An end of week recap
“To read books seriously is to be staggered by the knowledge of how many more books will remain beyond your ken. It’s like looking up at the star-filled sky.”
– James Fallows
It is also Alice in Wonderland Day, marking the July afternoon in 1862 when Charles Dodgson (better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll) first spun Alice’s adventures for the Liddell sisters during a leisurely boat trip up the River Isis.
Among those born on this day history are American novelist and short story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804), Indian poet and novelist Nanak Singh (1897), leading American literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905), Austrian poet and novelist Christine Lavant (1915), Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun (1941), South African thriller novelist Deon Meyer (1958) and Cuban-born American novelist Cristina García (1958). Then on Sunday it will be the turn of French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist and critic Jean Cocteau (1889), British writer, aesthete and prominent member of the Bright Young Things Harold Acton (1904), Northern Irish author Maurice Leitch (1933), Italian-Canadian poet Pier Giorgio di Cicco (1949), Irish novelist, playwright and poet Sebastian Barry (1955), American writer Allegra Goodman (1967) and Soviet-born American writer Gary Shteyngart (1972).
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 opinion 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 two – both posted in the last week or so:
* 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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Columbia Magazine: 🗽 Beverly Gage Takes Us on a Historical Road Trip through the United States – “In This Land Is Your Land, a guide to some of America’s most consequential (and at times controversial) historical sites, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage tells the story of the United States through visits to museums, theme parks, battle reenactments, and more as the nation celebrates 250 years”, writes Julia Joy.
Le Monde (via Archive Today): 🗼🍷🥐 ‘Despite the tracksuits, we have brains’: The French youth staging literary battles in housing projects – “The ‘projects book club’ has become a sensation on social media. By pitting Zola against Flaubert and Adam Smith against Karl Marx with humour, ‘Geronimo’ and his friends aim to bring writers and sociologists to new audiences”, reports Sevin Rey-Sahin.
The New Yorker (via Archive Today): 🎤 László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails – “The Nobel laureate on his notoriously long sentences, our estrangement from beauty, and why he would ‘never voluntarily reread’ one of his books.” In this interview Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai talks to Merve Emre on subjects ranging from perfectionism to European culture and his relief at being old.
The Decade Project: ☭ The Foundation Pit—Andrey Platonov – “The Foundation Pit is not exactly a dystopian novel. While it depicts a world made wretched by intrusive state control, there is nothing futuristic about it.” Robert Boyd Skipper turns his thoughts to the Soviet Russian novelist, short story writer and poet Andrey Platonov’s 1930 classic, which blended experimental style with profound critiques of Stalin-era policies. “Despite [his] initial misgivings, the book moved [him].”
Afrocritik: 14 Books for Anyone Trying to Make Sense of Nigerian Democracy – Joseph Jonathan “presents fourteen books that together form a serious reader’s guide to Nigerian democracy; its historical roots, its political logic, its failures in practice, and the arguments still being made about what it owes the people it governs.”
Quill & Quire: 🍁🎤 Bestsellers Q&A: Elinor Florence on the success of her historical novels – Cassandra Drudi chatted to Canadian author Elinor Florence about transitioning from journalism to fiction, penning her successful novels Wildwood and Finding Flora and her forthcoming book Grasslands.
Inside Story: 🦘 No one goes to jail for bouncing a cheque – Nina Porter An intriguing memoir explores the slippery terrain between fact and fiction – Aged only eight when her mother was sent to jail and their idyllic life in rural Victoria was shattered, Fernanda Dahlstrom’s memoir, The Framing, is “a testament to her instinct for finding good people to support her along the way”.
Emily’s Corner: 📖 Literary Theory for Beginners – “Literary theory doesn’t need to be difficult,” says Emily, who has put together a clear, friendly companion to the literary terms you need to know.
TLS (via Archive Today): 🗽 Quiet magic – “The fiction of a family that happens to resemble Keith Waldrop’s family”. Recently republished with an introduction by Ben Lerner, Magnus Rena looks back at Light While There is Light: An American History — a historical novel with the feel “of a memoir that takes place across the same settings and timeline of Waldrop’s early life in the Midwest and South of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s”, first published in 1993.
Jane Austen’s World: Is Mr. Collins Autistic? – “It’s not often that I read something that invites me to look at one of my favorite books, Pride and Prejudice, in a totally new way”, says Brenda S Cox. Recently, after giving a presentation on ‘Mr. Collins: Jane Austen’s Most Memorable Clergyman’, “a participant asked if [she] had considered the idea of Collins being on the autistic spectrum. [Brenda] hadn’t.” The lady recommended reading So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in Pride and Prejudice by Phyllis Ferguson Bottomer. Having now read the book, Brenda shares her reflections.
On being a professional academic in an anti-intellectual age: 🚫 Phoenix Publications Ltd is live – Professor Jo Phoenix has been a criminologist for over three decades but as an academic who was “cancelled”, now describes herself as a “cautionary tale”. She has launched Phoenix Publications Ltd because she is sick of “watching good books die”. It will publish the titles that traditional presses are too intimidated to touch.
Reactor: 🦄 Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird – “S&S is making a comeback in a very narrow way”, says Cynthia Ward, arguing here that “we need to restore the genre’s essential weirdness.”
The Common Reader: Perpetual Summer in the “feminine middlebrow” – “What I had not learned in the arrogance of adolescence is that there is no such thing as ‘women’s writing’, there are only novels and writers, some of who are women, and some of who happen to be as absorbing, fascinating, and mind-occupying as those books we would never call ‘the male highbrow’. Henry Oliver discusses his “ongoing love of twentieth century ‘women’s writing’”.
AnOther: ✉️🗼🍷🥐 Albert Camus’ Secret Love Letters Make Modern Dating Feel Lazy – Albert Camus Maria Casarès: Letters 1944-1959, a “collection of more than 850 letters between the author and actress Maria Casarès, paints a love story that majors in celebrity, glamour, heartbreak and obsession”, says Martha Alexander of this first English translation of these impassioned letters.
Travelling in Books: Five Historical Novels From Off the Beaten Path – Kim suggests “Five novels to try if you’re looking for something that’s not yet another Tudor Tale” including J.R. Thorp’s Learwife, “about the Shakespearean King Lear’s wife, who is hardly spoken of in the play.”
The Conversation: 🦘 Australians are hungry for new history books – but historians are pressured not to publish locally – A new study shows that workplace priorities for Australian historians make it harder for their work to reach Australian readers – despite strong public interest.
Two for the autodidacts: 🧠📖
Read and Think Deeply: Building A Thinking Life – Ryan Hall has reached the final part of his excellent series on becoming a more serious reader. This week he examines “going from being a consumer to a thinker” and looks at how to “make reading and thinking deeply a priority in your life.”
The Times (via Archive Today): Self-education is still the key to a happy life – “Fixation on university degrees means we’ve forgotten our grand tradition of autodidacts — now’s the time for a revival”, argues James Marriott.
North Meridian Press: 🎤 Lee Upton Discusses Her New Book, “The Withers”: Interview – With the publication this month of The Withers, the latest novel by American writer Lee Upton, now seems like a good time to bring back an interview conducted last winter with Wesley R. Bishop in which she answered questions about her latest work (set in the aftermath of a devastating epidemic), the writing process, and “what the pandemic novel can still show us in a world after the onslaught of COVID.”
AP: ‘The tale of KAHO,’ a Haruki Murakami novel with a female protagonist, goes on sale – “Haruki Murakami’s new book went on sale in Japan on Friday, but dozens of enthusiastic fans marked the release at a countdown event at a major Tokyo bookstore to get their first copies as soon as the clock struck midnight”, reports Mari Yamaguchi.
The Baffler (via Archive Today): ☭ The Music of Destruction – “[Vasily] Grossman’s life was inextricably bound up with the trajectory of the Soviet state”; indeed, his “two major novels, Stalingrad and Life and Fate, form a mirrored portrayal of Soviet society and WWII”, writes Mathias Fuelling in his in‑depth review of From the Front Line: Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin, 1941–1945 (translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler) – a collection of forty‑nine of Grossman’s finest, many newly unearthed, articles for the Red Star newspaper.
The Indian Express: 📖🎭 Makarand Sathe’s plays use myth, time and memory to expose the crises of modern life – “Reading plays is always a challenge”, says Sundar Sarrukai, but in Exit and Other Plays, “Sathe offers an insight into the act of producing an imagination that helps read a play.”
The Telegraph (via Archive Today): Zahra Joya escaped the Taliban. Her memoir is a harrowing but vital read – “The Afghan journalist’s horrifying work of reportage-cum-memoir reveals the hell into which her homeland has descended”, writes Lucy Thynne in this piece about Zahra Joya’s The Vanishing Girl of Kabul.
Miller’s Book Review: 🗽🤖🛸 Kurt Vonnegut’s Ambivalent War on AI – Joel J Miller shares a few thoughts on Kurt Vonnegut’s “prescient [1952] debut novel”, Player Piano, which “presents a radically centralized and automated vision of postwar America.”
Ancillary Review of Books: 🫣 Accepting The Strange: Review of Jeffrey Ford’s Pandemonium Waltz – “When approaching a work like Jeffrey Ford’s Pandemonium Waltz, a recent collection from an author who’s been putting out master-level work for decades, it’s a little intimidating—with so much already said about Ford’s short fiction, how does one approach it in a new light, or add to the conversation? Thankfully, Ford makes it easy”, says Sam Reader.
The Armenian Mirror-Spectator: 🗼🍷🥐 A Literary Mind Etched by History – “Marina Dédéyan is a French novelist of Armenian and Russian descent [who] was born in the port city of Saint-Malo and spent her [youth] in Montpellier.” The “daughter of medieval historian Gérard Dédéyan and the granddaughter of literary scholar Charles Dédéyan […,] her first novel, Moi, Constance, princesse d’Antioche [I, Constance, Princess of Antioch was] the real story of an Armeno-French princess during the Crusades”.
Smithsonian Magazine: 🌋 Scientists Have Deciphered the Surviving Fragments of a 2,000-Year-Old Philosophical Treatise Frozen in Time by Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption – “The papyrus manuscript was part of a vast library preserved by volcanic ash. Now, the remaining passages—which examine ethics, knowledge and human nature—are accessible for the first time since 79 C.E.”, reveals Ellen Wexler.
The Marginalian: ✍️🛸🦄 The Meaning of Maturity: Ursula K. Le Guin on What It Really Takes to Grow Up – “Without compassion for who we used to be, we can never fully own who we are or [be] open to who we can become”, writes Maria Popova. This, she says, is what Ursula K. Le Guin explored “in a fragment of her wholly fantastic 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy […], which also gave us her abiding wisdom on the meaning of life.” Incidentally, the collection has been revised and will be republished by Silver Press later this year.
Granta: The Other Norwegian – “When Fosse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2023, he was often described in the press as a writer of a ‘minority language’, but just what that meant was often obscure to anyone outside of Norway.” Damion Searls on translating Jon Fosse and Nynorsk, a minority Norwegian language.
The Newtown Review of Books: 🦘 ANGELA O’KEEFFE Phantom Days. Reviewed by Ann Skea – Phantom Days, the latest novel from Australian author Angela O’Keeffe, “brings a book to life – a book that is sentient, observant, and full of opinions”, finds Ann Skea. You can also read Lisa Hill’s excellent review of the same at ANZ LitLovers LitBlog: Phantom Days (2026), by Angela O’Keeffe.
Women Writing the World: 🛸🦄🚫 China: Science Fiction, Fantasy & Censorship – “When [Lilian Nattel] decided to tackle China for [her] next essay, [she] faced a dilemma. This is a country where everyone is under surveillance–readers and writers.” She wondered how people wrote in such circumstances and “decided to start with a genre”: science fiction and fantasy. “To get a feel for it, [she] read all the women writers in three anthologies” and the “2016 Hugo prize winning novelette, Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang.”
The Believer: ✍️ On Description – “If a depiction only distinguishes one thing from another, what else is lost?” asks Alfred Jung Lee, after it occurred to him that “when one describes something, one is also describing how the described deviates from the norm, and therefore also describing what is and is not normal.”
Seven Stories Press: Approaching the Absolute – Argentine writer, journalist and screenwriter Daniel Guebel’s “English-language debut, The Absolute, translated by Jessica Sequeira […], is the story of a family of artists, scientists, and politicians who are responsible for the great cultural and political advancements of modernity, yet remain mysteriously unknown.” Here SSP share the Translator’s Note from the 2022 edition in which Sequeira reveals “the complexities, and the joys of translating this multi-faceted novel”.
Deadline: 🍁🤖 Margaret Atwood Details Her First & Only Encounter With AI & Shares Her Assessment: “It’s Garbage In, Garbage Out” — Babell Literary Festival – Appearing recently at the inaugural Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal, the legendary Canadian author Margaret Atwood spoke about Artificial Intelligence, concluding in her characteristically sardonic tone: “The thing about AI is that it’s garbage in, garbage out,” reports Zac Ntim. Atwoodites may also like to know that her latest publication, Significant Moments: Six Stories on the Joys and Trials of Motherhood – a “miniature array of perfect stories” – is now available to purchase.
Andrew Doyle: Axe: Stories That Cut Deep – Inspired by “Kafka’s injunction that ‘a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us’”, Axe: Stories That Cut Deep gathers pieces by an “array of authors” (including Joyce Carol Oates, Sherman Alexie, Chuck Palahniuk, Lionel Shriver, Andrew Doyle, Richard North Patterson, Jeffrey Ford, David Sedaris and Alice Walker) from “Heresy Press, a publisher that was established to promote artistic freedom and to push back against the conformity and self-censorship of our times.”
ABC: Inventing devotion: 🦘✝️ How books taught us to feel with one another – “Devotional writing was a medieval practice that entangled reading with feeling and made meaning collaboratively, over time, through networks of human communities who were progressively transformed by reading about how to feel”, says Sophie Gee.
Two Rowlings in one: ͛⚯🪄
Independent: Letters from JK Rowling to terminally ill fan fetch almost £10,000 at auction – “An archive of heartfelt letters written by author JK Rowling to a terminally ill fan of her best-selling Harry Potter series has sold for almost £10,000 at auction”, reports Carla Feric.
The Standard: Queen welcomes JK Rowling to Palace of Holyroodhouse – Queen Camilla “held an audience with Harry Potter creator JK Rowling at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. [They were] pictured smiling and standing side-by-side […] as the pair met to discuss the importance of young people having access to books.”
The Culturist: Short Stories You Can Read in One Sitting – “In discussions of great literature, novels get the lion’s share of attention. All too often, however, one genre in particular is left out of the conversation entirely: the short story.” Here are “5 essentials of the Western canon” from this “community of lifelong learners pursuing the True, Good, and Beautiful.”
The Chosun: Korean Literature Workshop Targets Chinese Market’s 10 Million Potential – “First Korean-Chinese translation workshop bridges literary gaps, revives Hallyu through collaboration between authors and students”, reports Hwang Ji-yoon.
Notes from the Neogene: 🗽🕵️♂️ Dream Sequence – “The private eye is a satanic figure [and] above all else, an individualistic operator, often uneasy with women and other people in general, despite their smoothness, their wiseass edge.” MH Rowe on Dashiell Hammett’s classic 1930 crime novel The Maltese Falcon.
TIME: The Scientific Case for Reading on Paper, Not Screens – “Norway is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Until recently, it was also one of the most enthusiastic adopters of screen-based education technologies”, says Markham Heid. But opinions there are changing.
Air Mail: 🗽 The Revolutionary Spirits – “America’s Founding Fathers were fueled by a belief in liberty, democracy, and self-determination—and, as a new book points out, extraordinary amounts of rum”. Boston historian Brooke Barbier reveals how they were fortified by more than just a belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution. 🍺🥴
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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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