Monitor: To craft Nordic Noir novels, Scandinavian authors draw on Viking tales – “What is Nordic Noir?” asks Kristina Lindborg. “The genre is more than just tales of ice and fire. It recalls a rich literary tradition of Vikings, gods, and politics.”

JSTOR Daily: Finding Lucretia Howe Newman Coleman – “Once a powerful voice in the Black press, Coleman all but disappeared from the literary landscape of the American Midwest after her death in 1948,” finds Ashawnta Jackson.

Euronews: ‘Caja de las Letras’: Inside an old Madrid bank vault full of literary treasures – “In the depths of the Caryatid Building in Madrid,” says Jonny Walfisz, “is a vault containing some of the greatest treasures of Spanish literature.”

Pop Matters: Feminine Discontents in ‘Back from the Dead’ and ‘The Other One’ – “Catherine Turney, a top-drawer writer of classic films about strong women, adapts her supernatural novel The Other One for Back from the Dead,” says Michael Barrett.

Irish Examiner: A mysterious mountain scales new heights for breakout Irish author – Ghost Mountain, Rónán Hession’s debut novel, “has been an increasing rarity in the world of publishing [in writing] a book that built gradually from virtually zero hype to become a huge word-of-mouth hit.”

Scroll.in: Is storytelling essential for journalism? A new book of essays asks how important stories are – “An excerpt from Against Storytelling, edited by Amit Chaudhuri.”

Harper’s: The Scavenger of History – Wyatt Mason on American writer Eliot Weinberger and his recent montage of fifty-eight poems capturing the life and times of the great Tang Dynasty poet, The Life of Tu Fu.

Interview: “I Couldn’t Have Written This 20 Years Ago”: Claire Messud, In Conversation With Joshua Cohen – Last month, the author Claire Messud talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist about her new novel This Strange Eventful History, a sprawling, multi-generational epic – described here as a “layered, postcolonial saga” about a “French colonial family during the fallout of the Algerian Revolution.”

Guardian Australia: Licence to probe: the liberating beauty of fiction after journalism – “Cut free from the constraints of reporting, a story can take its own shape, can lead you down rabbit holes you’d never expected,” says crime fiction writer Michael Brissenden.

AP News: Caleb Carr, military historian and author of bestselling novel ‘The Alienist,’ dies at 68 – Hillel Italie reports: “Caleb Carr, the scarred and gifted son of founding Beat Lucien Carr who endured a traumatizing childhood and became a bestselling novelist, accomplished military historian and late-life memoirist of his devoted cat, Masha, has died at 68.”

Metropolis: Book Launch: Thomas Lockley’s Gentleman from Japan – Cassandra Lord announces publication of an amazing but true story of the sea: A Gentleman from Japan: The Untold Story of an Incredible Journey from Asia to Queen Elizabeth’s Court.

Air Mail: Editor’s Picks – “This week, don’t miss a beloved historian’s memoir; a look at early American life; and an author’s ode to his cat.”

Garden & Gun: Forrest Gump Turns Thirty: An Oral History of the Unexpected Blockbuster – Monte Burke on how Forrest Gump made its way from idea to book to Oscar-winning film.

Irish Independent: A marital crisis with a difference: Out goes the husband, in moves his AI sex doll – Ksenia Samotiy finds Sarah Crossan’s Hey, Zoey, “deep, relatable, depressing, and darkly funny.”

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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: Melissa Mogollon, Nthikeng Mohlele, Olga Tokarczuk, Rónán Hession, Susan Sontag