An end of week recap

“Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.”
– Meg Mason
Sorrow and Bliss

Today is National Biographers Day – when we remember the 16^th May 1763 meeting of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in London – while also raising our glasses for World Whisky Day and National Mimosa Day. Then, on Sunday, we can all abstemiously celebrate the final day of National Stationery Week. 🖊️🗒️

Among today’s literary‑types’ births are German poet and translator Friedrich Rückert (1788), Russian poet and literary critic – who presided over the Berlin circle of Russian émigré litterateurs –  Vladislav Khodasevich (1886), English novelist and short‑story writer H. E. Bates (1905), German‑born American writer Margret Rey (1906), influential American poet, essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich (1929) and American novelist, playwright, theatre producer and essayist Jean Hanff Korelitz (1961). Tomorrow’s selection of writerly birthday babes includes Anglo‑Irish art historian, literary critic and travel writer Anna Jameson (1794), Swedish poet and novelist Lars Gustafsson (1936), British science‑fiction writer Colin Greenland (1954) and Danish writer of fiction Peter Høeg (1957).

As ever, this is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on the 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 opinions and 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.

* A Bookish Summer in the City *

Emma of Words And Peace, together with France Book Tours, cordially invites fellow Francophiles and booklovers to pack their bags and embark on a cerebrally enriching journey to the French capital – that global centre of art, fashion, gastronomy and culture. Last year’s virtual visit to Paris proved a great success, with generous participation and plentiful giveaways, so once again you are encouraged to gather your books, films, podcasts, and other Paris‑themed delights for Paris in July 2026. If you are a published author, or preparing to release a book connected to this wonderful European city, please alert the host as “you could have your [work] featured throughout the event.” See Paris in July 2026 for everything you need to know about taking part and do remember to use the #parisinjuly2026 tag when sharing your contributions across social media.

* Blogs from the Basement * 

Please select reverse gear: 1) We venture back to October 2025 to read Helen Tope’s positive review of Chinese author Eileen Chang’s (1920-1995) previously untranslated short‑story and essay collection Time Tunnel for Bookmunch. In “Her fiction is a warning” – Time Tunnel by Eileen Chang (trans. Karen S. Kingsbury / Jie Zhang), we learn that “political fervour is never too far from the surface” in these works and there is “real anger underpinning” the narrative – but the stories in particular “exhibit a blend of knowing humour and sharp backward glances into the turbulence of Chinese history.” Helen describes the book as “a kind of retrospective” in which “Chang trains her sight on the future.” 2) From the same month and year comes a piece by Jill, one half of the husband‑and‑wife writing team at Rhapsody in Books, titled Review of “The Summer War” by Naomi Novik. A novella, The Summer War is a “heartwarming fairytale […] populated by fae, witches, kings, and queens” from a “creative and versatile fantasy writer”, centred on a young witch who accidentally curses her brother to live his life without love – and she must find a way to undo the spell. It is, says Jill, an “intricate” story with “memorable characters” and a “simple” message. 3) Moving back still further, to May 2025, we return to Chris Lovegrove’s tantalising review for Calmgrove Books of a “beautifully illustrated” work that has “befuddled and fooled a great many readers”: The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono. In ‘Symbols of reciprocity’, Chris ponders whether this environmental parable (first written for but subsequently rejected by Reader’s Digest in 1953) is “fact or fiction, faux biography or fable?” He is certain, however, that over “seven decades [it has] been inspirational for those who recognise its simple but important message.” 

* 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 difficult to pick only this one – posted in the last day or two:

Lake Effect author Hillary Behrman has too many book recs to count – Cascadian writer Hillary Berhman’s short stories “explore intimacy, family, labor, and dislocation in lives shaped as much by emotional distance as by fierce human connection”, says champion of debut writers Adam Vitcavage. In his recent conversation with the author of Lake Effect, a collection “selected by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction”, he poses the familiar questions from his ongoing My Reading Life series so that readers may “know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.” Berhman speaks of the books she adored as a child and during puberty; the title she now wishes she had discovered at sixteen; and the works that steadied her through the writing process – with lots of other fascinating details along the way. Please wander over to Debutiful to learn more about her new collection, which spans “settings from Seattle to Istanbul”.

* 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:

If you’d like to stay up to date with the latest Tove Jansson and Moomin news, views and events, please head over to the Tove Telegraph. 🎩👜

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NPR: New book reimagines Hans Christian Andersen’s visit with Charles Dickens and family – Heller McAlpin finds Five Weeks in the Country, a historical novel about the odd friendship between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen by award‑winning author Francine Prose, “offers a memorable twist on the classic English country house drama.”

The Middling Place: 📖 Writing the Liminal Space in the Historical Fiction Genre – Sabrina Nesbitt thoroughly explores “how Hilary Mantel and Maggie O’Farrell use imagination to fill the gaps historians leave behind”.

The Atlantic (via Archive Today): The Secret of Elizabeth Strout’s Appeal – “Her 11th novel, The Things We Never Say, is classic Strout (New England setting, unhappy marriages, family secrets, lots of what mental-health professionals call ‘suicidal ideation’); her legion of fans is bound to propel it to the top of the best-seller lists”, says Adam Begley in this piece in which he considers “how she writes best sellers that are also critical darlings.”

Raids on the Underworld: ✍️ On writing and not-writing, and the difference between them – Richard Gwyn notes that, over the past year, there have been several “pieces on Substack about ‘not writing’, some claiming that ‘not writing’ can even be a way of ‘writing.’” He attempts to “imagine a painter painting a picture about not painting,” but cannot. In any case, he remarks, “who cares?” It seems, perhaps, that he does.

Ancillary Review of Books: Constant Discovery: Review of Nicola Griffith’s She Is Here – Jeremy Brett discusses She is Here, the latest work by the British-American lesbian author Nicola Griffith, which he describes here as “a judicious mixture of […] fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and examples of her zoomorphic art based on animals found in 6^th–9^th-century art.”

The Arts Fuse: Book Review: Stop Romanticizing the Starving Artist – Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life by Mason Currey “assembles colorful tales of ingenuity while skirting the economic inequities that make them necessary”, says Debra Cash.

The New York Times (via Archive Today): Amor Towles Shares Insights on His Own Rare Book Collection – The American novelist and collector talks to Charlotte Dulany about “what draws him to add to his own bookshelves.”

London Review of Books (via Archive Today): Mourning the Houseplant – “Walls of various kinds are present in almost all [the Austrian author] Marlen Haushofer’s writing. They are a means of both entrapment and escape. Why else would the narrator of [her masterpiece] The Wall [1963], who confronts the tallest and most impenetrable of all Haushofer’s barriers, also be the most joyful of her characters?” Becca Rothfeld explores several of Haushofer’s newly republished works in this piece.

My Bookshop Backstory: 48 books to pack this summer – Tom Rowley, founder of Backstory, London’s independent bookshop of the year, presents his “gorgeous summer books guide,” Your Summer Reads, which is free to download in PDF format – or, if you are local to the area, you can “pop in” to pick up a hard copy. It is also mailed out with every online order.

Asymptote: An Interview with Luis Othoniel Rosa – Martina Bařinová talks to Puerto Rican writer Luis Othoniel Rosa, author of Animal Spiral (translated by Katie Marya) – a transhumanist, speculative‑fiction novel about future possibilities and a cautionary tale on the risks of disregarding our humanity.

Still Sketching:🐉 The Vanishing of Krystyna Turska – In this intriguing piece, Deborah Vass searches “for the life of a forgotten illustrator and a magical book forty years on”.

The Spectator (via Archive Today): All the gossip about Lady Chatterley’s Lover – “Trawling through decades of songs, newspapers, films and merchandise, Guy Cuthbertson catches a shoal of ephemera relating to Lawrence’s last novel”, writes Frances Wilson in her review of Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Afrocritik: Interior Is a Country: On Nigerian Novels and the Limits of the Screen – “Nigerian novels are not unfinished blueprints awaiting visual realisation. They are finished architectures of thought”, argues Tomilola Adejumo. 

Laura Thompson’s Substack: About a book – The English writer and biographer Laura Thompson skilfully edited Au Revoir Now Darlint: The Letters of Edith Thompson in 2023. Here she discusses the complex 1922 murder case and “trial of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, for the killing of Edith’s husband Percy”, describing these collected letters as “a record like no other of a woman’s life – and imagination”.

Julian Girdham: Martin Doyle’s ‘A Hosting‘ – “Doyle is an expert interviewer, and his new book, A Hosting, collects 60 of those interviews with Irish writers from 1991 to 2026”, says reader, writer, thinker and teacher Julian Girdham. “The early pieces are from the Irish Post,” he continues, “the most recent ones from the Irish Times, where he is Books Editor, and there are several outstanding ones from that newspaper, such those with Anna Burns, Sebastian Barry, Anne Enright, Jan Carson and Colm Tóibín.”

3:AM Magazine: Hell of Solitude – C.D. Rose reviews the Japanese writer active in the Taishō period, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Hell of Solitude (translated by Ryan Choi), a “new collection of his work” that presents “a range of shorter pieces – stories, poems, essays, and mixtures of all the three” and “offers a map of [his] obsessions, questions, processes and approaches.”

The Miramichi Reader: 🍁 Interregnum: Inside the Gruelling and Glamorous Battle to Become the Next King of Chess by Jordan Himelfarb – A chronicle of a chess battle, Interregnum is described by Alison Manley as a “compelling”, enjoyable, “comprehensive look at a dramatic year in the chess world”.

Dominic Winter Auctioneers: The Telegraph – 9 May 2026: Rare photograph of Oscar Wilde shows star in the making – “He is hard to make out at first glance” in this old black and white photograph taken in the cloisters of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1876, “but sitting among the bowler-hatted students is Oscar Wilde, soon to be one of the most recognisable figures in Victorian society.”

The Saturday Paper (via Archive Today): 🦘 Romy Ash Mantle – “Romy Ash’s bracing and precisely crafted novel Mantle is about what sits under the skin or breaks it – the skin of human bodies and water ripples, swells and peels,” finds Felicity Plunkett. I’m sure you will also enjoy reading a thoroughly “spooked” Lisa Hill’s recent review of this novel for ANZ LitLovers LitBlog: Mantle (2026), by Romy Ash.

The Conversation: The other Brontë sister: why do we always forget about Anne? – Long dismissed as the youngest and quietest sister – over‑edited, underestimated – Anne Brontë deserves far better, argues Amy Wilcockson.

The Bookseller (via Archive Today): Viking signs Elif Shafak’s ‘rich and inventive’ new novel – “Viking has acquired the latest novel from award‑winning [Turkish‑British] author Elif Shafak, In One Brief Moment All Eternity”, reports Lauren Brown. The author also issued an announcement on her Substack page, Unmapped Storylands, in which she tantalisingly describes her new work as telling “the story of Gustave Flaubert and his unforgettable book Madame Bovary, set against a time of warfare, discontent, bloodshed, siege, starvation — a world of constant political and social crisis.” She adds that it “bridges the Western canon and the oral stories and rich cultural heritage of the Middle East.” 

La Bibliotrek | Read the World: ✈️ Exploring Athens through Books – “Books on the history, mythology and modern life of Athens for travellers and armchair explorers”. 

The Arts Desk: 🎸Samira Ahmed: A Hard Day’s Night review – cocking a snook – “Books about The Beatles are apt to prompt questions on whether there is anything left to say about them”, says John Carvill, though “only a minority will be able to turn that into a story that’s compelling to others.” He believes Samira Ahmed has achieved “this rare feat” in the latest entry in BFI’s Film Classics series, A Hard Day’s Night. 

Ron Charles: Douglas Stuart’s Best Novel Yet – Glasgow-born writer Douglas Stuart’s latest novel, John of John “is a tender story of a father, a son, and the hard work of learning to love honestly”, says Charles.

AV Club: 🫣 R.I.P. Koji Suzuki, creator of Sadako and author of Ring – Koji Suzuki, the Japanese author known for horror novels including Ring, which “launched horror film franchises on both sides of the Pacific, while also helping to kick off the J-horror craze”,  died at a Tokyo hospital” on Friday 8^th May at the age of 68. 

The Learning Dispatch: 📖 Novels Tell Us Who We Are – “It’s not often that something on social media stops [Carl Hendrick] in [his] tracks, but this week [he] was transfixed by a recent interview with Bob Odenkirk” in which the American actor and screenwriter explained how Solvej Balle’s novel On the Calculation of Volume (I) gave him the words to articulate the experience.

Buzz: ✍️ You don’t have to be mad to work as a writer… but it helps, says ROSA MONTERO – “A glimpse into the minds of different creatives, Spanish writer Rosa Montero weaves an excellent exploration of creativity and madness in [her memoir cum essay] The Danger to Be Sane. Using her journalistic background, [she] develops a case to demonstrate how eccentricity, mental instability and past trauma are part of the process for creatives.”

The Seaboard Review of Books: 🍁🐉 Throwback Thursday: A Time and a Place by Joe Mahoney – “An unlikely hero travels to other worlds and times to save a boy who does not want to be saved in this unique and imaginative adventure.” Melanie Marttila looks back at Canadian author Joe Mahoney’s time-travel fantasy A Time and a Place. 

The Upstairs Window: 🫣 Will Maclean’s novels are the best of modern British horror – “The Apparition Phase was a remarkable debut, and Solace House is even better: richer, weirder, more politically and formally ambitious, the sort of reading experience you could wait years – decades – for.” Blair explores “hauntology and the role of time in [Solace House, her] favourite book of the year so far”, while also looking back at The Apparition Phase, Will Maclean’s “ghost story revolving around a possibly haunted house”.

The Guardian: David Malouf, Australian writer whose work spanned the ancient world and 70s Brisbane – obituary – “Remembering Babylon was shortlisted for the Booker prize but none of his novels were made into films because, he said, ‘almost nothing happens’” recalls Jennifer King. His official obituary, David Malouf: January 1, 1934 – April 23, 2026 (Age 92), can be found at OfficialObituary.com.

Himal Southasian: The sound and fury of Manu Joseph – Diya Isha explains why she thinks Manu Joseph’s latest book Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us “falls short in diagnosing the ills of liberal India, and how the novelist turned provocateur has lost his way”. (Requires an email to access the article.)

Locus: 🛸 Black Hole Heart by K.A. Teryna: Review by Jake Casella Brookins – Russian speculative fiction writer and illustrator Kateryna Teryna’s Black Hole Heart and Other Stories (translated by Alex Shvartsman) displays a “nice mix of genre elements […] from classic generation ship and cyberpunk tropes to stories with excellent and harder-to-define magical-realist sensibilities”, says reviewer Jake Casella Brookins.

The MIT Press Reader: The Trouble With Narrative History – Alex Rosenberg, author of How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories, “from which this article is adapted”, attempts “to understand human history,” suggesting that “we must resist attributing meaning and motive to it.”

Independent:🕵️‍️ Prolific author Anthony Horowitz admits using artificial intelligence: ‘It feels like cheating’ – English suspense and crime fiction writer Anthony Horowitz, author most recently of A Deadly Episode, “talks to Prudence Wade about ChatGPT and the enduring appeal of murder mysteries”.

Slant Magazine: ‘Transcription’ Review: Ben Lerner Walks a Tightrope Between Fact and Imagination – Transcription, “Ben Lerner’s deceptively slim new novel”, is “ultimately about a pact we must make when we read fiction”, says Richard Scott Larson.

Emily’s Corner: 📖 the ecstasy of confusion – “For the last four months, [Emily has] been reading Finnegans Wake. If you were to ask [her] what [it] was about, [she’d] be able to tell you [she’s] pretty sure there is a family […] and that the family is involved in some kind of scandal […]. But that’s about it.”

Tudum: Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew Will Roar to Life with Global Eventized Release in 2027 – “Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew [based on the first book in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series], will release in IMAX and wide globally in theaters on February 12, 2027, and on Netflix on April 2, 2027. Sneak previews only in IMAX will begin on February 10, 2027.”

Murder at the Manse: 🕵️‍️ Shōgatsu – Welsh pastor and crime fiction aficionado Adam Thomas is “still relatively new to the world of Japanese detective fiction” but nevertheless shares his thoughts on reading two classics of the genre: Shizuko Natsuki’s Murder at Mt. Fuji (translated by Robert B. Rohmer) and Yasuhiko Nishizawa’s archetypal time-loop murder mystery, The Man Who Died Seven Times (translated by Jesse Kirkwood).

Qantara.de: The paradox of Colette Khoury – “Syrian author Colette Khoury has died at 95. She wrote with unusual courage about women’s freedom, yet spent her later decades in the service of a regime that stifled the very ideals she once championed”, writes Muhammed Nafih Wafy.

Nation Cymru: 🛸🐉 Hay-on-Wye welcomes new specialist bookshop – “A new independent bookshop specialising in science fiction and fantasy has opened in [the famous Welsh book town] Hay-on-Wye.” Bookshop 451, “which takes its name from Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451,” is described as a “new welcoming space for stories that imagine other worlds, and through that lens question this one.”

Pen and Poison: Which Dostoyevsky Translation Should You Read? (A Brutally Honest Guide) – Liza Libes “studied Translation Theory at Columbia. Here’s why it’s difficult to translate Dostoyevsky—and why you shouldn’t read Pevear and Volokhonsky.”

Travel + Leisure: ✈️ I Visited the Real-life Homes Behind Beloved Childhood Books—and Found a New Way to Read Them – Greta Rybus discovers “the homes of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, and Maud Hart Lovelace preserve the places that shaped their classic stories.”

The Broken Compass: Review: Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero by Heather O’Donoghue – Writer and historian Mathew Lyons examines Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero, which he describes as “an excellent introduction to the one of the most famously forbidding works in English literature” – and notes that it is newly available in paperback.

Africa is a Country: Art under siege – “From Nairobi to Khartoum, Kampala to Addis Ababa, a new digital magazine maps how the interconnected forces of political repression, class exclusion, and patriarchy are shaping artistic life across Africa”, says Silas Nyachwani.

Literature Cambridge: Book Review: Gardens in the Work of Virginia Woolf – “Virginia Woolf lived and wrote in gardens”, observes Helen Rees Leahy in her review of “Karina Jakubowicz’s brilliant new book”, Gardens in the Work of Virginia Woolf: Nature, Modernity and the Politics of Space. “She knew that gardens are psychic, as well as physical, spaces, capable of generating and holding emotions and memories. It was no coincidence that this was where she chose to write.”

LA Times: ✈️ My bucket-list trip to Yorkshire led me to James Herriot, Dracula and the Brontës – Yorkshire birthed many literary classics. American culture critic Mary McNamara’s journey led her to James Herriot, Dracula, the Brontës and Sally Wainwright.

Full Stop: The Home the Drowned – Elin Anna Labba – “Sweden’s Lake Akkajaure is one of the largest reservoirs in [the country], formed after four successive dammings”, says Hugh Blanton. Elin Anna Labba’s The Home the Drowned (translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Clark Wessel) is a multigenerational saga of the Sámi people who were displaced by construction and thus decided to fight back when it seemed certain to happen again. The villagers set up a protest group.

The Telegraph (via Archive Today): 🛸 Why everyone should read the brilliant Douglas Adams novel that left fans baffled – Twenty‑five years after the death of Douglas Adams, Tristram Fane Saunders strongly urges us to read So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth novel in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, which he describes as “a masterclass in sharp observations, wit and optimism”.

Publishers Weekly: How Chick Lit Lost Its Footing – “As a genre, the boundaries of ‘chick lit’ were always loose” – but its “general themes were clear: a young, upwardly mobile woman, living on her own in the big city, taking on obstacles in work and love.” By 2003, however, the genre was said to be “in decline”, a development some critics welcomed, and it had “fragmented into discrete categories.” Julia Rittenberg wonders what became of it.

ABC News: 🦘🐉 Fantasy becomes reality for next-gen speculative fiction authors riding self-publishing boom – “Make-believe is having a moment” in Australia, says Gavin McGrath. At a recent literary festival at Clunes Booktown in regional Victoria, “between half and two-thirds of the authors peddling their wares were writers of so-called ‘speculative fiction’.”

ArabLit: Rhyming Recipes in the Early Modern Arab Mediterranean – “Arabic,” says Leonie Böttiger, is “a language famed for its poetical tradition [and] also boasts its fair share of food-related poetry”. However, she continues, “a curious North African craft recipe collection made up entirely of rhymed couplets might be a closer kin to [Shakespeare’s] double trouble, though admittedly less renowned.”

The Home of Agatha Christie:🕵 Mythology in Christie – Hercule Poirot’s forename derives from the Greek god of strength. This inspired his twelve cases in The Labours of Hercules, but other ancient references can be found throughout Christie’s writing.

Vulture (via Archive Today): The Post-Trauma Plot Book Is Here – In 2026, “a lot of people know their trauma very well”, says Gideon Leek. So “what happens when terrible memories are no longer repressed, hidden, or unspecified but instead announced in class, posted online, suddenly everywhere all the time?” He finds that “several recently published books point toward a new form” – the post‑trauma plot.

The Spinoff: 🦘 ‘I’m cursed to forever be making a fool of myself’: Hannah Kent’s Atwood encounters – The Spinoff Books Confessional series this time homes in on Australian writer Hannah Kent’s reading habits.

Literary Merit: Beloved Books and Their One-Star Amazon Reviews: Part Two – Reader, writer and library worker Andrea Bass enjoys setting up displays that pair classics with their one‑star Amazon reviews. She shared some of the most amusing examples in Part One of this feature; here, she highlights a selection drawn from among her own favourite books.

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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 term, there is an excellent description on Urban Dictionary.

>> See my monthly digest at the Book Jotter Journal on Substack. >>

Categories: Winding Up the Week

Tags: #parisinjuly2026, Australian Literature, Canadian Literature, Cascadian Literature, Eileen Chang, Elin Anna Labba, Francine Prose, French Literature, Hillary Berhman, Japanese Literature, Jean Giono, Joe Mahoney, Katie Marya, Latin American Literature, Luis Othoniel Rosa, Meg Mason, Naomi Novik, National Biographers Day, National Stationery Week, Paris in July, Paris in July 2026, Romy Ash, Scandinavian Literature, Shizuko Natsuki