An end of week recap
“A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn.”
– Helen Keller
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.
* Finding Tove’s Finland *
My latest contribution to the Tove Trove project is a brief flip through the English-language edition of This is FINLAND 2025-26 – a magazine filled with fascinating articles, including several about Tove Jansson and her Moomin characters. >> What is Finland? #ToveTrove >>
* Fuller Days Through Summer *
* A Roaring Good Read *
* Almost Overlooked *
* Lit Crit Blogflash *
I am going to share with you a couple of my favourite posts from around the blogosphere. There are a great many talented writers producing high-quality book features and reviews, which made it difficult to pick only these two – both published in the last week or so:
* 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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Literary Review: The Once & Future Genius – In this “sensitive, compelling study,” Francesca Wade “puts writing at the centre of her subject’s world”, says Sophie Oliver of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, which she describes here as an “unconventional biography”.
The Lamp: Ghosts and Dolls – “Be interested in rather than anxious about what machines write.” Paul J. Griffiths on “the writings of artificial intelligence.”
Beyond the Bookshelf: Guardians of Memory – “From the book’s earliest pages, Pettegree an der Weduwen make it clear that libraries are as mortal as the societies that birth them.” Matthew Long examines The Library: A Fragile History.
The New York Times (via DNYUZ): ‘James’ Won the Pulitzer, but Not Without Complications – “In an unusual but not unprecedented move, the prize board chose a fourth option after it couldn’t agree on the three less-heralded finalists”, reports Alexandra Alter.
Pioneer Works: Sense and Senescence – “A professor ponders how Jane Austen prepares us for death.”
Counter Craft: The Age of Genre Bending, Blending, and Juxtaposing – “Thoughts on the most important literary trend of the last 25 years, and novels that juxtapose different genres side by side”, from Lincoln Michel.
Literary Theory and Criticism: Analysis of Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister – “While Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister is not a well-known work, it remains crucial to the development of the novel”, says Nasrullah Mambrol.
Read Japanese Literature: Japanese Proletarian Fiction – “Proletarian literature was an international movement, especially in the 1920s and 1930s.” Alison Fincher provides a list of proletarian writers from Japan and their work in English.
Life With Books: Books about the quiet joy of everyday life: Drinking coffee, flowers on tea trays, good breakfasts and other delights – Lucy Fuggle on “the gentle, comforting charm of books that celebrate the ordinary… our habits, rituals, simple pleasures, and ways of navigating the world.”
Caught by the River: Angels in the Cellar – “More than a description of wine making, Peter Hahn’s Angels in the Cellar, recently published by Little Toller, is a celebration of nature and a love of the land, the seasons and the soil, writes Paul Bursche.”
China Books Review: Yan Geling: Crossing the Red Line – “The acclaimed novelist and screenwriter built an audience in China for her powerful historical narratives. Then, somewhere, she crossed a line. What is it like to be banned from publishing in your homeland?” asks Karen Ma.
Nordiskpost: Greenland without a bookstore: the end of Atuagkat marks a cultural turning point – Malthe Pedersen is deeply concerned that “Greenland no longer has a single bookstore.” She considers the consequences to “readers, publishers and writers across the island.”
Miller’s Book Review: Open Thread: Emotional vs. Intellectual Novelists? – “George Eliot vs. Charles Dickens? Victor Hugo vs. Alessandro Manzoni? Henry James vs. Dostoevsky?” Joel J Miller would like to know if there is an “emotional-intellectual divide” between novelists and, if so, would it be possible to “map [their] temperaments and styles”? ChatGPT may have the answers.
New Scientist: The best new science fiction books of May 2025 – “May’s new science fiction novels include a hot tip from [the] culture editor, as well as war on an alien planet from Bora Chung,” says Alison Flood.
Platform: Siyahi Retreat – Ahead of her first-ever writers’ retreat in Jaipur, Mita Kapur, founder of “one of the very first literary agencies in India,” talks to Paridhi Badgotri about her relationship with books, promoting literature in India and reading Enid Blyton’s stories with her sisters when she was a child.
Our Culture: Author Spotlight: Matthew Gasda, ‘The Sleepers’ – Sam Franzini “spoke with Matthew Gasda about [his novel The Sleepers,] generational fiction, playwriting, and plundering from diaries”
Los Angeles Times: 10 books to read in May – “Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your May reading list.”
The Duck-Billed Reader: At the Edge of Death: Safety Coffins, Poe, and Dracula – Claire Laporte examines “what happens when the boundary line between life and death is blurry?”
Granta: This Very Complicated Cast of Mind – Renata Adler shares a previously “unpublished piece” on “the death of her friend, Hannah Arendt” – a “forthright reckoning with Arendt by a writer from a younger generation with a shared German émigré background” (available to read in PDF format). There follows here “a supplementary conversation, in which Adler relates some of her memory of Arendt.”
Independent: Ian McEwan’s next novel is science fiction ‘without the science’ – Ian McEwan’s forthcoming speculative fiction novel, What We Can Know, “will be a post-apocalyptic story”, says Hillel Italie.
The Moscow Times: Walk the ‘Green Mountains’ of the Caucasus with Author Caroline Eden – Caroline Eden’s latest book, Green Mountains (the last in her ‘colour trilogy’), traces her journey through the Caucasus, “walking and collecting stories and recipes [as she reflects] on ten years of researching and writing these books, set most recently against the dark backdrop of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”
Persuasion: Why It’s So Hard To Find Small Press Books – “Adopt a few small and independent presses as your own” is just one of the suggestions by Melanie Jennings and Elizabeth Kaye Cook for how you could help make small press books more widely available in bookstores.
OUPblog: Elleke Boehmer’s seminal Colonial and Postcolonial Literature at 30 – “May 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Elleke Boehmer’s seminal text Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, [which] remains a landmark publication in [its] field”. Here, the author “reflects on her book and its longevity and shares some of her ‘must reads.’”
Reactor: Writing the Speculative Into Real History – American author of speculative fiction, Lara Elena Donnelly, whose recently published novella No Such Thing as Duty is a “World War I alt history” featuring Somerset Maugham, draws on non-fiction and fantasy to discuss the appeal of alternate histories.
The Conversation: Is Russian misogyny enabling sexual violence in Ukraine? Yes, argues a bestselling author – In Same River, Twice: Putin’s War on Women, Sofi Oksanen draws on her family’s history of Soviet colonisation and reports of the war in Ukraine to argue Russia uses violence against women as a weapon of war.
The Miramichi Reader: We, the Kindling by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek – “Okot Bitek’s writing is unapologetic as she reckons with the legacy of the Lord’s Resistance Army: a militant group that abducted tens of thousands of children to serve in its ranks between the late 1990s and early 2000s”, says Catherine Marcotte in her review of Kenyan-born Ugandan-raised diasporic writer, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s We, the Kindling.
Books of Titans: Read it as if it were True – After first dreading but then going on to read The Lord of the Rings series in its entirety “in under a month”, Erik Rostad shares his “reading tip for books you don’t want to read.”
Bocas Lit Fest: Haitian Myriam J.A. Chancy wins 2025 OCM Bocas Prize – Village Weavers, an historical novel by Haitian Canadian American author Myriam J.A. Chancy, “has won the award for best Caribbean book of the past year.”
The MIT Press Reader: ‘The Silver Bridge’: Gray Barker’s Psychic Travelogue – “The first book-length exploration of the Mothman sightings, The Silver Bridge is also something much stranger and more expansive”, writes Gabriel Mckee.
The Wall Street Journal: ‘“I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer”’ Review: Instruction Fit to Print – “The first advice column was published in 17th-century London. Correspondents were especially interested in the topic of sex” says Judith Flanders in her review of Mary Beth Norton’s “I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer”: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column.
Open: Search Party – “Set in contemporary Kerala, [Jissa Jose’s Mudritha is] a novel about women escaping to find themselves,” writes Geeta Doctor.
The Conversation: A new publisher will focus on books by men. Are male writers and readers under threat? – Julian Novitz says evidence suggests male writers and readers are in decline – in Australia and elsewhere. Is a male-only publishing house the solution?
Public Books: The Translator’s Dilemma: Thinking Versus Doing? – Lawrence Venuti, author of Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic and translator from Italian, French and Catalan, poses the question: Would we get a different view of translation if we turned to translators themselves?
Newcity Lit: Island Time: A Review of “The Living and the Rest” by José Eduardo Agualusa – Set on “a small island off the eastern coast of Africa [where] a group of writers assemble for the first Ilha de Moçambique Literary Festival”, José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel, The Living and the Rest, is “concerned with why people write [and] what it means to be an ‘African writer,’” says Theodore Anderson.
CNN Travel: Bookstores’ latest release? Beer, wine, dinner, coffee and a unique aesthetic – “Books — real books, the tangible, flip-the-pages kind — have an enduring appeal. As do bookstores — real bookstores, the brick-and-mortar, browse-and-discover kind. There is an atmosphere and culture to them, expert curation and literary serendipity. Bookstores are vital social capital too — third spaces where strangers mix.”
NewsSky: Light of the Word: Ukraine says goodbye to Valery Shevchuk – “Ukraine has lost one of its most prominent literary voices: Valery Shevchuk, a writer from the sixties, Shevchenko Prize laureate, literary historian, translator, and keeper of the Ukrainian Baroque,” reports Chilli Pepper.
Deadline: ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ Series A Go At Netflix From John Wells & Madhuri Shekar – “A drama based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, has been ordered to series at Netflix from showrunner, writer, and executive producer John Wells”, writes Rosy Cordero.
Bookanista: The dark side of the mirror – “‘One thing needs to be made clear. I did not kill my twin sister.’ So Begins Liann Zhang’s fiercely entertaining debut Julie Chan Is Dead.” Liann Zhang talks to the second-generation Chinese Canadian author about her debut thriller.
Keep Calm and Carry On, a Substack from Karen Dukess: The Jane Austen Controversy – “When the facts ruin a great story but reveal an even better one”, says American mystery novelist and author of the forthcoming cosy crime title, Welcome to Murder Week.
ScreenRant: There Were Originally 5 Elephants In Discworld: What Happened To The Fifth & Why It’s Missing – What happened to Terry Pratchett’s fifth elephant? Nicole Zamlout investigates.
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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.