An end of week recap
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
– Fran Lebowitz
The Fran Lebowitz Reader
There are all manner of celebratory occasions today. Be Nice to Nettles Day, anybody? National Drinking with Chickens Day (me neither!) – but nothing in the least literary. However, it is World Turtle Day, which couldn’t be more opportune. Tomorrow brings Aviation Maintenance Technician Day – so the perfect opportunity for us to tune up our aircraft – but again, no bookish or writerly festivals. Ah well, never mind, it will be National Biscuit Day next Friday, which is something – and just so you don’t miss out while I’m not here, June is National Adopt a Cat Month.
Today you may like to wish a happy birthday to, among others, English poet and humourist Thomas Hood (1799), American writer and women’s rights activist associated with the American transcendentalism movement Margaret Fuller (1810), American writer of children’s books Margaret Wise Brown (1910), English fantasy writer Susan Cooper (1935), German-American writer Ursula Hegi (1946) and Australian author of science fiction Sean Williams (1967). Then tomorrow, balloons can be blown for English diarist and correspondent Caroline Fox (1819), Belgian-born French poet and writer Henri Michaux (1899), Slovene writer Branka Jurca (1914), Irish writer William Trevor (1928), Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (1940), American author and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon (1963) and Norwegian writer Erlend Loe (1969).
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.
* 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 difficult to pick only this one – 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:
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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The Telegraph (via Archive Today): All your opinions are hopelessly biased. Here’s why – Ian Sansom writes: “So you think your views are strong and well thought-out? Turi Munthe’s new book shows that you don’t deserve most of the credit”. Why We Think What We Think: The Unexpected Origins of Our Deepest Beliefs delves into culture, biology, geography, history, psychology and much more to reveal the underlying DNA of our beliefs.
The Asian Age: Book Review | Ten Pieces of Assamese History – “What’s easy to like about this collection of [Shehnab Sahin’s] stories is the sense of history they give you from the point of view of an ordinary citizen or family pushed willy-nilly into trouble by stirring events in the neighbourhood”. Shashi Warrier shares his thoughts on Colour my grave purple and other stories, an anthology of historical fiction from Assam in northeastern India spanning a century of the region’s enthralling past from the 1850s to the 2000s.
The Sewanee Review: 🍁 An Interview with Miriam Toews – Canadian writer and author Miriam Toews “is known primarily as an interpreter and critic of Mennonite culture [and] nearly all of her books explore the ramifications of suicide.” She speaks to Morgan Leigh Davies about why she writes, her sister, Marjorie, and her memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace. (🔒 Most of this interview is available without a subscription.)
A Narrative Of Their Own: Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ – In her “weekly publication exploring the lives and literature of women”, Kate Jones homes in this time on Virginia Woolf’s 1930 essay Street Haunting, which reveals “the particular appeal of walking the streets of London on a winter’s evening.”
The Wheeler Centre: 🦘 [Read] Pulse Check: Watch, Listen, Read – “In her first piece for [Read], Jaclyn Crupi attempts to take the pulse of the publishing industry by talking to literary agents, publishers and booksellers. Oh, and somehow she works in some book recs, too.”
Beshara Magazine: Book Review: Conversations with Dostoevsky by George Pattison – “Andrew Watson engages with an innovative […] book which explores Dostoevsky’s relevance to our contemporary world”: Conversations with Dostoevsky; On God, Russia, Literature and Life by George Pattison.
The Anchoress Archives: 🗄️ Some notes on Alphabetical Order. – Katy Jones-Gulsby remarks that, in her “latest attempt at reading every niche history book about knowledge and information management, [she’s] finished Judith Flanders’ A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. And, as always, [she has made] some notes”, which she shares with us here.
The Public Domain Review: 📚 Octave Uzanne’s “The End of Books” (1894) – “The end of books has been declared many times. Over a century before the invention of the e-reader and the meteoric rise of the audiobook and podcast, ardent French bibliophile Octave Uzanne (1851–1931) wrote a story, inspired by rapid advances in phonographic technology, imagining how printed text might disappear.”
Sarah: 🪖 World War II Novels Will Always Be Popular – Why, wonders Sarah, are World War II novels “perpetually popular” despite agents suggesting the trend has peaked? Have they, for instance, been “iterated upon so much that [they’ve] developed their own kind of formula?” And, if so, she asks, “what obligatory elements – beyond their historical setting – would that formula require?” She makes it her business to find out.
Gay & Lesbian Review: What They Don’t See About Iran – “Iran is one of the few countries where homosexuality is punishable by death, and civil liberties are restricted under Sharia law”, writes Majid Parsa, a gay man of mixed Iranian/Turkish heritage who lived in Iran for 29 years. His book The Ayatollah’s Gaze: A Memoir of the Forbidden and the Fabulous is an unflinching exploration of growing up gay “in Iran, in a devout Muslim family.”
The Sydney Morning Herald (via Archive Now): 🦘 From serial killers’ wives to enigmatic echidnas: 10 new books – Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll cast their eyes over new fiction and non-fiction releases – ranging from cli-fi and crime fiction to the fascinating world of Australian wildlife.
BBC Tyne: ✍🏻 ‘We need working-class voices to enrich culture’ – Kate Pasola, a journalist from Northumberland, wrote essay collection Bread Alone, “a book about the difficulties working-class writers face, after [herself being] pushed out of the industry […] over costs.”
Prospect (via Archive Today): Here, at last, is Sylvia Plath – Jeremy Noel-Tod introduces The Poems of Sylvia Plath (edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil), “a new collection of the poet’s work [which] puts away the suicide doll and replaces it with wit, wordplay and truth”.
The Montreal Review: ✍🏻🛸 Memoirs and Confessions of a Publishing Scoundrel – Robert Crossley reflects on the “scoundrelly” business of life writing, tracing his decade as biographer of British philosopher, novelist and pioneer of visionary science fiction Olaf Stapledon – from letters to H.G. Wells to a “cluttered shrine” of a study in a remote English village. It is a poignant meditation on a craft that is part detective work, part ghoulish excavation and on the enduring challenge of reconciling an ordinary life with an extraordinary imagination.
The Korea Times: 🕵🏻 K-LIT REVIEW Cho Yeeun’s ‘Shift’ reveals true cost of a miracle – “What are you willing to trade for a miracle? Your life, or someone else’s? And if that’s the price, then which lives are worth saving?” asks Emerald Gao. These questions, she says, “lie at the heart” of Cho Yeeun’s debut mystery novel Shift, featuring Detective Yi Chang.
Reading on Trains: 🚂 Reading on Trains 90: Two Extracts from ‘To The Sea by Train’. – Andrew Martin’s To the Sea by Train: The Golden Age of Railway Travel is now out in paperback. The author shares “two brief extracts from it” on his Substack site.
Compulsive Reader: 🍁 A review of Ground to Stand On by Sandra Djwa – Ruth Latta writes: “Sandra Djwa’s autobiography, Ground to Stand On: A Canadian Literary Life, is like an in-depth conversation with a brilliant, accomplished new friend. Women like myself who entered higher education in the 1960s and 1970s will identify with her struggles in male-dominated academia, and her experiences with American professors who viewed Canada as second-rate.”
Book Beveling: Korean Books for AANHPI Heritage Month – “As a librarian and educator, the heritage months are on [Kelly Mayfield’s] radar”, so it is unsurprising she has focused on AAPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander) Month, which is celebrated throughout May. In this post she turns her attention to Korean-American authors and South Korean literature in translation.
The Brooklyn Rail: Francis Naumann’s Impossible: The Love Affair between Marcel Duchamp & Maria Martins, and the Artwork it Inspired – Charles Stuckey reviews Impossible by leading Marcel Duchamp scholar Francis M. Naumann – a true story of a secret romance that changed the course of modern art – told here in full for the first time.
Broad Street Review: 🕵🏻 If the Owl Calls, by Sharon White – Sharon White’s debut novel (If the Owl Calls, reviewed here by Chhaya Nayyar) is a mystery set to the backdrop of 1979 Norway during a time of environmental resistance that asks big questions around culture and tradition.
Financial Times (via Archive Today): 🦹🏻♂️ The French mastermind behind a €1bn Ponzi scheme – French manuscript dealer and expert in balloon mail Gérard Lhéritier “lured investors by selling shares in literary treasures. When suspicions grew, he was exposed as the architect of a massive fraud”. Vincent Noce reveals all about a man once described in the magazine Winner as “‘the king, lord of letters and manuscripts’ and featured him on the cover.”
Buzz: 🏉🎶🍺 In good company: Welsh water inspires a new essay collection from 10 writers – Rhys James reviews The Waters That Raised Us, a new anthology of essays by Welsh writers on water and identity.
The Common Reader: 🐉 To vex the world. Jonathan Swift’s Frustrated Humor – “On the three-hundredth anniversary of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s satire of his own society is remarkably relevant”, finds Henry Oliver.
Hyperallergic: The Painted Book Cover Is Back – Tara Anne Dalbow suggests that the “recent shift toward figuration on book covers may reflect a broader desire for physical presence — proof of the artist’s hand in the digital age.”
Two Tolkien’s in one:
Wardrobe Door: 🦁 The Little-Known Way C.S. Lewis Fought for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Literary Legacy – “Files released after 50 years reveal Lewis’ devotion to his friend’s work”, reports Aaron Earls.
Dr. Andrew Higgins Elvish Musings: 🧙🍻 Tolkien at Kalamazoo 2026 – Dr Andrew Higgins gives a marvellously detailed report of his time at this year’s International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo – his “eleventh year of involvement with Tolkien” at this event.
LARB: Consummating Our Incomplete Nation – “A newly translated Montenegrin novel combines dashes of Kafka, Kadare, and early Kundera with a style that is all Stefan Bošković’s own.” Cory Oldweiler reviews The Minister (translated by Will Firth), a mind‑boggling political noir exploring the ways in which pledges of democratic change so often empower both corrupt politicians and criminal cartels.
Quill & Quire: 🍁📚 Death and the fairies: Sarah Ellis turns to memoir to process the final year of her wife’s life – In My Year in Fairyland: Grief, MAID and a Lifetime of Books, Ellis describes fairyland as a place suspended between who she had been before her wife Sherry died and who she was after.
The Creative Independent: On working through discomfort – Born and raised in Beijing, writer M Lin talks to Amy Y.Q. Lin about “feeling at home, art’s political consequences, […] why she writes in her second language” and her debut short story collection, The Memory Museum, which explores the lives of women in China and across the Chinese diaspora.
The Conversation: 🕵🏻 Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro is a gripping Argentinian crime story about gender violence and the weaponisation of religion – The unsolved murder of a young girl in Argentina sends shockwaves through generations of a religious family. Helen Vassallo reviews Argentinian crime writer Claudia Piñeiro’s Cathedrals (translated by Frances Riddle), which “takes on the institution of the Catholic church” with the author’s “characteristic edge-of-the-seat storytelling”.
Afrocritik: ✍🏻 A Voyage and An Exploration: What An Essay Is – “The essayist must take a position: political neutrality is hardly a thing that makes a great essayist, except if the matter is explicitly nonpolitical.” Chimezie Chika examines the essay from every angle.
Edinburgh University Press: 🫣 Q&A on French Horror – French Horror: Industry, Society and Media is described as “one of the first major works on French horror cinema as an industrial and theoretical entity”. In this illuminating Q&A, author Reece Goodall reflects on the inspirations that shaped the book, the research that underpinned its writing, and the directions in which he hopes to take his work next.
The New York Times (via Archive Today): This Narrator Merits Your Attention. Just Don’t Trust Anything She Says. – “Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s novel follows a commitment-averse liar who is plagued by visions of violence”, says Justin Taylor. Attention-Seeking Behaviour is now available in paperback.
Literary Hub: ✍🏻 Writing in Exile: Why Russian Dissident Literature Demands Our Attention – “Katherine Kelaidis on the Russian writers defying Putin’s regime from abroad”.
Transfer Orbit: 🍁🛸 Learning the language – Hugo and Locus Award-winning American and Canadian writer Ray Nayler, whose latest historical-sci-fi novel is Palaces of the Crow, talks to Andrew Liptak about “his fascinating career, communicating with intelligent life, reading and writing unconstrained, and our relationship with the natural world”.
Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade: 📚 Pinocchios, Frankensigned Monsters, and 11 Other Kinds of Signed Books – “Frankensigned Monsters” is a term to describe photocopying biblioclasts who have “sliced out [genuine] signature sheets […] and then made Pinocchios out of them”. Scott Brown explains all with his “hierarchy of autographs, from worst to best”.
Shelf Awareness: 💘 Review: A Perfect Hand – Writing for this newsletter, fellow book blogger Julia Kastner of pagesofjulia describes A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman as a “twist on the historical romantic drama [that] considers a lady’s maid, the valet she falls for, and the wider world for which she yearns.” Meanwhile, the critic at Kirkus Review comments: “If Jane Austen and Nora Ephron collaborated, they might produce something close to this new novel” – indeed, they say, it is a “witty, frothy, and ultimately wise, […] sendup of the marriage plot [that] would make Mrs. Gaskell proud.”
BBC Scotland: ‘Sunset Song church’ sold after community bid fails – Arbuthnott Church in Kincardineshire, which inspired Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic 1932 Scottish novel Sunset Song, has been sold, much to the disappointment of local people.
Africa is a Country: How to read postcolonial writing – “The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectation that writing from the South should sound opaque, excessive, and primitive”, observes writer and researcher Lina Abushouk.
ABC News: 🦘 Australian author Ellena Savage considers our ecological disinheritance in debut novel, The Ruiners – Nicola Heath talks to the Australian author of The Ruiners about her debut novel, her obsession with microplastics and how to create a better world.
The Ink-Stained Desk: 🍁🫣 Reclaiming Youth, Relinquishing Soul: A Review of Nick Cutter’s The Dorians. – “While The Dorians delivers the skin-crawling body horror that Cutter’s fans crave, it also offers a devastatingly bleak exploration of dignity, regret, and the monstrous cost of playing God”, says C M Reid in her review of the Canadian fiction writer Nick Cutter’s latest thriller. You may also like to read Interview With Nick Cutter, Author Of ‘The Dorians’ at PopHorror.
Two Kuang’s in one:
Slate (via Archive Today): 🚫 The Award-Winning Novelist Who’s Under Fire for Simply Depicting an Israeli – “After reading R.F. Kuang’s Taipei Story, I can now confirm that this controversy is even dumber than I suspected”, says Laura Miller.
quite useless: 📚 Goodreads is great, actually – Novelist a. natasha joukovsky sings “a lovesong to the literary internet’s most hated website”.
Big Other: Oceanic Affinities and Apocalyptic Collapse: What Is Taiwanese Ecoliterature? – “Modern Taiwanese literature is flush with homegrown genres and movements,” says Angus Stewart – one of which is ‘ecoliterature’, a “rich vein” of nature writing “straddling mountains and ocean; fiction and non-fiction.”
Liberties: Jack Kerouac: The Psuedo-Saint of Mindfulness – Josh Milton-Bell wonders whether Jack Kerouac is partially to blame for the shallow state of our contemporary mindfulness culture. He approached The Buddhist Years, “a collection of Kerouac’s previously unpublished drafts, diary entries, poems, and scribbles, […] skeptically”.
The Point: 📚 Common Readers – Selen Ozturk looks at the critical values and limitations of BookTok.
InDaily: Book review: 🦘 The Enigmatic Echidna – “South Australian zoologist Danielle Clode tackles her prickliest subject yet: getting up close to the quilled monotreme with backwards feet, a tendency to hibernate when things get tough, and a leathery snout for snorting ants” in The Enigmatic Echidna: Secrets of the World’s Most Curious Creature.
Better Living Through Beowulf: 🏆 The 100 Greatest Novels (or Not) – “To present a ranked list of best books to a booklover is like throwing chum to sharks. Suddenly we begin frothing and biting and thrashing around. Which is to say, we are at our entertaining best”, writes Robin Bates in this piece on The Guardian’s latest 100 best novels of all time.
UnHerd (via Archive Today): 📖 Book clubs are for phoneys: Good readers don’t relate to characters – Kathleen Stock has “been looking into the literacy crisis” and she thinks she may understand what is happening. “These days”, she observes, “young people are either making videos about how much they love books or masturbating over werewolves. Either way, few of them are reading very much, and practically no one is reading in depth.”
Economical with Fiction: “I wonder if God knows how difficult it is being a saint’s family?” Why Fiction Loves a Vicar – English fiction is “swarming with vicars”, observes E.J. Barnes. Here she shines a light on “tithes, curates, prebendaries, Austen, Trollope(s), Noel Streatfeild and more”.
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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. >>