An end of week recap
“A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”
– W.H. Auden
Among the many literary folk born on this date are Australian poet, scholar and literary critic, Christopher Brennan (1870), American poet, novelist and short story writer, Stephen Crane (1871), Polish-Jewish novelist, dramatist and essayist in the Yiddish, Sholem Asch (1880), Austrian writer, Hermann Broch (1886), Russian-French writer, biographer, historian and novelist, Henri Troyat (1911) and English author, Susanna Clarke (1959). Tomorrow’s selection includes French novelist, poet, short story writer and literary critic, Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808), Greek poet, Odysseas Elytis (1911), American-born German writer, sex educator and feminist, Shere Hite (1942), Jamaican-American author, Michelle Cliff (1946) and American speculative fiction writer, Lois McMaster Bujold (1949).
National Authors’ Day is celebrated today by Americans (and increasingly international readers, writers and literary organisations), as is National Family Literacy Day – an occasion honouring families reading and learning together. Oddly enough, it is also the start of National Family Literacy Month in the USA and, while the two events are related, they are apparently quite separate entities. Elsewhere it is Philippine Book Development Month, a vibrant celebration held every year to pay tribute to the richness of Filipino 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.
* Clubbing at the MCMLXI *
* Blogs from the Basement *
* Lit Crit Blogflash *
This is where I share my favourite pieces of writing from around the blogosphere. There are a great many talented people producing high-quality book features and reviews, which makes it mighty difficult to pick only one – in this case, posted 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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Columbia Magazine: The Beginner’s Guide to Day of the Dead – Luisa Navarro, author of Mexico’s Day of the Dead: A Celebration of Life Through Stories and Photos, “explains the history and meaning behind a frequently misunderstood holiday [which takes place on the 1st and 2nd November] — and how anyone can celebrate it.”
Noted: The Brothers Grimm and the Notes that Saved Our Fairy Tales – “It was perhaps just the right time to record these tales since those people who should be preserving them are becoming more and more scarce.” Jillian Hess studies the written notes and personal libraries of the brothers Wilhelm (1786-1859) and Jacob (1785-1863) Grimm.
ABC News: Will the art of biography be lost when AI and algorithms control our data? – “Letters, journals, private scribblings, saved memos, battered boxes bursting with faded photos and jaundiced newspaper clippings. This ephemera, alongside publicly archived material, is the beating heart of literary biography.” Juliet Rieden has begun to wonder “how will the next generation of biographers manage?” and can virtual archives even be trusted?
The Letterpress Project: Inspiring Young Readers – Covering 150 years, from the mid-nineteenth century to now, Worlds of Wonder: Celebrating the Great Classics of Children’s Literature is a nostalgic journey through the most remarkable works in children’s literature, compiled by international critics and finely illustrated throughout with original artwork, film stills and manuscripts.
The Duck-Billed Reader: Interwoven Lives – Claire Laporte on “the fabric of relationship in Elizabeth Gaskell’s great industrial novel”, North and South.
The Kyiv Independent: This Ukrainian author was executed by the Soviets, but his legendary novel ‘The City’ lives on – “A defining novel of 20th-century Ukrainian literature”, says Kate Tsurkan, Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s The City “has now been brought to English-language readers by Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute in a fresh translation by Maxim Tarnawsky.”
Yale University Press London: Cute Cruelty: Approaching Fairy Lore – “Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture, from J. R. R. Tolkien’s warlike elves to little flower fairies. This extract from Matthias Egeler’s Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld introduces and explores these mythical creatures from Iceland to Germany and beyond.”
Open Letters Review: Fateful Hours by Volker Ullrich – Volker Ullrich’s new book Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic (translated into English by Jefferson Chase) shows how Weimar politicians underestimated the Nazis, making way for the rise of the Third Reich. A possible choice both for German Literature Month and Nonfiction November?
Parade: Literary Icon, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Author Margaret Atwood, 85, Just Proved Why She’s One of Literature’s Most Important Voices – “She never gave up”, says an admiring Deborah Cruz.
Book of Titans: The Case for the Chronological Bookshelf – “A visual display of your reading life can help you remember what you read”, says Erik Rostad.
The Washington Post (via MSN): Russian women take center stage in ‘Motherland,’ a riveting new history – In Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, “the Russian American journalist Julia Ioffe’s new blend of history and family biography takes on the contradictions of female selfhood in Soviet Russia, from great achievement to marginalization”, says Casey Schwartz.
African Books Collective: Uganda @ 63: An African Books Collective Curated list of Ugandan books – Last month, “Uganda celebrated 63 years of independence”. Thus, African Books Collective came “together in celebration of independent publishing strides Uganda has made.”
Aeon: Hidden in plain sight – In this piece which begins with a chance meeting in a Manhattan bookstore with the Polish-born American writer Jerzy Kosinski, Carolyn Ariella Sofia argues that “Jewish children who were ‘hidden’ in Christian families during the Holocaust have much to teach us about memory and trauma.”
Advocating for the Ignorant: Miss Marjoribanks and the suffragette colours – “Surely not just a coincidence?” Sarah Harkness investigates a mystery arising from Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks.
Colossal: Conrad Bakker Recreated All 1,100+ Books in Pioneering Land Artist Robert Smithson’s Personal Library – When the American artist and writer Robert Smithson was killed in a plane crash in 1973, “he left behind a vast personal library that represented his broad interests”. His wife donated all 1,120 books to the Archives of American Art, where they are still housed today.
Derek Neal’s Newsletter: Confronting the World Outside Your Head – Derek talks “unreliable narrators in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh, Green Life”.
The Telegraph (via Yahoo!): Philip Pullman’s final Book of Dust is a masterpiece for all eternity – Philip Womack describes the final book in the trilogy as “powerful, profound and utterly unforgettable: The Rose Field gives us a stunning trilogy conclusion.”
BBC Oxfordshire: ‘Philip Pullman taught me English at school’ – “A former student of world-renowned fantasy novelist Sir Philip Pullman has said he was [a] ‘fantastic and really engaging’ teacher.”
Dirt (Blank): Laptop nonfiction: The fantasy of the fragment. – In response to Jasmine Vojdani’s article in The Cut’s Book Gossip newsletter last August, The State of the Braid, Greta Rainbow shares her thoughts on the braided essay.
4Columns: The Lord – Soraya Antonius’s historical novel, The Lord, first published in 1986 and newly reissued by NYRB Classics after falling out of print, “paints a breathtakingly vivid portrait” of Palestine before the formation of the Jewish state, says Kaelen Wilson-Goldie.
New Voices Down Under: The cream of the crop: whose star shone bright in 2025? – “In the final edition for 2025, [Meredith Jaffe looks] at the debut authors who not only achieved the publishing dream but also got a little icing on their cakes.”
UnHerd: Climbing ‘The Magic Mountain’ today Thomas Mann’s novel is an antidote to nihilism – “The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once asked: ‘Isn’t it true that we’re still dealing with the heroes of The Magic Mountain?’ More than 100 years after it was first published, [German writer] Thomas Mann’s great novel feels as contemporary as ever”, says Morten Høi Jensen in this excerpt from The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain.
Reactor: Five SF Stories Featuring the Sudden Formation of New and Exciting Bodies of Water – “Sorry if you’re a fan of boring old dry land…”, says James Davis Nicoll, but he thinks you might enjoy these “five vintage works” about the formation of “new and exciting inland seas”.
Murder at the Manse: Queen’s Honours – Welsh pastor, Adam Thomas, has “become very fond of old Ellery Queen anthologies.” Here he shares his thoughts on The Queen’s Awards: Second Series, a “1940s mystery-writing contest” which produced a collection he found enjoyable “as a whole” – however, “there were five stories that especially stood out” for him.
Literary Hub: What’s With All the Sheep on Book Covers? – “Celia Mattison on how the lamb became the newest literary It Girl”.
Austrian Academy of Sciences: Sensational Discovery: Unknown Letters by Poet W. H. Auden Found in Lower Austria – “Around 100 previously unknown letters and postcards written by W. H. Auden to his lover, friend, and confidant Hugo have been discovered in Lower Austria […] – a major contribution to international Auden scholarship and to Austrian cultural history.”
The Common Reader: Is Mansfield Park about slavery? – “A vexed question with no simple answers”, says Henry Oliver.
Keep Calm and Carry On, a Substack from Karen Dukess: Imagining Georgiana Darcy in Mid-Life – “I misunderstood the assignment but stayed true to Austen anyway”. Karen Dukess “was asked to contribute to an anthology of stories about Jane Austen’s “unsung characters,” Ladies in Waiting, and “decided to write about Georgiana Darcy”.
The Metropolitan Review: The Last Literary Lion of New York, Gay Talese: The Talese Issue – Gay Talese, the American writer who helped define contemporary literary journalism is 93-years-old. Last summer, editors Ross Barkan and Lou Bahet visited him to conduct an interview, during which they discussed “every topic conceivable”, including “Sinatra, Trump, boxing, adultery, the writing life, the nudist life [and] the importance of dressing well.”
Vogue: Can You Be Serious and Seriously Glamorous? – “I’ve taught Kafka in a kaftan and Muriel Spark in sparkles,” says the English writer, Zadie Smith. Her latest essay collection, Dead and Alive, was published on 28th October.
The New York Times: The Dogged, Irrational Persistence of Literary Fiction – “Literature is fragile. It serves no obvious purpose. But it is also as close to immortal as any cultural endeavor has ever been”, writes Gerald Howard.
The British Columbia Review: ‘Becoming a metaphor’ – The reissue of an avant-garde, out-of-print 1981 novel with a “highly experimental structure and unabashed presentation of its occasionally difficult subject matter” highlights how “sometimes art with this level of originality takes longer than it should to gain the appreciation that it deserves.” Logan Macnair reviews The Bee Book by Canadian writer Ann Rosenberg (1940-2018).
Notes Under the Fig Tree: I read the whole Booker Prize longlist and all I got was this Substack post – Leah Beth shares her (not always complimentary) “thoughts on the 2025 Booker Prize longlist”.
Mental Floss: How a Book Marketing Ploy Almost Ruined Edgar Wallace, Literature’s “King of Thrillers” – “Edgar Wallace wanted to promote his first novel with more than just traditional ads—but his brilliant idea almost became his downfall.” Jane Alexander on the vigilante thriller, The Four Just Men.
Ancillary Review of Books: Misplaced In Translation: Review of Elia Barceló’s Natural Consequences – In his review of Spanish author Elia Barceló’s 1994 sci-fi novel, Natural Consequences (freshly translated by Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea Bell for its 25th anniversary), Nat Harrington argues that “the entire infrastructure of English-language SFF as a community would likely have to change” for the genre to find a “receptive” audience.
The Korea Herald: ‘Children of the Fourth Person’ gives voice to victims – “Author Kim Ana, who was announced as the winner of the 15th Honbul Literary Award earlier this month for her novel Children of the Fourth Person, began writing the book as a way to reach out to those who might have lived through the same painful experiences she had”, reveals Hwang Dong-hee.
The Guardian: Susan Griffin obituary – Julie Bindel remembers the author “who devised the concept of ecofeminism and also wrote about war, memory and the private lives of public events.”
Sussex World: Iris Murdoch discovery leads to new poetry collection – “A new book of poetry by Iris Murdoch (entitled Poems from an Attic) is being released [this] month, after two Chichester academics discovered a chest filled with notebooks of hand-written poems in the writer’s attic.”
Emerge: AI Novel Tops Japan’s Biggest Fiction Website, Sparking Literary Uproar – “An AI-penned romance stormed to No. 1 on Kadokawa’s Kakuyomu site after flooding it with machine-written chapters. Critics warn that AI-created novels could replace human writers”, reports Josh Quittner.
BBC News: George Orwell classics get new lease of life in Welsh – “Two classic novels by George Orwell have been translated into Welsh for the first time”, reports Antonia Matthews.
Washington Blade: New book celebrates gay rights pioneer you’ve never heard of – “Craig Rodwell was at Stonewall riots, helped start first Pride, [ran the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop] and more”. Charles Green reviews Insist That They Love You: Craig Rodwell and the Fight for Gay Pride.
The Bookseller: Axe murder and Montreal erotica titles vie for the Oddest Book Title of the Year – “Deliberations for the 47th The Bookseller Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year are underway.”
The Critic: Why update PG Wodehouse? – “When the stories work, then, they really work. And when they don’t work, they tend […] to read like half-finished squibs”. Alexander Larman on Jeeves Again, a collection of tales by celebrity authors “reimagining the classic characters”, which, he grumbles, is “cynically timed for Christmas”.
Independent: Agatha Christie detectives join Mr Men world in new children’s books – “Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are back in a series for young readers”, reports Lauren Del Fabbro.
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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.
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