An end of week recap

“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
– Jeanette Winterson

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 follows a selection of interesting snippets:   

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Literary Hub: The Annotated Nightstand: What Eugene Lim Is Reading Now, and Next – “Diana Arterian goes deep on Eugene Lim’s TBR pile, featuring Paul Yamazaki, Richard Brautigan, and more.” 

The Hedgehog Review: The Unlikely Verse of H.P. Lovecraft – Ed Simon discusses “conjuring horror from the darkest deep down things.”

Granta: Literature Without Literature – “Corporate publishing is the channel through which literature happens to flow at this moment in history” – Christian Lorentzen dissects the literary establishment. 

The Guardian: Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki review – an 18th-century hoax – Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s historical novel, Mary and The Rabbit Dream, is “the remarkable story of how, in 1726, the medical establishment believed that a poor woman had given birth to rabbits.”

Asymptote: An interview with Georgi Gospodinov – Sarah Gear talks to Bulgarian writer, poet, playwright and International Booker Prize winner Georgi Gospodinov about “the nature of memory, time capsules, the power and dangers of the past, the act of smuggling stories abroad, the intertextual nature of his novels, and of course the Minotaur.”

Publishing Perspectives: China Bestsellers: Summer Shuffles Book Sales – Another If History Were a Group of Cats’ book from Fei Zhi, which uses cat cartoons to depict Chinese history, has hit the non-fiction charts.

Pop Matters: Lindsey Drager’s ‘The Avian Hourglass’ is Wonderfully Weird – “While navigating many odd circumstances, Lindsey Drager’s The Avian Hourglass provides a continuous stream of consciousness; scientific, literary, and philosophical,” finds R.P. Finch.

The Point: Significant Obsessions – Alisha Dietzman on “Milan Kundera and the weight of influence.”

Virago News: An iconic new design for our Modern Classics – Virago has announced “an elegant and iconic new design for its Modern Classics list: a love letter to the original ‘green spines’, reimagined for today’s reader.”

World Literature Today: “The Divine Epilepsy We Call Inspiration”: A Conversation with Mircea Cărtărescu – Claudia Cavallin interviews Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu.

paulsemel.com: Exclusive Interview: “The West Passage” Author Jared Pechaček – Paul Semel interviews author of the new fantasy novel, The West Passage, “set in a crumbling palace ruled by eldritch Ladies, populated by weird creatures.”

English Pen: PEN Translates winners announced – Sixteen titles from 11 regions and 10 languages have won English PEN’s flagship translation prizes, the PEN Translates awards.

Commentary: Solzhenitsyn Warned Us – “The great Russian writer [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] understood the West and predicted its future with frightening precision,” says professor of Slavic literature Gary Saul Morson.

ABC Arts: Lady Macbeth given her dues in Val McDermid’s Queen Macbeth and Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (An Undoing) – Between a new stage play and a book, Lady M has finally got out of that damned spot.

ActuaLitté: Olympic Games: in Paris, bookstores put to the test – “The Olympic Games are fast approaching in the capital,” says Louella Boulland, which leaves Parisian booksellers faced with an “expected influx of tourists.” With “Metros closed, deliveries delayed, customers vanished… [It is, she says,] “the promise of a summer like no other.”

Full Stop: Nauetakuan, a Silence for a Noise – Natasha Kanapé Fontaine – In Nauetakuan, the debut novel from Innu poet and actress Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, “Indigenous characters’ laughter disrupts the serious, restrained norms of literary fiction.”

Africa is a Country: The puzzle as propaganda – “At the height of African decolonization, radical writers turned to interactive features like competitions and quizzes to engage their audiences,” finds Alex White.

The Berliner: Under the Neomoon: Oozing, odorous, florescent – Set in East Germany and first published in 1982, “Wolfgang Hilbig’s debut collection of prose writing, Under the Neomoon, has been translated into English by Isabel Fargo Cole.”

Verso: ‘I want to read about women who can’t make things.’ – “In Hannah Regel’s debut novel The Last Sane Woman, Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London.” This is an edited excerpt from Regel’s story of friendship and failure.

Express: Trainspotting author launches book set in Brighton – Irvine Welsh – ‘I’d probably have become more Right-wing if I’d stayed on building sites’ – “Three decades on, with his gloriously scabrous debut novel still being discovered by each new generation, Irvine Welsh reveals how success affected his politics, the importance of feeling uncomfortable in his writing… and why JK Rowling not Piers Morgan pops up as a character in his brilliant new book,” Resolution, says Matt Nixon.

Electric Literature: 7 Books About Jamaica by Jamaican Authors – Ishi Robinson, author of the recently published coming-of-age novel Sweetness in the Skin, “recommends stories about class, colonialism, religion, and history.”

Todays Author: The Bookseller – News – Ursula Doyle leaves Fleet after eight years; crowdfunds to sue past employer – “Ursula Doyle has left her role as publisher at Little, Brown imprint Fleet claiming she was ‘hounded out’” over her sex realist beliefs.

Aeon: Beyond authenticity – “In her final unfinished work, Hannah Arendt mounted an incisive critique of the idea that we are in search of our true selves,” says Samantha Rose Hill, the editor and translator of What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt.

Caught by the River: To Ease My Troubled Mind – “Ted Kessler’s To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish, newly published by White Rabbit Books, is a paean to the redemptive power of art and creativity, writes David Keenan.”

GlobalVoices: Nigeria-born writer and academic Funso Aiyejina, who had a lasting impact on Caribbean literature, has died – “His ‘meticulous attention to language embodied the essence of our literature,’” writes Janine Mendes-Franco.

3:AM Magazine: Zardoz at 50 – Oscar Mardell looks back at Zardoz, John Boorman’s 1974 post-apocalyptic science fiction film and its subsequent novelization – written in collaboration with Bill Stair.

China Daily: Hong Kong Book Fair spotlights Beijing’s literary treasures – Atlas Shao reports: “Mainland pavilion showcases capital’s rich culture, publishing achievements.”

LARB: Flying Right up to the Sun – Katya Apekina talks to Kashmiri writer Priyanka Mattoo about her memoir Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones.

Elle: The Reading Revolution: How The Literary Sphere Took Over – In the UK, “book clubs have reached cult status among celebrities and designers, covers have their own social followings and independent publishers are booming. Alex Holder explores how the literary world became 2024’s biggest trend.”

Ursula K. Le Guin: The 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction – This year’s Ursula K. Le Guin Prize Shortlist includes Anne de Marcken, Samantha Harvey and Vajra Chandrasekera among the 10 nominated authors.

Nation Cymru: Book review: Glass Houses by Francesca Reece – Set in North Wales, Glass Houses is a “story of star-crossed lovers, […] which contains within the twists and turns of its plot a beautifully-nuanced examination of the emotional fragility of its central characters,” writes Cath Barton.

ArtsHub: Book review: Big Time, Jordan Prosser – Ash Brom declares Big Time, Australian author Jordan Prosser’s “much-touted first novel” as “sometimes [flying] off its own tracks,” but it is nevertheless “a very impressive debut.”

The Japan Times: Three novelists named for Akutagawa and Naoki awards – Authors Sanzo K. Matsunaga and Aki Asahina won the Akutagawa Prize for literary writers, while the Naoki Prize for genre fiction went to Michi Ichiho.

Quill & Quire: Art of Camouflage by Sara Power – “In her debut short story collection, Art of Camouflage, [Canadian author] Sara Power explores what it means for women and girls to be at their lowest point, and how they can emerge from such depths.”

TLS: Battle grounds – Edward N. Luttwak reviews Richard Overy’s Why War? which explores “the reasons we started fighting, and why we won’t stop.”

The Spinoff: Christchurch’s secondhand bookshops, ranked and reviewed – “Simon Palenski journeys home to fossick through Ōtautahi’s secondhand bookshops.” offerings.

Far Out: Female sexuality, autonomy and vulnerability in the work of Anaïs Nin – Aimee Ferrier looks at the French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica, Anaïs Nin.

Hazlitt: Staying In – Abhrajyoti Chakraborty with a short piece on “writers in movies.”

The MIT Press Reader: ‘Mein Kampf’ as a Propaganda Playbook – “Mein Kampf is both a manifesto of ideological hatred and a strategic guide for manipulation. Its tactics remain disturbingly relevant,” says Albrecht Koschorke in this excerpt from On Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

The Paris Review: Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing – The history of doodling – the act of distracted drawing sometimes believed to reveal the unconscious thoughts of its creator – is examined here by Polly Dickson.

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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, Francesca Reece, Gina Apostol, Ishi Robinson, Jared Pechaček, Jeanette Winterson