An end of week recap
“The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!”
– Fernando Pessoa
In the meantime, I have a few literary birthdays to share with you. Today we can pop the port cork for (among others) Italian writer, Andrea Camilleri (1925), Spanish poet, Ángel González Muñiz (1925), American writer and philosopher, Robert M. Pirsig (1928), American writer, Alice Sebold (1963) and British urban fantasy fiction author, essayist and comic book writer, China Miéville (1972). Then tomorrow, we can do it all over again for British poet, critic and eldest of the three literary Sitwells, Edith Sitwell (1887), British-born American novelist, Taylor Caldwell (1900) and American novelist and short-story writer, Jennifer Egan (1962).
In addition to this, you may like to join our American friends in celebrating Read a Book Day, a gentle nudge to pause, unplug and immerse yourselves in the quiet joys of reading. The entirety of September is then dedicated to World Kid Lit Month, an international initiative that promotes children’s literature with the aim of encouraging empathy and curiosity through storytelling.
I would urge you also to take a moment to remember the English author, literary critic and polemicist, Brigid Brophy, who died on 7th September 1995. Most widely remembered for works such as Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953) and The Snow Ball (1964), she was also an influential social reformer, campaigning for homosexual equality, vegetarianism, humanism and animal rights.
Finally, I should like to wish Mrs Jotter a joyfully uplifting birthday as we take to the skies. ✈️
Até já!
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 you a couple of my favourite pieces 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 posted 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 are a selection of interesting snippets:
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Sydney Review of Books: Just a Little Longer – “Why did books start being divided into chapters? Joshua Barnes reviews [The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century,] Nicholas Dames’ history of literary segmentation, a study that slices through and pauses over what chapters have always told us about the times we live in.”
New Scientist: Ursula Le Guin’s son on why The Dispossessed is (maybe) his favourite – “The New Scientist Book Club is currently reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic science fiction novel The Dispossessed. Here, her son Theo Downes-Le Guin considers the artistic process behind it – and why it still resonates today”.
Unmapped Storylands: A Thousand Fibres Connect Us – “You don’t always remember clearly where and when your path crossed with a favourite book,” says Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak, but she recalls vividly the day she first encountered Moby Dick. In fact, the events of that day led eventually to her writing 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World.
TNR: Constantine Cavafy, Poetry’s Inadvertent Influencer – “By restricting circulation of his work and cultivating an intimate yet prominent group of friends who championed it, the ‘poet of Alexandria’ helped ensure his stature would only grow after his death.” Scott Bradfield reviews Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys.
The Scotsman: Dan Gunn on reconstructing the life of Muriel Spark through letters – “Few people have immersed themselves in the lives of great writers as thoroughly as Edinburgh-born academic Dan Gunn”, says David Robinson in his review of the first of two volumes of the letters of Muriel Spark, The Letters of Muriel Spark, Volume 1: 1944-1963.
Chicago Review of Books: Someone Else: The Misnamed Narrator in “Archipelago” – In Archipelago, Natalie Bakopoulos’s tale of discovery, which takes place along the Dalmatian coast and in Greece, “a woman comes unmoored from herself in a slippery odyssey of identity, borders, and language”, finds Ben Lewellyn-Taylor.
World Literature Today: Do Book Reviews Sell Books? – J. L. Powers, “the owner of a small, independent press considers the role of book reviews in getting books into readers’ hands.”
Kyiv Post: Book Review: A Ukrainian Refugee’s Story, With a Difference – Vladislav Davidzon describes The Story of an American Who Refused to Leave Ukraine by Larissa Babij as “an excellent guide to […] horrific times” and “a deeply important work of philosophic candor and observation by an incredibly perceptive critic.”
Big Other: Pulsing in Parallel: The Mirror Worlds of British and Chinese Science Fiction: An Interview with Lyu Guangzhao – Angus Stewart speaks to Lyu Guangzhao about the “ongoing ‘boom’ in Chinese sci-fi with the new wave of British sci-fi that started in the nineties and fizzled out in the noughties. Those studies are now complete,” he says, “and were published as The Boom & The Boom: Historical Rupture and Political Economy in Contemporary British and Chinese Science Fiction.”
Olongo Africa: NLNG Finalists for Fiction, 2025 – From 252 entries down to 11 longlisted authors, The Nigeria Prize for Literature has pruned its list down to three finalists.
Daphne du Maurier: Launch event for After Midnight by Daphne du Maurier at Regent Street Cinema, London, 1st October 2025, 7pm – A date for your diaries. – A stunning new collection of Daphne du Maurier’s darkest stories, After Midnight: Thirteen Tales for the Dark Hours (with an introduction by Stephen King), is to be launched at Regent Street Cinema, London, on 1st October.
BBC World: India’s International Booker winner at the centre of a political row – “International Booker Prize winning-author Banu Mushtaq has found herself in the midst of a controversy after she was invited to inaugurate a prominent festival in the southern Indian state of Karnataka”, reports Cherylann Mollan.
The Duck-Billed Reader: What Tolstoy Taught Me About Birth and Death – “In honor of Leo Tolstoy’s birthday (September 9, 1828), [Claire Laporte offers] an appreciation of his portrayal of life passages.”
The Conversation: Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine is a Hindu mandala – Harsh Trivedi argues that the 19th century novelist and playwright’s realism “is not merely descriptive but architectural: a literary mandala of modern society.” Balzac, he says, was “French to the core” yet “profoundly Hindu in the way he sought to understand the world.”
3 Quarks Daily: The Thin Line Between Crime Fiction And Horror – David Beer finds Icelandic crime writer Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s newly translated (by Victoria Cribb) novel, Can’t Run, Can’t Hide, is “about weather” and evokes “genre features from horror and ghost stories, bringing a certain suspense to the unmistakable investigatory step-by-step character of detective fiction.”
New Lines Magazine: Inside Beirut’s Fight To Save Its Reading Culture – “As reading declines and self-censorship grows, bookshops are shuttering in the city once hailed as the Arab world’s publishing capital”, reports Amelia Dhuga.
Smithsonian Magazine: Two Years After Cormac McCarthy’s Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth – “The famously reclusive novelist amassed a collection of thousands of books ranging in topics from philosophical treatises to advanced mathematics to the naked mole-rat”, reveals Richard Grant.
Radio Prague International: Lost manuscripts of The Good Soldier Švejk found after 90 years in Prague archive – “The Czech Museum of Literature has announced a remarkable discovery. Literary scholars have uncovered a large part of the original manuscripts of Jaroslav Hašek’s world-famous novel The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War.”
The Metropolitan Review: Cocktail Horror – Alexander Sorondo’s debut novel is “a story about genocide told with the wide scope and electric pace of Don Winslow’s The Power of the Dog, the campy humor and paranoia of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the elusive history of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, sprinklings of late Cormac McCarthy’s terse baritone prose, and a healthy dose of magical realism.” Adam Pearson reviews Cubafruit.
The Free Press: What Happens If No One Reads – “With AI able to quickly summarize everything from self-help books to great novels, we need to remind ourselves why we read in the first place”, warns Spencer Klavan.
The AU Reviewer: Book Review: The Reunion is an intriguing twist on Australian Gothic with a touch of locked room drama – “More than 100 years on from Picnic at Hanging Rock, Australian novelists are still exploring the terror of being lost in the Australian landscape,” says Emily Paull – not least in this thriller [The Reunion] “with an air of menace” from mystery novelist Bronwyn Rivers.
Still Sketching: How one thing leads to another – Deborah Vass with a lovely diverse piece: “From [the English writer and illustrator] Eve Garnett to Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose and on to Barbara Comyn’s Sisters by a River.”
UnHerd: VS Naipaul’s glorious failure: His ‘Enigma of Arrival’ humanises him – The Enigma of Arrival by Trinidadian-born British writer V.S. Naipaul “is a novel for all seasons” and “a work that illuminates as much through its limitations as its triumphs”, says Marco Roth.
The Brooklyn Rail: Josephine Rowe’s Little World – “Not long ago, [Meghan Racklin found herself] near Edinburgh, in a church dating back to the twelfth century. [She] kept thinking of that church, cold and quiet, as [she] read Josephine Rowe’s Little World, a compact, sacred marvel of a book about a child ‘maybe-saint’ in Australia.”
The Washington Post (via MSN): Why is everyone reading these hard-to-find British war novels? – First published in the 1990s, Sophia Nguyen is intrigued to know why Elizabeth Jane Howard’s saga, The Cazalet Chronicles is enjoying an unexpected revival.
Deadline: ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Author Margaret Atwood Mocks Book Ban With New Short Story & Now The Ban’s On Hold “Until Further Notice” – “Try to ban The Handmaid’s Tale and you’ll face the literary scorn of Margaret Atwood. Alberta’s government has learned as much from its now paused censorship measure”, reports Dominic Patten.
New Voices Down Under: Love in a time of war, a famous mutiny and running marathons – Meredith Jaffe with her regular monthly feature in which she spotlights an “eclectic mix of [Australian] novels bound to catch your eye.”
1000 Libraries Magazine: Want to Annotate? Here’s Where to Start – “Discover [with Millie Ramm] how annotating turns reading into a conversation. Underline, question, react, and make the book feel like your thoughts on paper.”
Traveling in Books: Book Review: The Summer War – Naomi Novik’s fantasy novella, The Summer War, “is a wonderful little book that gives the reader a new faerie story built upon a solid foundation of traditional faerie stories”, says Kim and the Cat.
Public Books: “Weird, but Fantastic”: Devoney Looser on Those Who Love Jane Austen – “The Austen biography space is fairly saturated and covered. But there’s still a lot more we can learn by seeing her in context: that is, by seeing Austen in relation to her society, her family, her friends.” Carolyn Dever interviews Devoney Looser, author of the newly published Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane.
The Seaboard Review of Books: A Sense Of Things Beyond by Renée Belliveau – Heather McBriarty describes A Sense Of Things Beyond, Canadian archivist Renée Belliveau’s novel set during the First World War, as “a gorgeous work of literary historical fiction, exploring what is commemorated and what is forgotten in times of war.”
Big Think: Why today’s publishers fear Goodreads more than government – “Social media backlash and review-bombing are increasingly leading to books being delayed, revised, or canceled before release”, says Kevin Dickinson. “In That Book Is Dangerous, author Adam Szetela examines the rise of the ‘Sensitivity Era’ in publishing and how outrage campaigns try to control what books authors can write and readers can read.”
The Arts Desk: Elizabeth Alker: Everything We Do is Music review – Prokofiev goes pop – Jon Turney reviews “music maestro”, Elizabeth Alker’s investigation into the ways in which pop and rock were transformed by the pioneering visionaries of classical music, Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop.
Meduza: ‘It’s mostly whining’ How pro-war writers and A.I.-enhanced censors conquered Russia’s literature industry – “Meduza correspondent Kristina Safonova reports on how Russia’s book publishers have navigated the growing influence of pro-war writers and A.I.-enhanced censors.”
Reality’s Last Stand: Agustín Fuentes’ Book ‘Sex is a Spectrum’ Fails to Refute the Binary – A fascinating piece in which Tomás Bogardus, Professor of Philosophy at Pepperdine University and author of The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters dissects in detail a new book by Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes that argues against the sex binary.
Literary Review: Read It & Weep – The stiff upper lip was for a long time considered a hallmark of Englishness, with its roots deep in history. However, in her review of Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality by Ferdinand Mount, Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders if at heart England is in fact a nation of softies.
The Telegraph India: Glorious loss – Debnita Chakravarti writes: “Literature homes the dissonant narratives that are stopped from entering through the archways of history. Jaunt and jubilation must come back to nest in the bleak reality of their terms and costs”.
From My Bookshelf: Revisiting Barsoom – Peter C. Meilaender on sci-fi novel A Princess of Mars and the prolific pulp fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs “at 150”.
BookTrib.: The Comfort of Chaos: Why Cozy Mysteries Matter in a Violent World – Valerie Burns believes “cozies deliver justice, community, and warmth amidst a backdrop of murder, especially during turbulent times.”
Prospect: On not reviewing Virginia Woolf – “Here’s what happened when [Oliver Soden] tried to get a copy of [The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Stephen Barkway]. Consider it a parable about money and the state of literary culture”.
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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.