Winding Up the Week #414

An end of week recap

“Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales…”
– Gerard Manley Hopkins

A very Happy Saint David’s Day (Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus) to all my Welsh or Wales-based followers, plus absolutely anyone who would like to join us in celebrating this culturally significant festival. Are you wearing a daffodil in your lapel today? Maybe you are planning a post for Reading Wales, which is now underway. At the very least, you should have a generous slice of bara brith with your mid morning cuppa (cwpan o de). It’s the done thing, you know!

Thank you for all your kind good wishes regarding my mum’s health (see WUTW #413). She remains in hospital making painfully slow progress. Walking no longer comes naturally to her – which is tedious for someone who once loved exploring mountains (the steeper and more rugged the better) and, in her younger years, hiked through parts of the world where women of her era rarely ventured. Nevertheless, she has retained her sense of humour and enjoys regaling us with the daily exploits of fellow patients and the long-suffering nursing staff. Still, we can’t help but wonder what ‘recovery’ means for a frail bodied 91-year-old. Ah well, as Euripides once wrote: “Time will explain all.”

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 publications, see what folk have on their nightstands 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.

* Almost Overlooked *

Two oldies but goodies – the second of which I selected for obvious reasons: (1) Last December, Kim Forrester of Reading Matters “found [herself] absorbed” in Alex Miller’s The Deal – the award-winning Australian writer’s “14th novel,” which “revisits themes familiar in his work” such as “male friendship, love, art and the writing life.” Protagonist, Andy, “a character who mirrors Miller in many ways,” moves to Australia in the hope of becoming a writer. His “literary ambitions remain unfulfilled” but he meets, marries and has a child with part-time antiquarian bookseller, Jo. He then encounters the charismatic teacher Lang Tzu, with whom he bonds “over their shared love of art,” and from there on the story “charts the evolution of their friendship”– a friendship that will in time prove perilous. In her review, ‘The Deal’ by Alex Miller, Kim tells us how much she loves “the beautiful, aching quality of the prose” and the way the author “fleshes out” Andy’s inner conflicts. In fact, she declares complete adoration for this novel. (2) Way back in October, Carola Huttmann reviewed Critical Lives: Dylan Thomas for Bookmunch – and today, I felt, was the ideal occasion to revive it. Introducing the life and work of the revered Welsh poet, biographers John Goodby and Chris Wigginton “follow Thomas’ development as a poet, examining his changes of style, themes and voice” as he progresses “from mimicking early Modernist Welsh poets to discovering his own poetic language.” While the book is “essentially a sprint through Dylan Thomas’ all-too-short life,” it is “accessible” and offers “a straightforward [if basic] introduction” to his “world and work.” You can read the full post at “A sprint” – Dylan Thomas by John Goodby and Chris Wigginton.

* 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 recent weeks:

SPECIAL FEATURE: Q & A with Màiri Kidd on her new novel The Specimens – Writers Review (hosted by Adele Geras, Linda Newbery and Celia Rees) spoke recently to Edinburgh author Màiri Kidd about “her first novel for adults”: The Specimens – a retelling of the infamous 19^th century ‘anatomy murders’, from the perspective of two very different women. Her motivation was “to give (fictional) voice to the voiceless,” in other words, the victims, who were “mostly women, generally poor and powerless, and [whose] bodies were destroyed after death.” Covering “a span of nine years” and “told from the viewpoints of several characters,” the novel relives the horrific Burke and Hare Murders (as the case became known), set in a time when corpses were much sought after by Edinburgh anatomists for dissection during lectures. You will discover in this interview Màiri’s inspirations and her intentions behind creating a fresh feminine take on a sinister period in Scottish history. You will also learn why it is such a “compelling read.”

* 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, here are a selection of interesting snippets: 

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Nation Cymru: Book Review: Many Roads – The twenty-five stories in Faeeza Jasdanwalla-Williams’s anthology, Many Roads: Women’s Personal Stories of Courage and Displacement in Wales (with a foreword by Charlotte Williams) “form a mosaic of Welsh immigrants’ experiences,” says Julie Primon. 

Publishers Weekly: Katherine Rundell Expands Her Impossible Creatures Series – Knopf Books “has announced the expansion of British author Katherine Rundell’s middle grade fantasy juggernaut, Impossible Creatures, from a trilogy to a five-book series.” Book two, The Poisoned King, is scheduled for global release on 11^th September.

Words On Words: Beautiful in its contradictions: on reading Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier – “The classic 1938 Gothic suspense that everybody loves.” Fiction writer Kolina Cicero shares her thoughts on reading Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.

UnHerd: Martin Amis stole my life: He distorted our romance for profit – Antonella Gambotto-Burke recalls her furtive meetings with Martin Amis “for long, indolent afternoons, [when they would drink vodka,] talk, play Scrabble, and read poetry to each other,” her feelings about his final novel, Inside Story and her reaction when “four decades of literary obsession [came] to an end.”

The Conversation: Joan Lindsay published Picnic at Hanging Rock at 71. Her writing life presents its own mysteries – Discretion, silences and underachievement marked Joan Lindsay’s life and work – despite writing an Australian classic. David Carter finds a new biography by Brenda Niall investigates her many mysteries. 

Full Stop: Egypt + 100: Stories from a Century after Tahrir – ed. Ahmed Naji – Yasmin Desouki explains EGYPT +100: Stories from a Century After Tahir as being “anchored by an elegantly simple premise: invite a cadre of influential Egyptian writers to imagine what the country will be like in the year 2111—one hundred years after the 2011 Revolution.”

A Narrative of Their Own: Anäis Nin in Paris – “Diaries, love triangles and city life.” Kate Jones, “an independent scholar of modernist women’s literature,” discusses the French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica, Anaïs Nin. 

Kazinform International News Agency: Kazakh classic literature author Dulat Issabekov passes away – “Kazakh author, winner of the State Prize of Kazakhstan Dulat Issabekov has died at the age of 83…”

Girls on the Page: An interview with C. Michelle Lindley – “On writing her prismatic debut, The Nude.”

Tangent: Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction by Andrea Barrett – Robert E Waters explains why he enjoyed Barrett’s non-fiction book-about-books, Dust and Light – you may also like to read an excerpt from it at Lit Hub: More than Cosplaying the Past: Andrea Barrett on Learning to Write Fresh Historical Fiction.

The American Scholar: Something New in the West – “Kurt Beals on translating All Quiet on the Western Front.” 

New York Journal of Books: Nesting: A Novel – “Nesting is one of those rare novels where the plot and writing are so powerful that a reader has to step away every now and then, just to breathe,” writes Fran Hawthorne of the award-winning Irish author, Roisín O’Donnell’s latest book.

Wordsworth: ‘Miss Austen’ – the BBC drama reviewed – “2025 marks the 250th anniversary year of Jane Austen’s birth. Sally Minogue looks at Miss Austen, BBC One’s first salvo in the celebrations.”

The Yale Review: Interviews: László Krasznahorkai – “The novelist of apocalypse insists on the reality of the present.” Hari Kunzru talks with Hungarian novelist and screenwriter, László Krasznahorkai.

Republic of Consciousness: RofC Prize for Small Presses, Short List 2025 – Described here as a “great short-list highlighting the extraordinary work of small presses in the UK and Ireland.” 

JSTOR Daily: The Sociopolitical Impact of A Passage to India – E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel, A Passage to India “captured not only the tensions between colonizers and colonized but also the fraught internal politics that shaped India’s fight for independence,” writes Noor Anand Chawla.

Nippon.com: “Mono no Aware”: The Essence of the Japanese Sensibility – Almoamen Abdalla writes: “When Japan’s culture began to develop its most lasting forms, a concept ironically underpinning the process was mono no aware—a wistful understanding that nothing lasts forever.” He asks, “is impermanence one of the few permanent things our world presents us with?”

WWAC: Essay: Alices: Lewis Carroll in Wonderland – “This year marks the 160th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” says Doris V. Sutherland in the first installment of a twelve-part series in which she takes “a tour of the many Wonderlands dreamt up by readers of Lewis Carroll.”

Crime Cymru: The Case for Crime: Dan Anthony – “According to W.H. Auden crime fiction is a guilty pleasure, an addictive form of storytelling which, whilst it can be enjoyable, doesn’t go anywhere. Of course, [he] was wrong; everybody always is when they try to generalise about fiction,” insists Welsh scriptwriter and short story writer, Dan Anthony.

Words Without Borders: Swallowing Words: Food and Desire in Karolina Ramqvist’s Bread and Milk – “‘Like all good books about food, Bread and Milk is sensuous and evocative,’ writes Nina Renata Aron.”

Los Angeles Times: Opinion: How can Israelis and Palestinians make peace? Reading each other’s poetry is a good start – Can “poetry ameliorate a war or hasten a peaceful resolution?” Owen Lewis firmly believes “that poetry can be a vehicle for change and peace amid war and other conflicts” – but “only if poets and readers can slip behind enemy lines.”

Miller’s Book Review: Forget Your Antilibrary, Try Bacon Instead – “Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term. Lifestyle bloggers made it a thing. But Francis Bacon had a better idea.” Joel J Miller discusses the antilibrary.

The Masters Review: A Conversation with Youssef Rakha, Author of The Dissenters – “Youssef Rakha’s novel, The Dissenters, […] is a stunning, bewildering, and hypnotic exploration of one woman’s life lived against a tumultuous era in Egyptian history.” In this interview, Justine Payton converses with [him] about the inspiration behind this “mesmerizing” historical novel.

China Books Review: Found in Translation – Michelle Kuo revues Taiwan Travelogue, “an award-winning [LGB/historical] novel set in Japanese-occupied Taiwan [exploring] the relationship between colonizer and subaltern, translator and translated — and how some distances can’t be closed.”

The Rumpus: “stones will know”: On Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood – In the memoir Trauma Plot, “Hood wonders how to write rape and its aftermath when its very nature is fragmentation, a form that disqualifies it as a story.” 

Positive News: A chronicle of courage: the programme keeping Afghan women’s words alive – “Since Kabul fell to the Taliban three and a half years ago, Untold Narratives has helped to protect the courageous words of women writers,” says Martin Wright. Their writings “are now imprints on a page, indelible and defiant” in My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group.

The British Columbia Review: Zero boundaries? Here’s help. – In Safekeeping: A Writer’s Guided Journal for Launching a Book with Love, Carellin Brooks finds that Canadian author Chelene Knight offers “advice to writers in [an] interactive writing journal stuffed with prompts, questions, and interesting personal stories.”

The Wall Street Journal: The Hottest Thing in Fashion Advertising? Books. – “The ubiquity of tech has made old-fashioned reading a way to signal luxury.”

The Irish Times: For girls of my generation, especially working class girls, lack of confidence was touted as a positive – “Assembling Ailish is not my story, but it is the story [of] a fictional contemporary who has lived in my times,” says Dubliner Sharon Guard.

Engelsberg Ideas: Notebooks Charles Lamb’s literary alter ego – “This year marks the 250th anniversary of Charles Lamb’s birth, providing an opportune time to take stock of his finest work — his strikingly original essays.”

TNR: Francis Fukuyama Was Right About Liberal Democracy – Much ridiculed when it was first published in 1992, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is still widely discussed and debated. “For all of its faults and weaknesses,” says Michael A. Cohen, “no serious competitor has emerged to capture people’s imagination or seriously challenge it.”

Daily Maverick: Exploring the ripple effect: Sarah Isaacs on family trauma and healing in Glass Tower – By way of introduction to her interview with South African author Sarah Isaacs, Joy Watson asks: “What does it mean to carry trauma across generations? How do we navigate identity in a world that demands definitions? In Glass Tower,” she says, these questions are tackled with “unflinching honesty.”

Reactor: The Great Intangibles of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Series – In this new essay, author Premee Mohamed examines the enduring brilliance of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast fantasy series.

Varsity: The forgotten women of the Beat Generation – “Millie Jeffery explores the work of the female Beat generation writers and asks why it is that they’ve been overlooked for so long.” 

The Guardian: ‘It allowed us to survive, to not go mad’: the CIA book smuggling operation that helped bring down communism – In this edited extract from The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War, Charlie English recalls: “From George Orwell to Hannah Arendt and John le Carré, thousands of blacklisted books flooded into Poland during the cold war, as publishers and printers risked their lives for literature.”

Elle: Shelf Life: Curtis Sittenfeld – “The Show Don’t Tell author takes [Riza Cruz’s] literary survey.”

Wardrobe Door: The Socialist Who Shaped Narnia – Aaron Earls explains how “writer and activist Edith Nesbit inspired C.S. Lewis’ fantasy world.”

TexasMonthly: Fernando A. Flores Didn’t Mean to Write a Novel About Elon Musk’s Texas – “The border native” talks to Michael Agresta about “dystopian literature, banned books, […] tech boomtowns, both real and imagined” and his new sci-fi novel, Brother Brontë.

The Wire: Banu Mushtaq’s ‘Heart Lamp’ Spotlights Lives of Muslim Women: International Booker Prize Judges – “The collection of short stories, [Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq] originally in Kannada and translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize.” 

AP: A New Jersey man is convicted of attempted murder in the stabbing of Salman Rushdie – Twenty-seven-year-old Hadi Matar has been convicted of attempted murder “for stabbing author Salman Rushdie multiple times on a New York lecture stage in 2022.”

Front Porch Republic: How to Raise Readers, in Thirty-Five Steps – “It is not too much to say that everything in our culture pushes against habits of deep reading,” says Brad East. “Is it possible, then, to raise readers in a digital age?” He believes it is.

The Express Tribune: ‘Toba Tek Singh’ remains a chilling reminder of the tragedy of 1947 – In the short story Toba Tek Singh, “Manto exposes the lingering scars of 1947 on collective memory and national identity.”

TNPS: Spotify Plans Expanded Audiobook Operations in Europe and Sweden – Mark Williams “would not be surprised [if] later this year [Spotify partnered] with the India-based AI narration and translation platforms to open up the India market for Spotify Premium audiobooks.”

Slate: The Ascendance of the Book Ladder – Chason Gordon with the “history of a totally necessary invention.”

BBC Culture: ‘I’m proud of its wonderful teens’: Amy Heckerling on how Clueless revolutionised the high-school comedy – “The Jane Austen-hits-LA comedy changed fashion, language and cinema. As it turns 30 and a new stage musical version opens, its writer and director discusses why it’s so personal to her.” 

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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.