An end of week recap
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
There are hordes of well-loved writers with birthdays today, including the English novelist, diarist and playwright Fanny Burney (1752), Irish poet, dramatist and writer William Butler Yeats (1863), Portuguese poet, writer and literary critic Fernando Pessoa (1888), English crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (1893), Spanish writer associated with the Generation of ’36 movement Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (1910), Paraguayan novelist and short-story writer Augusto Roa Bastos (1917), Northern Irish author Colin Bateman (1962) and American writer Audrey Niffenegger (1963). Sunday is similarly overflowing with literary types born on this day, among them American author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811), French poet and member of the French Resistance René Char (1907), Chinese-born American writer of books for young adults and children Lensey Namioka (1929), Polish-born American writer Jerzy Kosiński (1933) and American essayist, memoirist and radical feminist Vivian Gornick (1935).
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.
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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 these two – posted in recent weeks:
* Irresistible Items *
Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I often 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 on your literary rambles through cyberspace, here are a selection of interesting snippets:
If you would like to stay up to date with the latest Tove Jansson and Moomin news, views and events, please head over to Tove Telegraph. 🎩👜
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Granta: Independent People? – “What sets Scandinavian literature apart from the rest of European literature? Why, at its best, does its fiction seem to pack in more force, pound for pound?” Granta editor Thomas Meaney poses these questions in his introduction to issue #175, which is devoted to Scandinavia.
Herald Sun: 🦘 Aussie writer exposes industry’s ‘dark underbelly’ – With her satirical novel The Scoop, Aussie journalist Erin Van Der Meer delivers a debut seven years in the making – a sharp, insider’s skewering of the very industry in which she spent more than a decade trying to get ahead.
Literary Africa: Cursed Daughters – Check out issue #344 of Literary Africa, a “reader-supported community and incubator for a new generation of African writers”. Featured this week is Cursed Daughters – a “Nigerian story by Oyinkan Braithwaite” – plus “love in all its messy, complicated forms” from “a landmark anthology of love stories and Imbolo Mbue’s tender new novel, to a BBC adaptation” and much more.
Three Rooms Press: An Interview with Hédi Jaouad, Author of “The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt” – Peter Carlaftes of Three Rooms Press (see its article about this book) talks to French writer and scholar Hédi Jaouad about his recently published “landmark” biography of a radical adventuress, The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt, what first attracted him to the Swiss‑born writer, the three major turning points in her short life and more.
The Tearoom: 📖 The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe – Mariella Hunt speaks to Gail Crowther – an author who specialises in writing about ‘troublemaking and misunderstood women’ such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Dorothy Parker – about her new bookish biography, Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe and, more broadly, about Monroe’s reading habits.
The European Review of Books: 🪖 KRIEG – Sander Pleij on “Stefan Zweig, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann [and] Romain Rolland: lessons from the trenches, for AI models”.
Toronto Star (via Archive Today): 🍁 Margaret Atwood’s her mom. Graeme Gibson’s her dad. Here’s why first-time author Jess Gibson never asked them for career advice – “You might not recognize her name at first. And it really shouldn’t matter”, says Deborah Dundas. “Jess Gibson, who just turned 50, recently published her first book, a volume of short stories titled The Good Eye, filled with murders, plot twists and dark humour.”
Two pieces on the death of Marjane Satrapi:
Le Monde: Marjane Satrapi, author of ‘Persepolis,’ dies at 56 – “The French-Iranian artist and film director ‘died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,’ people close to her said.” She will be most widely remembered for Persepolis, an autobiographical story about a girl’s coming of age in Iran and Europe in the eighties.
What to Read Now: Marjane Satrapi – “Only the other day [Caroline Sanderson] was thinking [she] should write something about [her] abiding love of graphic non-fiction. Then came awful news – that one of the greatest of graphic non-fiction writers and artists, Marjane Satrapi had died at the age of only 56.”
Womack’s Wanderings: Two Worlds and Their Ways by Ivy Compton-Burnett – “Education, the home, and corruption” is the sub‑heading this week as Philip Womack continues with his “foray into the dark and troubling milieu of [English novelist] Ivy Compton‑Burnett”. He has “now reached her 1949 novel, Two Worlds and Their Ways,” which, we are told, is “set, as usual, in a vague kind of 19th century country house.”
Stop Hiding Under the Desk: Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Stories: Maeve Binchy’s Writing Process – Helen Redfern explains how Irish novelist Maeve Binchy “transformed ordinary lives into unforgettable stories” – inspiring her “own writing journey.”
Books of Titans: 📖 The Topic-and-Timeframe Method – Erik Rostad explains “how to turn any interest into a reading list”. He uses King Arthur and trees as examples here, but his topic‑and‑timeframe technique can be applied to any subject or desired duration.
LARB: The Failure of Bildungsroman – Reuven Pinnata writes: “In Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan’s new novel [The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks (translated by Annie Tucker)], crime and its punishment are the ultimate grammar of collectivity.”
Martha’s Monthly: 🏖️ ️A Translated Summer Reading Guide – “Reading in the summer is special, and while some may disagree, I think it is the best season for being a reader”, says book critic, writer and reader Martha Adams. In her latest guide, she shares “27 translated books that [she considers] great summer reads, with an additional 13 [she hopes to] read this summer” – a generous forty titles in all.
The Bibliophile: 🍁 Best Canadian Series 2026 – In this slightly older article, Ashley Van Elswyk lists all seventy-six contributors to this year’s three anthologies, including those selected by Brian Bethune for inclusion in Best Canadian Essays 2026.
The American Scholar: Canonical Contempt – “It is usually a mistake to apply contemporary standards to a writer who lived centuries ago”, says Michael O’Donnell, but it appears to him, after reading Martha Saxton’s forthcoming The Conversions of Edward Gibbon: A Modern Biography, that “even in the 18th century, Edward Gibbon’s misogyny set him apart”.
Dr. Andrew Higgins Elvish Musings: 🛸 Exploring Invented Languages – In his latest piece about language invention in early Sci‑fi, Dr Andrew Higgins investigates Percy Greg’s 1880, Mars‑based Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record, which, he says, is often referred to as “the originator of the ‘sword and planet’ subgenre of science fiction”.
TNR: 🕵 The Crimes Georges Simenon Declined to Investigate – “New editions of his ‘hard’ novels show an obsession with furtive desires and misdeeds—and an uncanny obliviousness to the horrors under his nose”, says Scott Bradfield.
Pens and Poison: The Russian Word English Can’t Translate – “There’s a Russian word that appears six times in the first four chapters of Crime and Punishment, says Liza Libes. However, “no English translator has ever understood it correctly.”
AP: 🪖 A rare Edith Wharton story is unearthed about the gap between everyday life and the horrors of WWI – “When World War I broke out in 1914, Edith Wharton’s initial response was less as a storyteller in search of material than as a citizen and intrepid witness”, writes Hillel Italie of The Men Who Saved the World.
New Voices Down Under: 🦘 🎶🎶🎶 Cattle and Cane, Streets of Your Town and now Songwriters on the Run! Books to make your heart sing 🎶🎶🎶 – “The Go-Betweens’ songs formed the backdrop of life in the 1980s. Now singer/ songwriter Robert Forster has a novel and it’s a cracker. Plus two novels that couldn’t be any more different.” Meredith Jaffe presents the latest edition of New Voices – “a newsletter dedicated to showcasing the best of Australia’s [newly released] fiction from debut novelists.”
LSE: 📚 The best bookshops in Gijón, Spain – “In this guide, Paula de la Cruz-Fernández takes us on a tour of [her] favourite bookshops in Gijón, Spain.”
The Upstairs Window: 10 more underappreciated books – A tantalising selection of lesser-known titles, described here by Blair as “cult classics and under-the-radar favourites you may not have read”.
4Columns: 🎨 Paying Attention – In Paying Attention: Essays on Art and Culture, novelist, short story writer and cultural critic Lynne Tillman’s latest collection of art writing,” Liz Brown finds “meaning may not arrive, but attention persists.”
The Guardian: 📖 I devoured classic novels as a teenager. In a world of distractions, can I relearn how to read them? – Ioan Marc Jones writes: “I devoured classic novels as a teenager. In a world of distractions, can I relearn how to read them? In less than a decade, surrounded by screens, I lost my ability to read some of the best books ever written. But, inspired by the Guardian’s 100 best novels list, I was determined to get it back”.
Meer: “Sophie’s world”: a journey through philosophy – Sophie’s World, Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder’s 1995 “story of Sophie Amundsen and Hilda Molle Knag, one a fictional character seeking to escape the bounds of fictional reality and the other a schoolgirl reading a book”, was originally written for children “as an introduction to philosophy” but, according to Tracey Madeley Jones, “it is a good starting point for adults wishing to learn about significant thinkers.”
From My Bookshelf: 📚 Yiddish Has Not Yet Said Its Last Word – Peter C. Meilaender on “the Yiddish Book Center and [author of Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books] Aaron Lansky’s remarkable salvage operation to rescue Yiddish books and culture”.
The Irish Times: 🏆 The winter place: from the US rat race to a writing course in Ireland – An American writer who sold her home to move with her young family to Dublin for a creative writing master’s degree at Trinity College’s Oscar Wilde Centre has won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction with The Correspondent.
Armchair Notes: Did Hart Woo the Way? – David Bentley Hart’s “translation seems motivated by pure affection and guided by a fidelity to something beautiful he found” in the legendary Chinese philosopher’s poetry. Sam Granger reviews Tao Te Ching: A New Translation.
Words Without Borders: 🕵 With the Revolver in the Library: Hélène Bessette’s Twenty Minutes of Silence – The German‑Canadian writer and critic Hannah Weber tells us that French novelist Hélène Bessette’s Twenty Minutes of Silence (translated by Kate Briggs), first published in 1955, “is a loose interpretation of a murder mystery [in which] a man is dead and his son has killed him [but might the perpetrator have been] his wife?”
en.philenews: David Connolly: “We believed we could change the world” – “David Connolly, translator of Greece’s greatest modern poets has devoted his life to bringing Greek literature to the world. [During] the International Academic Conference on Elytis held in Nicosia [Cyprus], where he delivered the opening address, [he spoke to Diana Aza] about his visits to the legendary poet’s flat on Skoufa Street, his childhood fascination with Greece [and] the glamour of a vanished era”.
Elle Reads Library Books: 🏖️ The Unhinged Beach Reads List Nobody Asked For (But Everyone Needs) – Elle shares a selection of books you might find in her beach bag – and it doesn’t consist of the usual titles with “pastel covers [depicting] beach chairs”, which “you can read with half your attention while someone asks whether you want another drink.” Instead, you’ll discover books she considers “so good that [she] will sit in direct sun past the point of sunburn rather than go inside and lose [her] place.”
The Times (via Archive Today): 🛸 Nightmare among the sand dunes— JG Ballard’s haunting 1965 sci-fi – “The Drought imagines a world without rain where people and escaped zoo animals scrabble for survival”, says “fully paid‑up Ballardian” M. John Harrison of English author J.G. Ballard’s apocalyptic dystopian novel, first published in 1964.
Book Post: ✍ Notebook: On Reviewing – “What do book critics do that is distinct from the opinions other people [who] now have so many means of expressing to the general public? Do they bring anything special or valuable to the table?” asks Ann Kjellberg. Here she discusses the “creeping obsolescence” of the book reviewer.
The Federal: Why literary translators feel their work is finally getting its due in India – Following the announcement of the latest International Booker Prize, […] veteran translators Malini Seshadri and Shubhashree Desikan [spoke to Pramila Krishnan about] literary translation, cultural nuance, the use of AI in translation, and […] growing global recognition.”
LARB: 🦄 Off, and Back On, with Her Head – “In her debut novel The Beheading Game (2026), poet and essayist Rebecca Lehmann takes this vibrant afterlife delightfully literally, proposing an Anne Boleyn who, after her execution, reawakens in a repurposed arrow chest, miffed that she didn’t warrant a proper coffin”, writes Sophia Richardson.
The Hedgehog Review: Companions on Parnassus – “Making ends meet—and writing timeless poetry—in Greenwich Village and Ischia.” Alan Jacobs on “W.H. Auden and James Schuyler in life and literature”.
The Culturist: 🫣 Where to Start With H.P. Lovecraft – “Lovecraftian horror clearly resonates with people today”, we are told in this piece on “why horror matters”, but “to better understand why” this should be, we first “must turn to the work of Lovecraft himself.”
Sydney Review of Books: 🦘 Living in Australia, Reading in Chinese – “After English, Mandarin and Cantonese are two of the most widely spoken languages in Australia. Late last year, Wing Kuang spoke with two booksellers in Sydney and Melbourne to pull back the curtain on Australia’s Chinese-language reading scene.”
The Broken Compass: The ten best books about the Crusades – Earlier this year The Telegraph asked Mathew Lyons to “pick ten of the best books on the Crusades, covering both fiction and non-fiction.” Here he shares the list and reflects on the thinking behind his choices.
Ancillary Review of Books: 🫣 The Ear Is the Organ of Fear: Review of Mónica Ojeda’s Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun – “If noir is having a Scandinavian moment, horror would appear to be having a Latin American one.” Matthew Eatough reviews Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda’s Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun (translated by Sarah Booker), a psychedelic novel that probes the “terrifying existential questions hiding just beneath the surface of our everyday reality.”
The Korea Herald: What Korea is reading in 2026 – Last year Korea’s “bestseller lists were dominated by the works of [Nobel Prize winner] Han Kang”, however, “a different picture has emerged” in 2026, says Hwang Dong-hee, with a “wave of new Korean and international novels [heralding] a broader revival of literary fiction among readers.”
Japan Forward: 🦘🪖 Australians, Japanese, and Espionage on the Eve of the Pacific War – In his latest book, Loyalty Australians, Japanese and Espionage on the Eve of the Pacific War, “Nick Hordern examines Australia-Japan relations in the prewar years and Australian fears of collaboration and espionage.”
JSTOR Daily: The Evolution of Britain’s Invasion Fiction – Ivan Kreilkamp considers the ways in which “fears of foreign plots and national decline moved from nineteenth-century novels into today’s thrillers.”
Asian Review of Books: 📚 “Cultural Mavericks: The Business and Politics of Independent Bookselling in China” by Zheng Liu – “Cultural Mavericks traces the rise of independent bookselling in China over the last twenty years”, writes Jonathan Chatwin in his review of a book “founded in scrupulous qualitative research”.
Cleveland Review of Books (via Archive Today): The End of Style: Defoe to DeWitt – Chapman Caddell offers an in‑depth review of Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s remarkable labyrinth of books‑within‑books, Your Name Here.
A Triple Tolkien:
Personal Canon Formation: Tolkienian Deep Time II: The Mountain, the Abyss, and the Hythe – “Or, to Hell and back” – John Halbrooks examines the ways in which Milton and Tolkien explored “deep time”.
The Joy of Old Books: I own a book that Tolkien scribbled in – While Harriet suspects this piece about her annotated copy of Words and Idioms by Logan Pearsall Smith “will mainly be of interest [to] the etymology geeks”, it will, without doubt, inspire envy in “Tolkien superfans”.
Caught by the River: Book of the Month: June – Read an excerpt from the newly published Rough Edges, in which Natasha Carthew explores “the villages, towns and cities of [Britain’s] coast, meeting the people fighting to keep these places alive.”
The Telegraph (via Archive Today): Life lessons from Hannibal Lecter? The 10 literary characters who give the best advice – “From moral and spiritual guidance to tips on style and romance, [Claire Allfree very much hopes you] don’t forget to listen to the fictional mentors in your life”.
The Middling Place: 📖✍ The Reading Habit That Changed How I Understand Books – “How a pencil, a few questions, and a margin can transform the way you read”. PhD student Sabrina Nesbitt shares all she knows on the art of book annotation.
The New York Times (via Archive Today): This Infamous British Spy Ring Fed the Soviets Secrets for Years – Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire by Antonia Senior “chronicles the careers of five men who betrayed their country — with devastating results”, says Jennifer Szalai.
Jonathan Bate’s Literary Remains: Left, Right: Perry Anderson on Anthony Powell – “What is it about [English novelist Anthony Powell’s] A Dance to the Music of Time that is so attractive to left-wing thinkers, such as Christopher Hitchens […] and, to an extraordinary degree, Perry Anderson?” wonders Jonathan Bate.
The Saturday Paper: 🦘 Laura McPhee-Browne Worry Doll – “The Mayan artefact that gives Laura McPhee-Browne’s thrilling new novel its title doesn’t appear until well into the second half, and when it does, it slips by so quickly you could easily miss it. Lacey, the second of the novel’s two protagonists, finds the doll in a ‘small threaded bag’ on a bookshelf that ‘has been sitting there for so long that no one sees it anymore’.” James Bradley reviews the Melbourne-based Australian writer and social worker’s exploration of love and desire in Worry Doll.
Two Prousts in one:
The Lamp: Gordon Wood’s Proust – Editor Nic Rowan recalls the pioneering historian of early American history, Gordon Wood (1933–2026), reading Remembrance of Things Past at ninety.
Dublin Review of Books: Proustian Thoughts from Ireland – “A new collection of essays shows that the author of À la recherche du temps perdu had a major impact on Irish life, deeper and more extensive than commonly thought.” Eamon Maher shares his thoughts on Max McGuinness and Michael Cronin’s The Irish Proust: Cultural Crossings from Beckett to McGahern.
BBC Kent: 🚫 Historian brands museum’s Dickens guidance ‘ludicrous’ – “Museum guidance advising staff how to address Charles Dickens’ views on race and empire has been branded ‘ludicrous’ by a local historian”, reports Robert Boddy.
Gizmodo: Someone Dropped This Notebook in a Medieval Toilet 700 Years Ago—and It’s Still Legible – “An ‘exceptionally well-preserved’ notebook pulled from a late Middle Ages latrine was found alongside silk scraps believed to once be fancy toilet paper”, reports Matthew Phelan.
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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.
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