An end of week recap

“A war […] kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.”
– John Williams

While searching for literary events to share with you this week, I noticed that on 6^th July 1942 Anne Frank and her family first went into hiding in their secret annex in Amsterdam. She documented the experience in her extraordinary diary and continued to do so until their capture by the Gestapo on 4^th August 1944. As we know, the diary went on to become a classic of war literature. You can read my memories of first discovering The Diary of a Young Girl over at Kim Forrester’s Triple Choice Tuesday (mark II): Paula Bardell-Hedley.

July is Read an Almanac Month – a celebration of those splendid fact-filled handbooks published each year, generally devoted to a specific subject. The aim of the event, it would seem, is to draw attention to the rich history and importance of these dependable resources (because sometimes Google simply won’t do). We might also remember literary figures born on today’s date, among them French poet, novelist and playwright, Jean Cocteau (1889), Croatian poet, Tin Ujević (1891), American writer, Frank Waters (1902) and Irish novelist, playwright and poet, Sebastian Barry (1955). Tomorrow, you may wish to raise a glass in memory of the much-missed British writer, Hilary Mantel, born on 6^th July 1952.

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.

* The Wonderful Blogger of Oz *

A noteworthy resource from “self-confessed book addict” and Fremantle dweller Kim Forrester made its debut earlier in the week. This Week in Aus Lit, “a weekly wrap-up of all things Australian literature (with a slight focus on Western Australia)”, isn’t quite new because she once published “these kinds of links and newsy bits on Facebook” before becoming disillusioned with the big “bloodsucking” social media platforms and banishing them from her life forever. However, thinking “it might be useful to gather [all this sort of information] in one spot and share [it] with you”, Kim is planning to be “a bit experimental” and is going to try out various formats on her blog each week, “depending on what’s happening news-wise.” If there’s anything you would especially like to see, “such as upcoming literary events, interviews with local authors, reviews, or even spotlights on independent bookshops and publishers”, be sure to let Kim know. So, without further ado, please head on down to Reading Matters for the maiden issue of This week in Aus Lit, #1.

* 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:

The Elopement by Gill Hornby – Margaret, a long-standing Janeite from north-east England, posted a short review of Gill Hornby’s historical novel, The Elopement, “about the life of Jane Austen’s niece Fanny Knight and Mary Dorothea Knatchbull, Fanny’s stepdaughter.” She has enjoyed similar works by this author in the past but in this instance was left feeling rather “disappointed” as it failed to “capture [the] flavour” of an Austen novel. Margaret shares some interesting background details about the two main characters and reveals that other family members, such as “the Knights of Godmersham Park; the Knatchbulls of Mersham-le-Hatch and the Austens of Chawton Cottage,” feature in the story, but Austen herself has a mere “cameo role.” Despite the story having rather a slow start and a “rushed ending”, the Author’s Note is of great interest since it explains how “the narrative exactly follows Fanny Knight’s record of events [from] her daily journals”, which she kept from the age of eleven until she was eighty. I encourage you to read the full review at BooksPlease.

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. A Review. – Volatile Rune’s Frances Spurrier has misgivings about Vietnamese American author Ocean Vuong’s latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, the tale of an unexpected friendship developing between a young male college dropout and an elderly widow in the early stages of dementia. While she was full of praise for his “unique” writing style “extraordinary poetic prose” and “beautiful” book cover, “everything started to go wrong” for her about mid-way through the book. Despite Vuong being “a superb writer”, Frances didn’t experience the “emotional engagement with the themes and characters” in the way she did with his widely acclaimed debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. There is, she says, “a level of despair which never quite goes away”, plus she would have preferred “more transformation” and “fewer minor characters with complex side stories”. To explore Frances’s reflections more fully, I urge you to read her fair and thoughtful review in its entirety.

* 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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Edinburgh University Press: Reading Mrs Dalloway – Helen Tyson, author of Reading Modernism’s Readers: Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller, explores “how Marion Milner’s psychoanalytic reading of Mrs Dalloway [in An Experiment in Leisure] reveals themes of motherhood, desire, and the transformative act of reading in modernist literature.”

Full Stop: Theory of Water – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Elizabeth Hall finds Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead is a “timely meditation on relationality and worldbuilding,” in which Canadian scholar, writer and artist, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “explores what it means to live and learn alongside water.”

The New Statesman: Ignore the pessimists – we are living through a literary golden age – “Literature is booming. Literary culture needs to catch up.” Henry Oliver makes the case for literary optimism. 

Loving Sylvia Plath: Doll Parts: A Novel, by Penny Zang – Emily Van Duyne talks to Penny Zang about her forthcoming novel, Doll Parts, in which a woman attempts to unravel the mystery behind the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath-adoring sad girls they attended college with decades earlier. You can also watch Emily and Penny discuss “the ways Sylvia Plath continues to inspire radical new art,” sixty-two years after her death.

Faber: In Praise of Scottish Literature – “Michael Pedersen shares some of his favourite Scottish authors and writing, including those that inspired his new novel, Muckle Flugga [spotlighted in WUTW #428].”

4Columns: Killing Stella – Killing Stella, Marlen Haushofer’s 1958 novella (newly translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside), is, according to Elvia Wilk, “a riveting and disturbing tale of blame, shame, and consequence.”

Africa is a Country: A barren sowing – “Donato Ndongo’s latest collection of short stories portrays African exile and diaspora in Spain and France”, says Luis Castellví Laukamp.

European Literature Network: #RivetingReviews: David Hebblethwaite reviews WILD BOAR by Hannah Lutz, translated by Andy Turner – A review of Wild Boar, “a striking novel” by the Finnish Swedish author Hannah Lutz, penned by our very own David Hebblethwaite of David’s Book World.

The Bookseller: Jeanette Winterson’s ‘tribute to storytelling’ signed by Jonathan Cape – One Aladdin Two Lamps, Jeanette Winterson’s “guide to starting your life as a reader, and a delightful recounting of One Thousand and One Nights,” which weaves “together fiction, magic and memoir,” is due to be published on 13^th November 2025, says Lauren Brown.

Spectrum Culture: How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998: by Helen Garner – In “this sometimes quiet, sometimes tortured chronicle of relationships and the world crafts structure and sense out of a human lifespan in progress, […] you don’t need to know anything about the Australian literary world to get swept up in its drama”, says Pat Padua of Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998. 

UnHerd: Forrest Reid: Belfast’s forgotten genius. His faded legacy is proof of literature’s caprice – E. M. Forster once described the Northern Irish novelist, literary critic and translator, Forrest Reid as ‘the most important man in Belfast’. So, “why has this unique and brilliant novelist been forgotten?” asks Andrew Doyle.

The Wire: English and a Translator’s Shame – Hemang Ashwinkumar writes: “As a translator, I trace my genealogy to Bapuji who also translated between Gujarati and English, as also to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who, at the peak of literary success, gave up writing in English to return to his native tongue for creative expression.”

The Common Reader: Jane Austen’s Rake Problem – “What can genetics teach us about marriage in Austen’s novels?” Here, Henry Oliver shares a guest piece by “Edward McLaren, a DPhil candidate in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where he specialises in 18th-century literature with a focus on Jane Austen and evolutionary psychology.”

Alta: Upcoming Releases: Moderation and Cozy Dystopias – Paul Wilner with “books to look forward to—for the beach and your nightstand.”

Historia: Show, don’t tell, Write what you know: do they work for historical fiction? – “How useful is advice like ‘Show, don’t tell’ and ‘Write what you know’ for authors in general and writers of historical fiction in particular?” asks Jem Poster, author of The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write: A Handbook for Fiction Writers.

The Arts Desk: Tom Raworth: Cancer review – truthfulness – Jack Barron says the ‘lost’ book, Cancer, “reconfirms Raworth’s legacy as one of the great lyric poets”.

CBC: Margaret Atwood, Jay Baruchel, Canisia Lubrin among writers of new anthology that explores Canadian identity – Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance, an anthology of responses to the ongoing Canada v. America trade war from a remarkable array of Canadian minds, will be published on 14^th October.

The Asahi Shimbun: Akira Otani’s thriller earns Dagger Award for translation – “Akira Otani’s gangland thriller [The Night of Baba Yaga] centered around two women is the first Japanese work to win the translation division of the prestigious Dagger Awards.”

Publishers Weekly: Adult Books for Fall 2025 – David Adams presents PW’s annual preview of the most noteworthy adult fiction and non-fiction coming out this autumn.

Miller’s Book Review: Do You Want What You Want? Edith Wharton’s ‘The Age of Innocence’ – Joel J Miller examines Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence – a “classic story of divided affections”.

3 Quarks Daily: Orality, Literacy, and Ismail Kadare’s “The File on H” (Part 1) – Derek Neal shares an anecdote and more concerning The File on H, “a novel written in 1981 by the Albanian author Ismail Kadare.”

Realnoe Vremya: ‘Between the Prix Goncourt and the Nobel’: BRICS Literary Prize makes an ambitious claim – “In Moscow, a new literary prize set to honour authors from BRICS countries has been unveiled”, says Ekaterina Petrova.

Harper’s Magazine: Demanding Pleasures – The acclaimed American fiction writer, essayist and translator Lydia Davis discusses “the art of observation” in this piece drawn from her book on the creative process, Into the Weeds.

The Kyiv Independent: ‘Not many events like this left’ — A Ukrainian literary festival in a city falsely claimed by Russia – “When Russia illegally declared ownership in 2022 over all of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast – despite never fully capturing or controlling much of it — it only strengthened the case for holding a literary festival there, says Svyatoslav Pomerantsev, president of the international literary corporation Meridian Czernowitz.”

1000 Libraries Magazine: What Dostoyevsky’s Scribbled Notes Reveal About His Creative Mind – “Dostoyevsky’s manuscripts illuminate a vast and complex creative process.” John Burns invites you to “explore what these drawings and stylistic touches say about his work and artistry.”

Read and Think Deeply: How To Remember What You Read – Ryan Hall suggests “five simple techniques that have helped [him] master what [he is] reading”.

Prospect: The other great American novel of 1925 – “You can’t miss the centenary celebrations for The Great Gatsby. But what about John Dos Passos’s compulsive, cacophonous Manhattan Transfer?” says Philip Clark.

Scroll.in: This book is an alternative account of literary beginnings in modern India through women’s writings – Read an excerpt from A Genre of Her Own: Life Narratives and Feminist Literary Beginnings in Modern India – Gayathri Prabhu’s account of the part played by women in the birth of modern Indian literature.

The Invisible Head: “Michael Field”: Poet(s) of the 1890s – Heralded as “a poet of rare promise”, Michael Field turned out to be “the pen name of two unmarried ladies from the West Midlands, Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper.” Alan Horn looks back at “These Inspired, Autocratic, Incredible Old Maids”.

The Critic: A story of doublings – “If you want to understand how the world works now,” John Self suggests you “read a classic”.

Daily Maverick: Unlocking the power of words: How writing shapes equality and activism in society – In this opinion piece, Mark Heywood discusses social justice writing that changed the world.

New Voices Down Under: What do boogie boards, chiko rolls, childlessness and falling in love have in common? – The answer, says Meredith Jaffe, is they are all subjects relating to four new Australian titles out last month.

History Today: What We Talk About When We Talk About Tunguska – “Was it antimatter? Aliens? An atomic blast? The weird and wonderful theories as to the cause of the Tunguska event show no sign of drying up. Why?” asks Andy Bruno, author of Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy.

Beshara Magazine: Winter Light: On Late Life’s Radiance by Douglas Penick – “Peter Huitson reviews a book which celebrates creativity and deepening perspectives in old age”.

The Armenian Mirror-Spectator: An Armenian Apocalypse: Armen Melikian’s Expraedium – “Armen Melikian’s 2023 novel, Expraedium, is a beguiling piece of work, part Joyce, part Orwell, part Pynchon, with a smattering of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange thrown in for good measure”, writes Christopher Atamian.

Gathering Light: The writers who ruin all other writers for you – “How 20th century women authors changed [Dominika’s] reading habits forever”.

Necessary Fiction: The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive – Diane Josefowicz reviews The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive: Being Dreamity, Algoriddims, Chants & Riffs, the second novel in Marcia Douglas’s “‘speculative ancestral project’ to describe ‘Caribbean migration and fugitivity’” trilogy.

The Irish Times: John McGahern Book Prize shortlist revealed – Frank Shovlin reports: “Novels by Ferdia Lennon, Alan Murrin, Sinéad Gleeson and Anna Fitzgerald” will compete to be awarded the best debut novel or short story collection published in 2024 by an Irish writer or writer resident in Ireland.

Electric Literature: Girls Who Journal Have Always Been Radical – “To keep a diary is to say, I am paying attention to my life, and I believe that it matters”, says Elizabeth Austin.

Brittle Paper: Finnish-Nigerian Writer Minna Salami Graces the Cover of Feminist Nordic Magazine Astra – “Finnish-Nigerian feminist writer and cultural critic Minna Salami is the cover star of the latest issue of Astra magazine (2/2025), the Nordic feminist publication.”

Paste: Sprayed Edges Are Everywhere and I Hate Them – “Sprayed edges have gone from making occasional appearances on (mostly) fantasy shelves to infecting every fiction section aimed at readers above the age of seven.” Selah Jordan argues against this practice, describing it as “annoying”.

The Broken Compass: Hosannas and hatchet jobs – “The how and why of the reviews [Mathew Lyons writes]: pitching for commissions, the process of reading and writing, and the rules [he tries] to stick to along the way.”

The Markaz Review: The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa – Rana Asfour reviews Kuwaiti novelist, Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library, “a tale set in the near-future exploring the world of banned books, repressed imaginations, dreams, and desires.”

The British Fantasy Society: Creating ‘The Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook’ – “Consider this guest post from Wren James, founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League, a call to arms for more climate-conscious writing.”

Longreads: The Emoji Tongue – In an excerpt from Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, Keith Houston asks: “If 😂 was a word, would that make emoji a language?”

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FINALLY >>

If there is something you would particularly like to see in 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.

Categories: Winding Up the Week

Tags: Anne Frank, Australian Literature, Fall Booklists, Feminist Literature, Gayathri Prabhu, Gill Hornby, Helen Garner, Helen Tyson, Jamaican Literature, Jane Austen, John Williams, Marcia Douglas, Marion Milner, Ocean Vuong, Patricia Lockwood, Read an Almanac Month, This Week in Aus Lit, Virginia Woolf