An end of week recap

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
– George Orwell (born 25^th June 1903)

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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Literary Hub: Tracy Chevalier Has No Time for Writers Who Don’t Read – In which the author of The Glassmaker takes the Lit Hub questionnaire – answering a range of questions about writing, reading, alternative professions and more.

The Conversation: Why have Australia’s espionage authors been renditioned to a literary black site? – “Espionage fiction,” says David Rymer, “is [Australia’s] unloved genre, maligned as the unwanted love child of psychological thrillers and historical fiction.”

Dirt: Space Crone: The website as imagination – “Meghna Rao on Ursula K. Le Guin’s pioneering, inventive, rapidly fading early-internet blog.”

The Observer: War by Louis-Ferdinand Céline review – disturbing, compelling, incomplete – In John Banville’s review of War, he describes the long-lost Céline novel thus: “A shellshocked soldier in Flanders embarks on a dreamlike journey in this savage fragment of a tale written in the 1930s by the controversial author of Journey to the End of the Night.”

The Wall Street Journal: ‘Brilliant Exiles’ Review: A Fresh Start in Paris – “For Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein and other American women in the early 20th century, the French capital offered an atmosphere of freedom,” says Gioia Diliberto in her review of Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 – an account of the cultural autonomy and empowerment American women enjoyed as trailblazers of the avant-garde scene in early 20^th century Paris.

European Review of Books: Ice queens, sex machines – In her review of Claude Anet’s recently translated 1924 novel, Ariane, A Russian Girl, Fiona Bell poses the question: “Insofar as erotica can ever be about something, what is Russia-themed erotica about?”

Plough: The Case for Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales – Haley Stewart is firmly of the opinion that fairytales “are the best way for children to learn that the world contains evil, violence, and danger.”

The Deep Dive: Purrfect Translation: A Look at Cats on Recent Translated Literature – “There are so many recent books in translation from across the globe that feature cats on the cover. How purrfect,” says Kelly Jenson.

World Literature Today: Introduction: International Horror Fiction in Translation – Rachel Cordasco looks at “what kinds of horror fiction are being written around the world, what is getting translated, and what this tells us about the wider literary output at this point in the early twenty-first century.”

LARB: Eloquent Contentiousness: On “Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument” – Bryan Garner reviews Ward Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument, exposing flaws, foibles and fallacies employed by English language writers.

The Oxford Student: George Sand: the life of a French feminist icon – Sophie Harrison reviews George Sand True Genius, True Woman, a graphic biography by writer Séverine Vidal and illustrator Kim Consigny, which tells the life story of the prolific French author who “led an extraordinary life.”

TNR: The Unexpected Afterlife of Autobiography of a Face – “Lucy Grealy’s 1994 [soon to be republished] bestseller [Autobiography of a Face] has become part of a larger story of literary friendship and the boundaries between artists and their work,” finds Alice Robb.

The Japan News: Tokyo’s Literary Bars: A Place Famous Writers Grabbed Drinks, Gained Inspiration; Many Artists Still Gather to Discuss Their Crafts – Takafumi Masaki takes us to Lupin, a bar in the Ginza district of Tokyo, which first opened its doors 1928 and was frequented by writers and editors of the Showa era.

Faber: Celia Fremlin was a prolific English writer of prize-winning, spine-chilling mysteries from the 1950s to 1990s – Wondering where to start reading Celia Fremlin? Described by the Sunday Times as “Britain’s Patricia Highsmith and the grandmother of psycho-domestic noir”, Faber offers an excellent introduction to their “very own Queen of Suspense.”

The Hollywood Reporter: Harry Potter Series at HBO Finds Its Showrunner and Director – “Succession alums Francesca Gardiner and Mark Mylod will lead the creative team for the show,” reports Rick Porter.

Atlas Explorer: How to Tell a Great Campfire Story – Karuna Eberl asks “professional storytellers how to master this ancient form of entertainment.”

Reactor: What Padan Fain Owes to Gollum, and What Rand al’Thor Might Learn From Him – It is common knowledge that Robert Jordan took much inspiration from Tolkien’s Middle Earth while creating The Wheel of Time, but for Padan Fain, Rand and the concept of two minds inhabiting one body in particular, Sylas K Barrett looks to a specific source…Gollum.

RAAM: Discovering Ukrainian literature: what to read? – Uilleam Blacker “provides a short history of the suppression of Ukrainian literature and gives an extensive overview of contemporary works as well as classics worth reading.”

The National: How May Muzaffar’s memoir has peeled back Iraq’s cultural history for over five decades – “A year on from the release of her lifetime-in-the-making memoir, Story of Water and Fire, [Melissa Gronlund] looks back at the poet and artist’s life and art.”

The Asian Age: Book Review | Whimsical mindbenders that disturb and delight – “A collection of short stories in the realm of speculative fiction,” Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World by Gigi Ganguly “hits two major pain points in [Kushalrani Gulab’s] reading life.”

Quill & Quire: Judith Graves – In The ANNEthology, ten of Canada’s top young adult fiction writers do what they will with fictional national treasure Anne Shirley to mark the 150th anniversary of L.M. Montgomery’s birth.

Forbes: A Writing Room: The New Marketplace Of Writer Classes, Retreats, And Collectives – “A Writing Room is one of the fastest growing of the writer collectives, and its suite of services illustrate the how the field is evolving,” says Michael Bernick.

Asymptote: Serpentine – Kanya Kanchana is a poet and writer from India. In this lyric essay she “traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation.”

Fine Books & Collections: New Publication Examines the History of Book Curses – In Eleanor Baker’s soon to be published Book Curses, we discover “Medieval book curses warned potential thieves of dire consequences for their crimes.”

Radio Prague International: Jaroslav Rudiš: Everything is connected in Central Europe – “After decades as one of Czechia’s best-known authors, Jaroslav Rudiš is about to see the first ever publication of one of his novels in English.” That book is Winterberg’s Last Journey, a tale that follows its protagonists on a tragi-comic train journey through Central Europe.

Paste: The Top 10 Books That Feature a Love Triangle – Anna McKibbin shares a book list that celebrates the “romantic triangle.”

The Japan Times: ‘The Night of Baba Yaga’ weaves a yakuza thriller into a meditation on queerness – Translator Sam Bett gravitated to the Akira Otani novel for its refusal to adhere to established genre conventions.

The Dial: Writing About Erasure – Nick Holdstock examines “two recent Uyghur memoirs [that] grapple with how to portray the oppressed minority as more than victims.”

Jewish Review of Books: Second-Hand Jew: A Self-Portrait in Scenes – “I took my first novel to Israel with me,” writes German writer and columnist Maxim Biller, “and when a suitcase bomb exploded twenty meters away from me at the Munich airport, I shielded the manuscript with my body. My sister didn’t read it until just before I left. Then she said: ‘I thought Thomas Mann was dead. Anyway, if you ask me, he’s not a good example.’”

The Guardian: Passiontide by Monique Roffey review – a passionate protest novel – “Set on a Caribbean island, [Passiontide] highlights the scale of violence against women.”

Aeon: Paper trails – “Husserl’s well-tended archive has given him a rich afterlife, while Nietzsche’s was distorted by his axe-grinding sister,” writes Peter Salmon in this piece on why archives matter.

Ars Technica: Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win – “Internet Archive fans beg publishers to stop emptying the open library.”

The Monthly: Alan Attwood’s ‘Houdini Unbound: Mystery, Music and Flying Machines’ – “The author’s speculation of Harry Houdini’s life in Melbourne in the early 1900s is impressively packed with period detail and fascinating characters,” says Patrick Witton.

New Lines Magazine: Humor of Classical Arabic Literature – “Before a modern prudishness took hold, authors displayed an unfamiliar liberality and linguistic playfulness around profanity,” reveals Tunisian writer Ahmed Mahjoub.

CLMP: Announcing the Winners of the 2024 Firecracker Awards and Lord Nose Award – The author Elizabeth Rush, Words Without Borders and Holy Cow! Press founding editor and publisher Jim Perlman are among the winners of the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses’ 10th annual awards.

Compact Magazine: The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault – Following the 40^th anniversary of his death from AIDS-related complications, Sohrab Ahmari asks if we will ever truly understand the French historian of ideas who also served as an author, literary critic, political activist and teacher.

Quillette: The Roots of Progressive Radicalism: Nellie Bowles vs. Musa al-Gharbi – “In two new books, a journalist and an academic offer competing explanations for the extremist ideological tendencies within left-wing cultural, academic, activist, and political institutions.”

Wired: I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again – “Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, Lena Dunham, Roxane Gay: We’ve all agreed to be turned into AI reading companions by a mysterious company called Rebind. [Laura Kipnis] report[s] from the inside.”

The Verge: Winter of Content – “For a crucial decade in print media’s transition to the internet, HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones was a boon in traffic… for everyone. But what happened when every publication started chasing the same thing?” asks Kevin Nguyen.

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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: Books, George Orwell, Gigi Ganguly, Monique Roffey, Reading, Tracy Chevalier, Ward Farnsworth