An end of week recap
“Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.”
– Maya Angelou
Today is International Women’s Day, a global celebration of the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. It is also an opportunity to raise awareness about issues such as equality and respect between the sexes, and to call for positive changes in attitudes towards women and girls. Accordingly, this week I present a special women’s wind up. Not that there won’t still be a diverse selection of links to explore in this post – of course there will – but you may well perceive a distinct tilt towards literary women and women in literature.
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.
* A Sunday Service for Reading Wales *
By the by, I am finding it impossible to trace when and where this poem was first published. I’m sure it must appear in at least one of her anthologies but so far all online searches have proved fruitless. I forget where I originally discovered the stanza and thence copied it into a notebook (I don’t possess a printer, so this is far from unusual) – perhaps it was in a journal of some sort but I failed to take note. Seldom am I defeated in such matters, but this has me stumped. I would be extremely grateful if anyone can help me out here. (Thanks to Josie Holford, I am now able to provide this information in my post.)
* Wyrdly Enough, Wisdom Begins in Wonder *
* Lit Crit Blogflash *
I am going to share with you a couple 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 these two – which were published in recent weeks:
* 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 is a selection of interesting snippets:
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Jeanette Winterson: Mind Over Matter: Books Because… – Winterson reflects on algorithms during a visit to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. We should, she says: “Just breathe. Just be. Just browse.”
Ancillary Review of Books: Hobbits, Sandworms, and Environmental Awe: Review of Willow Wilson DiPasquale’s Finding the Numinous – Matthew James Seidel examines the thinking behind Willow Wilson DiPasquale’s Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at Dune and The Lord of the Rings, in which the author argues for the importance of environments in these two classic works of fantasy.
Literary Review: Do Not Disturb – According to Anglo-Welsh novelist, essayist and travel writer Joanna Kavenna: “Interruptions break the spell,” but as with so “many aspects of life, interruptions can be good or bad.” However, she says, “in one of those small ironies the universe seems to enjoy, [her] book about interruptions keeps getting interrupted.”
Guardian Australia: The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat’ – “Over 50 years, she has become one of the most revered writers in Australia,” says Sophie Elmhirst. “Is she finally going to get worldwide recognition?”
Smithsonian Magazine: Why Oscar Wilde’s Play About a Biblical Temptress Was Banned From the British Stage for Decades – “Salome, a one-act tragedy by the Irish playwright, terrified the Victorian public with its provocative depiction of a teenage girl whose lust for a man quickly morphs into bloodlust.”
Unknown Literary Canon: The Bravery of Russia’s Sappho – “Known as Russia’s Sappho because she openly included her seven [women] lovers in her poetry,” Sophia Parnok wrote in a unique style, distinct from her contemporaries. Here, Jo ⚢ shares her thoughts on Diana Lewis Burgin’s 1994 biography, Sophia Parnok: The Life and Work of Russia’s Sappho.
The National Book Review: Q&A: Navigating a Life Through Books: An Interview with Donna Seaman – Rachel Swearingen talks to Donna Seaman about her new memoir River of Books: A Life in Reading, in which she tells her life story through the books she has read.
26: Author Q&A: Anastasia Rubis – “Elena Bowes caught up with Anastasia Rubis, who goes by Stacy, the author of Oriana, a wonderful moving novel about the trailblazing Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci.”
OUP Blog: Five inspiring biographies for Women’s History Month – In celebration of Women’s History Month, Amy Guest shares a reading list of “inspiring women throughout history that played path-breaking roles in shaping philosophy and literature.”
Arts Alive in San Antonio: “The Moral Circle” by Jeff Sebo – In The Moral Circle, Jeff Sebo’s “short, provocative new book,” he asks us “whether it is appropriate to enlarge what he calls ‘the moral circle’ – ‘the set of beings who matter for their own sakes.’” In other words, creatures such as the lobster (“routinely boiled alive”). Do they merit “moral consideration”? wonders reviewer, Steven G. Kellman.
The Literary Edit: Ella Ward’s Desert Island Books – Lucy Pearson features Australian author Ella Ward in her latest Desert Island Books column. The notionally marooned booklover chooses, among her eight, a “book she enjoyed more than any other, and a novel that’s sumptuous, sweaty, and sprinkled with magical realism…”
New English Review: Organizing Solitude: Jean Giono by Himself – Kevin Anthony Brown shares an essay-review of French fiction writer Jean Giono’s six recently reissued titles from Archipelago Books and New York Review Books Classics (including his 1930’s Occupation Journal).
RNZ: New Zealand author Saraid de Silva named on list of Women’s Prize for fiction longlist – Set in Sri Lanka, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and London, Saraid de Silva’s Amma – which “stands among the line-up of writers longlisted for the 30th Women’s Prize for Fiction” – is a novel about the history and future of the Sri Lankan diaspora.
Literary Hub: Invasions, Empires, Political Bromances: Five Nonfiction Books That Explain Modern Russia – “Charles Hecker recommends Joshua Yaffa [Between Two Fires], Svetlana Alexievich [Secondhand Time], David Remnick [Lenin’s Tomb]” and others.
Cleveland Review of Books: Doubled Visions: On Heather Christle’s “In the Rhododendrons” – American poet and author, Heather Christle’s hybrid memoir, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf is “a moving and fascinating exploration both of her own life and of the process of reading and re-learning the past […] full of stereoscopic visions,” writes Rachel Trousdale.
FictionMatters: Reading in Public No. 65: Why I can’t accept the phrase “I won’t accept criticism” – In which [educator Sara Hildreth, not unreasonably in my opinion, takes] another internet phrase much too literally.”
Toronto.com: ‘The Immortal Woman’ author Su Chang on her reading habits and what makes ‘Jane Eyre’ so sexy – Jean Marc Ah-Sen discovers what Su Chang, author of generational novel about the fractured lives of Chinese immigrants, The Immortal Woman, likes (and does not like) to read.
BBC News: Can book fans turn the page on decline in reading? – “From venturing to Middle Earth to solving crime with Poirot, reading can be a form of escapism and relaxation,” says Caroline Robinson.
The Week: Joan Didion and posthumous publishing: a new problem? – “Personal and intimate diaries from the author – which she kept out of public view – will be released in April,” says Elizabeth Carr-Ellis. Should posthumous publishing always be acceptable, she wonders?
Miller’s Book Review: Just Like Yourself, Perhaps – “Hopefully not!” says Joel J Miller by way of opening his review of Cormac McCarthy’s classic Southern Gothic novel, Child of God.
Interesting Literature: The Surprising Origins of ‘Thoughtcrime’ – “Where did the word thoughtcrime originate?” asks Dr Oliver Tearle. Most people would probably say, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – but would they be correct?
Nippon: Japanese Writer Ayako Sono Dies at 93 – “Renowned Japanese writer Ayako Sono, known for many best-selling novels and essays, died of natural causes at a Tokyo hospital Friday. She was 93.”
LARB: These Words Contain My Pulse – “Cory Oldweiler reviews Argentine author Agustina Bazterrica’s terrifying dystopian novel The Unworthy, translated by Sarah Moses.”
Chicago Review of Books: Sifting Truth From Fiction: An Interview with Nicole Graev Lipson – Rachel León talks to the Pushcart Prize-winning author of forthcoming memoir-in-essays, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters – a book that explodes many accepted ideas of motherhood, using great literature as a guide.
The Comics Journal: My family’s curious correspondence with Edward Gorey – Every “letter from Mr. G was instructive because he was never, ever lazy with language. Always reaching for the mot juste, he cherished terms like ‘habituated’, ‘diverting’ and ‘gelatinous,’” says Cynthia Rose of her correspondence with the American illustrator.
NB: A Conversation with Caoilinn Hughes – Madeleine Knowles speaks to the author of The Alternatives, the story of four Irish sister orphaned in childhood. If you wish, you can read my review of her 2018 debut, Orchid & the Wasp, right here.
The New York Times: 3 New Horror Books That Put a Fresh Spin on Old Tropes – Columnist Gabino Iglesias “reviews three new horror books” published last month.
Los Angeles Times: Forget thought crime. People are incarcerated for dream crime in this near-future novel – Anita Felicelli explores The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami’s “entirely plausible” and “richly conceived” dystopian novel “about pre-crime”.
InDaily: To read Barbara Hanrahan is to be made innocent, if also obscene – Author “Laura Elizabeth Woollett reflects on the legacy of Barbara Hanrahan in an essay published as the foreword to a new edition of Hanrahan’s 1974 [Australian feminist classic] novel Sea Green.”
The New Yorker: The Classic Mystery That Prefigured the Los Angeles Wildfires – Anthony Lane finds Ross Macdonald’s 1971 mystery novel, The Underground Man “is exquisitely attuned to the Californian landscape—how it rises, falls, smells, and, most indelible of all, how it burns.”
BBC Culture: ‘It tells us something about how elites seek to retain their power’: How Lampedusa’s The Leopard skewered the super-rich – “Lampedusa’s mid-20th-Century novel The Leopard became a bestseller, then a revered film – and is now a lavish Netflix series. Its withering takedown of society’s flaws and hypocrisies still hits home today,” says Miriam Balanescu.
JSTOR Daily: Twin Curtains: Oz and the USSR – “Aleksandr Volkov’s The Wizard of the Emerald City reimagined L. Frank Baum’s classic, imbuing the story with a love of labor for readers in the Eastern bloc.”
Outlook: Celebrating The Women Who Shaped India’s Folk Traditions – “A folk scholar traces women’s legacy in India’s folk theatre through the research of her father, Dr. Prakash Khandge.”
Esquire:‘Twist’ Review: Colum McCann’s New Novel is a Deep, Deep-Sea Mystery – “In the Irish writer’s slippery new book, [Twist] broken cables and broken relationships litter the ocean floor.”
Necessary Fiction: Living In Your Light – “A slim novel in three parts,” Living in Your Light “is an absorbing story told in melancholy retrospect” of Malika, “an indomitable Moroccan woman modelled on the author’s mother,” writes Diane Josefowicz.
NPR: After a tragic accident, a widow faces a lifetime of what-ifs – Live Fast won France’s top literary prize in 2022. Brigitte Giraud’s haunting book revisits the death of her husband in a motorcycle crash 20-odd years earlier.
The Japan Times: ‘A Hundred Years and a Day’: Short stories unfold through the lives of structures and spaces – In Tomoka Shibasaki’s curious collection, A Hundred Years and a Day: 34 Stories, critic Thu-Huong Ha finds “time flows architecturally, plots meander by design and humans are unnamed, ephemeral and often disappear.”
4Columns: Airless Spaces – Julie Phillips says: “In her 1998 book, [Jewish, Canadian-born writer and activist] Shulamith Firestone, author of the classic feminist text The Dialectic of Sex, chronicles mental illness and institutionalization with dark humor.”
Full Stop: Pinko Magazine – An interview with Max Fox, M.E. O’Brien and Tiana Reid (aka the Pinko Collective) by Nico Millman in which the revised and updated edition of After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept – described here as a “thoughtful and compelling inquiry into the circulation of left-wing concepts like ‘accountability’” – is discussed.
VQR: From the Gut – “The gastrointestinal agonies of writers, it turns out, forms practically its own canon, one that dates back almost to the beginning of Western science’s attempts to understand the digestive tract.” Will Boast presents: “A Literary History of Indigestion.”
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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.