Winding Up the Week #401

An end of week recap

“I am simply a ‘book drunkard’. Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.”
– L. M. Montgomery (born 30^th November 1874)

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 publications, 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.

* For Whom the Nobel Tolls *

Anyone up for a “perpetual challenge”? Then I suggest you head over to Read the Nobels, a blog “dedicated to reviews about the individual books penned by Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature.” Conceived in 2007 by Aloi from Guiltless Reading, this ongoing collaboration “aims to bring attention to Nobel Prize Laureates and their body of work.” To take part, please contribute by posting a piece (or several pieces) of writing to either your own blog or the official site (for the latter you must be signed up to Blogger) and carefully read the instructions on the Join page. You will spot many familiar names from the book blogging community on the current list of Nobel Readers.

* Almost Overlooked *

I have two noteworthy posts that were hitherto missing in action – that is to say, buried in some out-of-place file on my PC. (1) Way back in July, Valerie O’Riordan wrote about Rebecca Watson’s “stream of consciousness” novel I Will Crash for Bookmunch in: “Touching, convincing, funny and devastating” – I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson. Told in “a fragmented manner, with lots of white space and poetic enjambment,” the plot involves English graduate, Rosa, returning “from her usual post-work Wednesday pint when her father phones [to say her estranged] brother has been killed in a car accident.” Reeling, “traumatised, and dissociating,” she sardonically downplays “her confusion and grief,” while simultaneously “reliving […] the physical torment she underwent at [his] hands.” Her “story is “deeply sad, but the [various] characters [therein] aren’t simply functions of grief: they’re very credible, entertaining folk,” and the book is both “funny” and hopeful. In fact, Valerie feels sure Rosa is going to be just fine. (2) Early in October, Diana posted her thoughts on a range of Japanese short stories at Thoughts on Papyrus. Selected from several collections, including Longing and Other Stories by Jun’ichirō Tanizak and Yuichi Seirai’s Ground Zero, her list, which is itemised in “order of publication” (1917 to 2017), contains such tantalising descriptions as “[Kyōko] Nakajima’s ‘light-hearted’ prose vis-à-vis the story’s disturbing implications did not sit well with me, but it is still one intriguing short story” (‘Kirara’s Paper Plane’) and Yōko Ogawa’s tale “is one beautiful story of kindness, remembrance, and buried writing ambitions” (‘The Tale of the House of Physics’). Japanese Short Stories from Tanizaki, Shiga, Seirai, Ogawa, & Nakajima is a post well worth reading if you haven’t already done so.

* Lit Crit Blogflash *

I am going to share with you one of my favourite posts from around the blogosphere. There are so many talented writers posting high-quality book features and reviews, it was difficult to pick only this one – which was published in the last week or so:

A readers’ guide to the novels of Richard Flanagan – “His work is characterised by lush, detailed prose […] but he achieves this without compromising narrative pace,” says Reading Matters’ Kim Forrester of Australian writer Richard Flanagan, winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and more recently, the Baillie Gifford prize for his memoir, Question 7. Born in Longford, Tasmania (and descended from Irish convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land during the Great Famine in Ireland), Flanagan’s “beautiful and pristine” island state features often in his fiction, though it was “once the British Empire’s most brutal and desolate penal colony.” In this useful compilation of Kim’s “favourite” Australian author’s “wholly absorbing” novels, where she provides brief introductions to all eight of them, his stories are described as being “tempered by a deep humanity” and brimming “with hope and optimism,” which “rarely feel oppressive despite the heavy subject matter.” Kim provides an ideal starting point for those wishing to discover more about this “intelligent, deep-thinking writer whose work deserves to be celebrated” by readers the world over. She also includes a link to her review of Toxic, his non-fiction exposé of the “salmon fishing industry in Tasmania.”

* 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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Publishers Weekly: Nnedi Okorafor Did It Her Way – “Throughout her prolific career, the Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor has always done things on her own terms” – and her latest science fiction novel, Death of the Author, “feels fresh and new,” says Sona Charaipotra.

Literary Hub: In Search of the Moomins in Helsinki: The Enduring Magic of Tove Jannson’s Characters – “Christiana Spens returns to her father’s world (and the beloved Moomin books).”

A Narrative of Their Own: A Bookshop of One’s Own – Kate Jones recently attended an event in which Jane Cholmeley, author of A Bookshop of One’s Own – “a non-fiction book about the pioneering feminist bookshop she and two friends opened in 1984” – shared her memories about Silver Moon.

Literary Review: Awake, Arise, or Be Forever Fallen – Nicholas McDowell reviews Orlando Reade’s “lucid and sometimes moving” reappraisal of Milton’s great biblical poem: What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost.

ARC: Literary Awards Ought to Be a Popularity Contest – “Sci-fi awards are voted on by actual readers. Pulitzers and National Book Awards should follow suit,” suggests Naomi Kanakia.

Air Mail: Alive and Kicking – Christian Lorentzen reviews Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, an exploration of the 20th-century authors who revolutionized literature.

The Ottowa Review of Books: Zebra Meridian by Geoffrey W. Cole – Robert Runté loosely classifies Canadian speculative fiction author Geoffrey W. Cole’s latest collection, Zebra Meridian as cli-fi, “since most of these stories contain some element of environmental erosion” – although, the “narratives range from fantasy to slipstream to outright horror.”

The Berliner: Jennifer Neal’s ‘My Pisces Heart’ is a well-woven tapestry of Black life abroad – “In her memoir My Pisces Heart, Jennifer Neal blends personal narrative with well-researched historical fact,” says Mathilde Montpetit in her brief review.

3: AM Magazine: It Bleeds – Tess Little’s essay is excerpted from the new Writing the Murder: Essays on Crafting Crime Fiction collection, edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst.

Lunate: Sam Mills’ Shelf Life – Author of novels The Quiddity of Will Self and The Watermark, and the forthcoming Uneven, a cultural history of bisexuality, Sam Mills comments: “A good writer should be a voracious reader. I never did a single creative writing course – I learnt everything from reading and studying other authors.”

The Booker Prizes: Revisiting the 1974 Booker Prize: controversy, compromise and the first joint winners – “50 years ago, the Booker was shared by writers Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton. One of them went on to win the Nobel, while the other drifted into obscurity – yet both deserve our full attention,” says James Walton. 

BBC Culture: ‘It was such a good idea’: Wicked author Gregory Maguire on the real meaning of the story that captivated the world – “Before it was a Hollywood blockbuster it was a megahit musical, and before that it was a 1995 novel. Author Gregory Maguire tells the BBC about the inspiration behind Wicked.”

Publishers Weekly: Norway Launches Fosse Prize for Translators, Lecture Series – In honour of Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, Norway has launched a new translation award and lecture series. The inaugural prize, worth $45,000, was won by Norwegian German translator Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, and the first lecturer will be French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion.

Hyperallergic: Orhan Pamuk’s Secret Paintings of Time – “Poet Kaveh Akbar speaks with the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist about his book of journal entries and paintings [Memories of Distant Mountains Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022], authors who also make art, and the delight of writing fiction.

ABC Books: Australian authors back a summer reading list for federal MPs and senators about the Israel-Gaza war – “More than 90 Australian authors and literary supporters have sent all 227 Australian federal MPs and senators a set of five books relating to the Israel-Gaza conflict to read over summer,” reports Nicola Heath. 

The Bookseller: The new novel by Andrew Miller, set in a frozen 1960s Britain, explores a society on the brink of change – “Andrew Miller’s exquisite new novel The Land in Winter is set in a frozen 1960s Britain on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties,” says Alice O’Keeffe. Here he talks to her about his father’s life as a rural GP and the winter of 1962-63. 

The Chatner: The State of Book Marketing in 1943: “You Can’t Do Business With Hitler” and “The Pocket Book of Boners” – Daniel Lavery on Second World War–era book marketing.

Words Without Borders: Translation and Rehabilitation: An Introduction to Indigenous Amazigh Literary Output – “Brahim El Guabli offers an absorbing overview of the ‘construction of Amazigh indigeneity,’ and Amazigh literature’s blossoming in its midst.” 

Public Books: The Poetics of Democracy: A Conversation with Devika Rege – Quarterlife by Indian author Devika Rege “is deeply intelligent,” says Merve Emre – “more formally inventive than just about any debut novel I have read recently.”

The Irish Times: Food and fiction: How writers are serving up food as a central character in their narratives – “In an increasingly fragmented and digital world, food remains one of the last tangible connections we have – to our bodies, to each other and to our cultures,” writes Shamim de Brún.

BookTrib.: Eight Very Bad Nights by Tod Goldberg and Various Authors – Tod Goldberg’s Eight Very Bad Nights: A Collection of Hanukkah Noir is “a deliciously dark array of noir stories laced with humor and wry poignancy for the season written by eleven authors,” says Linda Hitchcock.

The Walrus: Memoirs Are Almost Impossible to Sell – “Publishers are turning away from personal stories. Have readers stopped caring about each other’s lives?” asks Tajja Isen.

BOMB: Midnight Revolt at Bertrand’s Year-Round Christmas Store – “A young dreamer […] helps trapped winter spirits find their way home” in this excerpt from US author Marguerite Sheffer’s short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees.

Carnegie Politika: Why Contemporary Russian Literature Is Thriving – “Russia’s new generation of writers are predominantly female, more regional than imperial in their outlook, and embrace diversity of form,” says Galina Yuzefovich.

Caught by the River: The Flitting – “Sue Brooks reviews Ben Masters’s memoir [The Flitting] — a consideration of masculinity, memory, identity, generational differences, loss and continuation, told through the pursuit of [Britain’s] elusive native butterflies.”

The Arts Fuse: Book Review: “The Absinthe Forger” — Betrayal Among Worshippers of the Green Fairy – “There was, after all, something Faustian in the prospect of an elixir that promised to reveal glimpses of the divine while simultaneously burning pits of fire in the seeker’s brain.” David Daniel on Evan Rail’s The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit.

The Conversation: Reading dark romance: The ambiguities of a fascinating genre – “A literary subgenre that emerged in the 2010s and gained widespread popularity in the 2020s, dark romance falls under the umbrella of unhealthy love stories.” What, wonders Magali Bigey, does the growing success of these provocative novels, often portraying romantic relationships tinged with violence, tell us eight years after #MeToo?

Arts Hub: What audio books are Australians listening to? – “Audio books are becoming more popular in Australia, but which titles and genres in particular and why go audio at all?” wonders Thuy On.

Culture Study: Abusers In Plain Sight and The Costs of Writing About Trauma – “Kate Hamilton is a pseudonym for a professor who escaped an abusive marriage — and wrote a stunning, stomach-punch of a memoir about it,” says Anne Helen Petersen, who speaks here to the author of Mad Wife.

Southwest Review: Life Is Made Up of Looking – Cory Oldweiler writes about Jennifer Croft’s translation of Argentine writer Federico Falco’s The Plains – a gay love story.

Good e-Reader: Canada makes it mark in Literature in Denmark with Margaret Atwood – Madeline Foster reports: “Famed Canadian author Margaret Atwood visited Odense, Denmark, […] to receive the 2024 Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.”

Independent: South African dissident writer and poet Breyten Breytenbach dies at 85 – “South African writer and poet Breyten Breytenbach, a staunch opponent of the former white-minority government’s apartheid policy of racial segregation, has died in Paris, his family announced on Sunday.”

Contemporary Japanese Literature: Nails and Eyes – “Kaori Fujino’s Nails and Eyes collects a novella and two short stories whose crystal-clear prose is darkened by the shadow of creeping psychological horror,” says Kathryn. 

The Art Newspaper: ‘He laughed like a madman’: when Édouard Manet decided to touch up one of Berthe Morisot’s paintings – “An extract from a new book by Sebastian Smee [Paris in Ruins] —about the Impressionists during the Siege of Paris and Paris Commune—brings to life the peculiar episode of artistic intervention,” finds José da Silva.

The Bookseller: Inaugural Climate Fiction Prize longlist announced – Nine novels, all authored by women, have made the longlist for the first ever Climate Fiction Prize, which is worth £10,000. 

The Hollywood Reporter: A Heartbreaking Rift of Staggering Intensity: Toph Eggers on His Estrangement from Brother Dave – “Introduced to millions as the kid in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Toph re-emerges to reclaim his tragic family history and explain why his famous sibling is no longer a part of his life,” says Gary Baum.

Portland Press Herald: When a married heterosexual woman in Maine falls in love with a female friend, her world shifts – “Mainer Penny Guisinger’s new memoir, Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions, is ‘searching, forthright and witty’ – and important,” finds Genanne Walsh.

Vittles: Michèle Roberts: The Art of Writing a Cookbook – “Lauren Elkin interviews the Booker-nominated novelist Michèle Roberts about writing her first cookbook,” French Cooking for One.

The Literary Edit: Kate Mosse’s Desert Island Books – “Featuring a story of obsessive love and revenge, and a heart-breaking book about what it means to be female…”

The Print: Book launch sparks debate on Western gaze in Tulsidas, Guru Nanak, Bulleh Shah translations – Ten Indian Classics from Murty Classical Library of India covers 2,000 years of South Asian writing. It has translations of Ramcharitmanas, Mir Taqi Mir’s works and Guru Nanak’s poems.

The Jerusalem Post: Rare first edition of Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ going up for auction – “The Prince, represents Machievelli’s efforts to guide political action based on history’s lessons and his personal experience as a Florence foreign secretary,” says Ellie Esquenazi.

Church Times: Book review: The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from pagans to Putin by Lucy Ash – “This sketch of Russian Orthodoxy [The Baton and the Cross by Lucy Ash] has it flaws, Xenia Dennen finds.”

CBC News: Why some book fans are leaving Amazon-owned Goodreads in wake of the U.S. election – According to Natalie Stechyson, “The StoryGraph saw a surge of new subscribers the week after the election, echoing Bluesky.”

BBC World: Patient sues Algerian author over claims he used her in novel – “This year’s winner of France’s biggest book prize is being sued in Algeria over claims he stole the story from a patient of his psychiatrist wife,” reports Hugh Schofield. In a separate report he also informs readers:  France alarmed by disappearance of writer in Algeria – “France’s Emmanuel Macron has joined calls for information about Franco-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, who has gone missing after he [returned] to Algiers.” 

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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.