An end of week recap

“Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.”
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh (born 22^nd June 1906)

You were promised a link-stuffed wind up when I returned from my chill in the Scillies – so, here it is in all its bibliophilic abundance!

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.

Make Merry with Austen This Summer

There’s a party going on at Sarah Emsley’s place, and an invitation has been extended to every one of you. Each week, between 20^th June and “the end of the season” (generally on a Tuesday and Friday), a series of guest bloggers will post a piece about Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), in anticipation of her forthcoming 250^th anniversary in 2025. Sarah says she is looking forward to recalling the adventures of the Dashwood sisters as she discusses and delves into the book with you. To join in the fun, grab a bottle or two of spruce beer and head over to Your invitation to A Summer Party for Sense and Sensibility. You know it makes sense!

Witchery Awaits You This Fall

We gaze into the future with Lizzie Ross as she forewarns us of Witch Week, an event materializing on “30 October through 05 November — from Halloween to Guy Fawkes Day (aka Bonfire Night).” She and Chris Lovegrove, the horrorsome hosts (sorry chaps!), are “preparing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Joan Aiken’s birth, lining up guest bloggers and a surprise or two” – and, we are told, this year’s “read-along book” will be The Serial Garden, a collection of short stories centred “around the Armitage family,” which “Aiken wrote over the course of her lifetime.” Should you wish to indulge in a spell of literary witchery, I suggest you slink over Witch Week 2024 for some “spooky inspiration.”

* 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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Sunday Times SA: The 2024 Sunday Times Literary Awards longlist – Jennifer Platt shares “the longlists for [South Africa’s] most prestigious annual literary awards for non-fiction and the fiction award in partnership with Exclusive Books. This year marks the 34^th anniversary of the non-fiction and 23^rd years of the fiction prize.” 

The Yale Review: The material constraints of writing criticism today – Author Christine Smallwood ponders the financial constraints of freelance book critics.

London Review of Books: Isn’t that … female? – “When I die I am going to ask her some questions about the lesbian thing,” declares Patricia Lockwood in her piece on Medusa’s Ankles, the late A. S. Byatt’s 2021 short story collection.

Nippon.com: Jinbōchō Through the Years: The Story of Tokyo’s Secondhand Book District – “Tokyo’s Jinbōchō has been a center for used bookstores since the late nineteenth century. It has continued to thrive by adapting to the times, making the most of dealers’ specialist knowledge to offer a unique service in the online era.”

The Moscow Times: 2024 Pushkin House Book Prize Awarded to Elena Kostyuchenko for ‘I Love Russia: Reporting From a Lost Country’ – Michele A. Berdy reports that I Love Russia: Reporting From a Lost Country, written by Elena Kostyuchenko and translated from Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse and Bela Shayevich, has won the 2024 Pushkin House Book Prize.

Aeon: All aquiver – Kate Hext, author of Wilde in the Dream Factory writes: “The Decadent movement taught that you should live your life with the greatest intensity – a dangerous and thrilling challenge.”

Literary Review: Kiss of Death – Rosa Lyster reviews Question 7, a non-fiction memoir by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan, which poses the question: “Who loves longer, a man or a woman?”

Slate: Stories Deserve to Be Told – “Matt Tullis spent his career asking writers how they do what they do. A posthumous book [Stories Can Save Us] assembles what he learned,” says Justin Heckert.

Scroll.in: Sunday book pick: A Jewish refugee in Bombay in Anita Desai’s novel ‘Baumgartner’s Bombay’ – “The first edition of [Anita Desai’s Holocaust-era historical novel, Baumgartner’s Bombay] was published in 1988,” recalls Sayari Debnath.

The Critic: Iain Banks: a double life – “His disturbing debut, The Wasp Factory, is being reissued this year,” reveals John Self.

The Paris Review: “Intelligent, Attractive, Powerful Lesbians Conquering the World” – “The following correspondence between Joanna Russ and Marilyn Hacker is drawn from a new edition of Russ’s On Strike Against God (1980), edited by Alec Pollak, to be published by Feminist Press in July.”

Words Without Borders: Literature in Translation from Taiwan: What to Read Next – “Jenna Tang, translator of Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise by Lin Yi-Han, recommends 8 books and short stories in translation from Taiwan to read now.”

TNR: In the Ruins of Edward Gibbon’s Masterpiece – “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is an enduring work—just not of history,” declares Mike Duncan.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: The War Over Creative Nonfiction – “The field won its battle with literature,” says Eric Bennett. So, “now what?”

UnHerd: Don’t be terrified of Pale Fire – Nabokov’s masterpiece has a complex but huge heart – Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire, “is one of the greatest books [Mary Gaitskill] has ever read.” Indeed, so great is it, she declares, “it is terrifying to write about.”

Nautilus: How Schrödinger’s Cat Got Famous – Fifty years ago, science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin popularized physics’ most enigmatic feline.

Radio Free Europe: How The Belarus Regime Is Destroying The Books It Doesn’t Like – A report on the continuing crackdown on “undesirable books” in Belarus reveals that publications “have been disappearing from bookstores and libraries across [the country] amid a clampdown on what the authorities deem to be ‘extremist’ literature.”

JSTOR Daily: The Joy of Burglary – “In the early 1900s, a fictional ‘gentleman burglar’ named Raffles fascinated British readers, reflecting popular ideas about crime, class, and justice,” says Livia Gershon.

Harvard Magazine: The DNA of World Literature – Nina Pasquini announces the fifth edition of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, “which reimagines the global literary tradition.”

Mining the Dalkey Archive: Who Doesn’t Love a Checklist? Every Dalkey Archive Title Ever – Chad W. Post has uploaded and shelved every Dalkey book in his possession, “in hopes of creating a complete ‘Dalkey Archive’ set [he] can both brag about and use for actual research.” Here he provides an update on his progress.

BBC Scotland: Caribbean writer takes Walter Scott fiction prize – “Caribbean writer Kevin Jared Hosein has won the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction” with his novel Hungry Ghosts – which, says Giancarlo Rinaldi, “tells the story of marginalised Hindu communities in Trinidad during the 1940s.”

The New Inquiry: The Sentimentality of Evil – Martin Amis’s recently republished novel (now an award-winning film), The Zone of Interest, “can be understood in the context of recent scholarship on family abolition, white supremacy, and domestic labor,” suggests Sari Edelstein.

49^th Shelf: The Chat with Nadine Sander-Green – In Nadine Sander-Green’s debut novel, Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit, an isolated woman living in the Yukon Territory comes of age via a toxic relationship with an older man. Here the author talks to Trevor Corkum about the inspiration behind the story.

LARB: The Nihilism of the Archive: On Iman Mersal’s “Traces of Enayat” – Edmée Lepercq reviews Traces of Enayat, a memoir of sorts by Egyptian writer Iman Mersal.

Xinhua: Feature: Hong Kong’s first literary museum sows seed of hope and exchange – Museum of Hong Kong Literature is described by its curator as “a green bud in the spring, breathing new vitality and hope to Hong Kong’s literature.”

The New Atlantis: Turn on, Tune in, Write Code – In Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, Benjamin Breen explores the ways in which “psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture.”

AP: Ursula K. Le Guin’s home will become a writers residency – The much-missed American fantasy and speculative fiction author’s three-story house is to become the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency.

Arts Hub: Book review: Hurdy Gurdy, Jenny Ackland – In Jenny Ackland’s latest novel, Ashleigh Meikle finds “a dystopian Australia [of the future where] women’s bodies [are] policed and subjugated.”

The Kyiv Independent: 10 authors shaping contemporary Ukrainian literature – Kate Tsurkan introduces ten “interesting writers in Ukraine today, some of whose works are already available in English translation.”

Daily Mirror: Winning the GRATIAEN PRIZE Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe lays bare her thoughts on winning Sri Lanka’s most prestigious Literary Award – Tina Edward explains that in 2009: “The Guardian newspaper [invited authors to submit] the opening paragraph of a fictional novel called The Letting Go” for a competition, which was won by Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe. The extract subsequently morphed into Father Cabraal’s Recipe for Love Cake – current winner of “the prestigious Gratiaen Prize.”

My Modern Met: Ancient Library in Tibet Creating Digital Archive of Its 84,000 Scriptures – Founded in 1073, Tibet’s Sakya Monastery is currently in the process of digitizing in order to preserve its ancient documents.

TNR: The American Novel Has a Major Problem With Fat People – “Why does fiction do such a bad job of portraying fat characters?” asks Emma Copley Eisenberg.

The Walrus: I Tried to Finish a Dead Man’s Novel – “It is both a gift and a curse to be handed a briefcase containing a life’s work,” admits Richard Kelly Kemick.

The Daily Star: Celebrating the best of Bengali short fiction – Shahriar Shaams tells us that Bengali literature has had a rich history of prose, beginning more or less in the early 19th century under the colonial Raj, in her review of The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories.

UNN: Ukraine introduces book certificates and subsidies for bookstores: Zelensky signs law – “President Zelensky signed a bill that provides subsidies for bookstores, introduces book certificates for 18-year-olds and young parents, and promotes Ukrainian books,” reports Julia Shramko.

BBC Culture: Andrew O’Hagan to Scarlett Thomas: 12 of the best books of 2024 so far – “From a Dickensian state-of-the-nation novel to a “wildly original summer thriller”, these are BBC Culture’s picks of the best fiction of the year so far.” 

Caught by the River: Adrift on a Painted Sea – Graphic novelist Tim Bird’s new book, Adrift on a Painted Sea is about his “mum’s paintings of the sea” and his family’s “connection […] to the North Yorkshire coast.”

EBRD: The End by Attila Bartis, translated by Judith Sollosy, wins EBRD Literature Prize 2024 – Kate Powell reports: “The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is delighted to announce that The End, a novel by Attila Bartis, translated from Hungarian into English by Judith Sollosy and published by Archipelago Books, has won the EBRD Literature Prize 2024.”

Buenos Aires Herald: Argentine writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky dies age 85 – “The author of Urban Voodoo and director of dozens of prizewinning fiction and essay films passed away on June 2 in Buenos Aires.”

Oregon Artswatch: Prose Before Bros: A book club where women of color share reading and community – Amy Wang discovers that “besides monthly club meetings, group members participate in reading-themed happy hours, book swaps, a book festival, and retreats.”

The Markaz Review: Is Amin Maalouf’s Latest Novel, On the Isle of Antioch, a Parody? – Farah Silvana Kanaan “questions whether, in this novel [On the Isle of Antioch], the Franco-Lebanese master is at the height of his powers, or is having us on…”

Quill & Quire: Cicada Summer by Erica McKeen – Jean Marc Ah-Sen reviews Canadian fiction writer, teacher and librarian Erica McKeen’s covid-era, LGB novel Cicada Summer – a book she describes as “a dramatic odyssey into the human condition.”

DW: Who was Franz Kafka and why is he more popular than ever? – “Franz Kafka is one of the best-known German-language authors in the world, even though he has been dead for 100 years. So why is he still so popular today?” asks Kristina Reymann-Schneider.

The Sydney Morning Herald: This republished classic captures the intensity of young love – First published in 1980, Beverley Farmer’s debut novel, Alone, reminds the reader how hard it was to be an LGB person in Australia in the 1950s.

Faber: Fiction on Tap: Five Famous Pubs in Literature – “Discover some of literature’s most memorable public houses, to celebrate Faber’s new edition of the 1940s classic Back to the Local by Maurice Gorham, with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone.”

Chytomo: Journalist Mustafa Ametov on Crimean Tatar Literature’s Vital Role in Language Preservation – Mustafa Ametov – journalist and “laureate of the Qirim Inciri [Crimean fig] literary prize, designed to stimulate the development of literature about Crimea,” speaks about Crimean Tatar literature and language, and the impact of Russian occupation on the region’s culture.

Lookout Santa Cruz: ‘Blue Mind’ environmentalist and ‘Slow Coast’ advocate Wallace J. Nichols dies at 56 – “Marine biologist, ecologist, writer and lecturer Wallace J. Nichols, author of Blue Mind, the 2014 bestseller about the therapeutic benefits of being near large bodies of water” has died at the age of 56, reports Wallace Baine.

AP: Japan’s ‘beat poet’ Kazuko Shiraishi, pioneer of modern performance poetry, dies at 93 – “Kazuko Shiraishi, a leading name in modern Japanese “beat” poetry, known for her dramatic readings, at times with jazz music, has died” at the age of 93.

IFLScience: Subvocalization: Why Do We Have A Voice In Our Heads When We Read? – Subvocalization anybody? Dr Russell Moul explains why you “probably have a voice in your head when you read” and why it is “helpful.”

BBC India: Will India’s Booker Prize-winning author face jail for 14-year-old remark? – Soutik Biswas asks: “Will one of India’s most celebrated writers really face prosecution for things she said more than a decade ago?”

EL PAÍS: Elizabeth Horan, literary scholar: ‘Gabriela Mistral is as important for Latin America as Bolívar, Martí, or Mariátegui’ – “The American academic has published the first of three books dedicated to the Chilean poet, the only female Nobel Prize winner in the region and the first of the great writers to publicly identify as ‘mestiza’” says Erika Rosete.

The Millions: Glynnis MacNicol on Marriage, Pleasure, and Orgasmic Narratives – Set in Paris, Glynnis MacNicol’s second memoir, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, sees the author give herself over to “the enjoyment and excesses of sex, food, art, and friendship.” Here she speaks to Marisa Wright about “women’s pleasure, the importance of community, and the book’s unconventional narrative structure.”

Literary Hub: Kill the Pet, Kill the Book’s Rating: The Perils of Writing Dogs in Fiction – “Clare Pooley on reviewers’ tendency to punish novels with dead canines.”

Vogue Business: Book girl summer: Why brands are leaning into the literary world – “Miu Miu’s ‘Summer Reads’ pop-ups are the latest in a line of fashion-literature tie-ups, as houses embrace the written word as a means for cultivating an intellectual brand identity,” says Madeleine Schulz.

BBC News: Historic writer’s desk could be ‘knackered’ old fake – “The desk of the writer Dr Samuel Johnson is to be returned to his former London home for the first time in more than 260 years,” reports Sean Coughlan. “Except,” there is a “twist” to the tale.

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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: #WitchWeek2024, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Arunava Sinha, Bengali Fiction, Bonnie Huie, Edward Ardizzone, Fictional Pubs, Jane Austen, Joan Aiken, Maurice Gorham, Nadine Sander-Green, Qui Miaojin, Ron Irwin, Taiwanese Literature, Witch Week 2024