An end of week recap
“When we’re young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens.”
– Gwendolyn Brooks (born 7th June 1954)
On a considerably less anxiety-inducing note, you may like to know that on this day in 1889, the Anglo-Irish author and critic, Elizabeth Bowen was born – as were Louise Erdrich (1954), Orhan Pamuk (1952) and Nikki Giovanni (1943). Elif Batuman’s birthdate is rather more mysterious as she is said by some to have been born on 7th June 1977, but not all sources agree.
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 *
* Lit Crit Blogflash *
I am going to share with one 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 this one – 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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The New Criterion: An interview with Jennifer Hofmann – A “brilliant novel” by Berlin-based author Jennifer Hofmann was published in 2020, says Mark Judge, which, for various reasons didn’t get the recognition it deserved. However, The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures “left a lasting impression” on those who read it. He recently spoke to Hofmann about her story of Stasi member, Bernd Zeiger, whom she describes as “a petri dish to examine how an individual’s psychology functions in—and justifies […] repressive environments.”
Public Books: Chekhov’s Pandemic? – “Even as Chekhov brings gloom befitting the pandemic to Tom Lake and Our Country Friends, these novels are irradiated by the theatre.”
LARB: There Is No Such Thing as Green Capitalism – “David Shipko explores climate denialism in speculative literature and culture.”
The Collector: Comparing Austen & Ibsen: Women & Finance in 19th-Century Literature – Rachel Benham argues that “while Jane Austen’s romance often distracts us from her heroines’ realities, Henrik Ibsen stares financial oppression dead in the face and offers his heroines hope.”
3 Quarks Daily: Going Beyond Language – Jon Fosse’s Septology, “a collection of seven novels published as a single volume, is one sentence long.” After reading the first page of the Norwegian Nobel Prize-winner’s book, Canadian English teacher Derek Neal found himself “unable to stop, like a person running on a treadmill at high speed.”
Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society: Dorothy L. Sayers at Oxford – Ann Kennedy Smith writes: “The first Oxford University graduation ceremony to award degrees to women took place on 14 October 1920. 27-year-old Dorothy L. Sayers was among the fifty celebrants that day, and she never forgot it. This short piece about the lasting effect of that day was inspired by a lovely post by laura thompson […] about Sayers’s 1935 novel, Gaudy Night.”
The Skinny: Catherine Lacey on her fiction-memoir hybrid The Möbius Book – “Following a devastating break-up, acclaimed author Catherine Lacey wrote [The Möbius Book,] a hybrid fiction-memoir exploring its tumultuous aftermath. [Anahit Behrooz chatted] with Lacey about breaking genre conventions and attachments to both love and narrative”.
EstLit: Echoes of the North: Rein Sepp and Estonia’s Quest for Mythic Nordicness by Mart Kuldkepp – Silverwhite, Lennart Meri’s “visionary prose meditation on migration, mythology, and the northern mind”, was “published in English [this spring] in a luminous translation by Adam Cullen”. As preparations are made “to publish an interview with Adam Cullen and Daniele Monticelli about the challenges and meanings of translating Meri,” EstLit presents a “captivating essay on Rein Sepp and the Nordic essence of the Estonian psyche.”
Full Stop: Goat Song – Konstantin Vaginov – In this recently republished 1927 volume we are presented with “the story of a motley crew of Leningrad intellectuals and the unnamed author who follows their every step”, says Konstantin Mitroshenkov of the Soviet modernist writer, Konstantin Vaginov’s Goat Song – a classic Petersburg city text “based on [the writer’s] actual friends and acquaintances.”
Colorado Review: Book Reviews: Women Surrounded by Water – Bilingual Puerto Rican writer, Patricia Coral, “guides the reader with great intentionality” through intense content in this memoir, says Jamie Hennick. Women Surrounded by Water oscillates “between family history and self” and “reflects generously [on] growing up female in a land that mostly values men.”
Psyche: When memories from fiction become part of who you are – “Scenes from books, movies and games sometimes carry as much weight as events from people’s own lives. We’re finding out why”, says Osman Görkem Çetin.
NewScientist: ‘Time travel was just a metaphor for controlling a narrative’ – “The Ministry of Time author Kaliane Bradley on how she made time travel work in her bestselling novel, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club.”
City Journal: Art and Life in the Criticism of Henry James – Edward Short finds On Writers and Writing: Selected Essays, a new collection of the novelist Henry James’ critical essays, “contains plenty of his own magic.”
Nippon.com: Writing in the Shadow of Oppression: Japanese Books from 1926 to 1944 – “The prewar and wartime period in Japan was marked by growing control over what could be written and published. Even so, it was a time when great writers flourished, including Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Edogawa Ranpo.” Book critic Takino Yūsaku on Japan’s Shōwa era.
Books of Some Substance: 13 Questions for Lars Iyer – “Lars Iyer is a novelist and philosopher. He has published six novels and two nonfiction books about [the French writer, philosopher and literary theorist] Maurice Blanchot: Blanchot’s Communism and Blanchot’s Vigilance.” He has also “been shortlisted for the Believer Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize.” David Southard has 13 questions for him.
Noema: AI Signals The Death Of The Author – In the opinion of David J. Gunkel, “the meaning of a piece of writing does not depend on the identity of the author, even if the author is not human.”
Outlook: ‘The Phantom’s Howl’: Exploring the Bengali’s Love of the Paranormal – Anjana Basu writes: “Curated by Arundhati Nath, the collection [The Phantom’s Howl: Classic Tales of Ghosts and Hauntings from Bengal] brings together a series of eleven ghost stories written by well-known and not-so-well-known Bengali authors.”
A Duck-Billed Reader: Suspended in Time: Thomas Hardy and the Original Cliffhanger – “A serialized novel written by Thomas Hardy leaves a character hanging off a cliff for a month – and inspires the coining of the term ‘cliffhanger.’” Claire Laporte on A Pair of Blue Eyes, serialisation and other suspenseful literary matters.
New Zealand Review of Books: This Compulsion In Us by Tina Makereti – In her review, Kelly Ana Morey describes Makereti’s book as an “essay collection exploring Māori culture, literature, personal paradoxes and the ‘constant argument about place’.”
Salmagundi: A Smiling Public Man – “Heaney emerges […] as sympathetic, conscientious and kind, generous with praise and with money, which can be said of few modern poets—and few human beings”, writes Jeffrey Meyers in his review of The Letters of Seamus Heaney (edited by Christopher Reid).
The Point: Rightful Trespass – Piers Gelly on “Diego Garcia and the promise of polyautofiction”.
Faber: Drawn From Life: How the Graphic Novel Memoir Takes Creative Liberties With Autobiography – “Artist, lecturer and researcher Damon Herd explores the ubiquity of graphic novel memoirs, and how comics are uniquely positioned to play with the truth.”
New Eastern Europe: The women of war: a review of Yuliia Iliukha’s My Women – “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to a spirited response particularly from the country’s women. Exposing the shared and distinct realities facing this group, Yuliia Iliukha’s new [short story collection, My Women, translated by Hanna Leliv,] offers insight into a plethora of experiences shaped by the war” says Nicole Yurcaba.
ABC News: Libraries are becoming ‘community living rooms’ keeping regional Australians connected – Offering millions of books, free internet access and everything from craft clubs to storytelling dogs, libraries are an essential public space – particularly in regional and remote Australia.
Books & Culture: On Creative Reading – An English literature teacher shares her joy in “meeting fellow book lovers in person” at her Books & Culture literary workshop on Creative Reading.
Daily Maverick: Post-festival blues, coffee with Abi Daré and the rage that becomes fiction – Nigerian author Abi Daré, winner of the first Climate Fiction Prize for her historical novel, And So I Roar, talks about “girlhood, grief, climate rage, class mobility and how fiction can do the hard work of truth-telling without breaking the reader.” Her work, says Joy Watson, “holds both fury and grace; it’s a call to pay attention, to care and to act.”
The Conversation: Giant: John Lithgow’s masterful turn explores Roald Dahl’s antisemitism – and wider questions about children’s literature – ‘Giant’ (playing at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre until 2nd August) features “a masterly performance by John Lithgow in the role of Dahl,” finds Kristina West, lecturer in Children’s Literature at Royal Holloway University of London.
NewcityLit: Who Really Knows? A Review of “Battle of the Big Bang” by Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper – Patrick Roberts reviews Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins, in which Niyayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper “pull back the curtain on the petty, sometimes nasty professional rivalries that make cosmology something of a blood sport.”
Commonweal: Head in the Clouds – First published in 1896, Paul Valéry’s philosophical novel Monsieur Teste – a “little book” about “a very Cartesian character” who, according to Jared Marcel Pollen, “is foremost a projection of Valéry’s own consciousness” – has been newly published by NYRB Classics with a fresh translation by Charlotte Mandell.
nb.: June Book of the Month: Gunk by Saba Sams – An interview with the English writer Saba Sams, followed by a review of her “electrifying debut novel”, GUNK – described by Madeleine Knowles as a “must-read for those seeking a fresh perspective on love and identity”. It is also, apparently, “a masterclass in stripping back the politics of the different connections that we can have between people.”
AP: Edmund White, a groundbreaking gay author, dies at 85 – “Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty” died last Wednesday.
The New Yorker: In Praise of Jane Austen’s Least Beloved Novel – “Part marriage plot, part novel about novels, Northanger Abbey is”, says Adelle Waldman, “Austen’s strangest—and perhaps most underappreciated—work.”
Forbes: J.K. Rowling Is a Billionaire—Again – “The Harry Potter books transformed her from a single mother on welfare to an author with a ten-figure fortune—but her massive charity initiatives dropped her from the ranks of billionaires. Now, thanks to new Potterverse books, movies, a play, and several theme parks—and despite a divisive social-media presence [over her support for the rights of women and the LGB community, and for the safety of children]—she is magically back in the three-comma club”, reports Matt Craig.”
New Voices Down Under: May Books full of heart and humour – Late last month, Meredith Jaffe suggested “four gorgeous books” to warm those nippy Australian nights.
Engelsberg Ideas: A little history of privacy – “The idea of privacy is a surprisingly modern notion, but one worth defending”, says Katherine Harvey in this piece about Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life, Tiffany Jenkins’ cultural history of how private life was won.
ARC: Is Huck Finn still a classic? – “Mark Twain’s novel is racist and reductive”, observes author Naomi Kanakia, but nevertheless declares Huckleberry Finn “great.”
Financial Times: Chilling reads: two thirds of Brits read true crime as Criminal Psychologist reveals why we are so intrigued by crime – “From notorious criminals to high profile robberies and real-life horrors, interest in true crime is high with 74 percent of people choosing to read the category as it records the highest average reading times across several genres on the Readly app.”
The Comics Journal: An Empty Room: The Existential Perils of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (The Graphic Adaptation) – Greg Hunter shares his thoughts on Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy: The Graphic Adaptation – the new pictorial edition of his three famous mystery novels contained in a single volume.
The Art Times: Story of My Life by Lucy Score, A Romance About Rediscovery, Built on Independence – “In Story of My Life, bestselling author Lucy Score blends emotional intimacy with small-town charm. Discover how she built a hybrid publishing empire, redefined reader connection, and wrote a love story about burnout, belonging, and the courage to begin again.”
Futurism: Readers Annoyed When Fantasy Novel Accidentally Leaves AI Prompt in Published Version, Showing Request to Copy Another Writer’s Style – “I just about fell out of my chair when I read this!” says an outraged member of the ReverseHarem community on Reddit.
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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.