An end of week recap

“My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.”
– Rick Bass

There are plenty of international celebrations and days of remembrance taking place over the weekend, though seemingly none that speak directly to the literary world – so, purely for the fun of it, I thought I would share a few happenings here.

Should you find yourself dwelling on what might have been, you may benefit from observing Toss Away the ‘Could Haves’ and ‘Should Haves’ Day, when we are encouraged to cast off all burdensome thoughts of missed opportunities. Alternatively, you may feel moved to mark Nelson Mandela International Day or simply ease back in your deckchair and make the most of World Listening Day. Furthermore, you need not be beleaguered by negative thoughts on Sunday either, for it is Stick Out Your Tongue Day. So there! 😜

If you happen to be in Belgium this week, you can join the Gentse Feesten – a vibrant ten‑day cultural festival honouring the port city of Ghent. Also, if you are in Ireland between now and 26^th July, you might care to nip over to Galway for the Galway International Arts Festival. Finally, for those of us basking (or baking) in unusually hot weather, we can join our American and Canadian friends in celebrating National Ice Cream Month. 🍨

Literary types born on this day in history include English novelist and illustrator William Makepeace Thackeray (1811), French poet Tristan Corbiere (1845), American author of short stories and novels Jessamyn West (1902), British poet Elizabeth Jennings (1926), Canadian novelist and short-story writer Margaret Laurence (1926), Soviet and Russian poet and writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933), American author and a pioneer of New Journalism Hunter S. Thompson (1937) and American journalist and author Elizabeth Gilbert (1969). 🎉 And on Sunday, it is the turn of Swiss poet and writer Gottfried Keller (1819), American poet, journalist and political activist Alice Dunbar Nelson (1875), Russian poet and playwright Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893), Scottish physician and novelist A.J. Cronin (1896), American crime writer Joseph Hansen (1923), Australian fantasy writer Garth Nix (1963) and British novelist Lisa Jewell (1968).

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 Bookcellar * 

Retrieved from our archive this week: (1) This time last year, Valerie O’Riordan’s review of English author Celia Fremlin’s crime novel The Jealous One appeared in Bookmunch. First published in 1965 – and reissued by Faber & Faber in 2025 – “from the first page” of this “faultlessly choreographed” mystery we are drawn into Fremlin’s “domestic horror blended with […] suburban comedy of manners”, where a woman wakes from a “feverish nightmare” about murdering her seductive, two-faced, husband-stealing neighbour – only to discover that she has gone missing in real life. Might she “somehow” have “shoved” her off a cliff? The dialogue, we are told, is as “sharp as any murder weapon, and the weary details of domestic life […] lend a superb edge to [the protagonist’s] seething frustrations”. Find out why Valerie gives it an “enthusiastic thumbs up” at “Perfect summer reading!” – The Jealous One by Celia Fremlin. (2) With Homer’s epic poem now adapted into a fantasy action film, you should without a doubt return to David Wiley’s detailed 2018 critique of Emily Wilson’s “go-to” translation of the Odyssey at A Certain Slant. In On First Looking into Wilson’s Homer he describes The Odyssey (2017) as standing “unique among modern Homer translations—as well as among all English translations of the poem.” Wilson, he says, “calls a slave a slave (rather than a ‘thrall’ or a ‘maid’) and makes no attempt to soften the poem’s brutal sexism, classism, and imperialism”, allowing her version to “stand as close as [possible] to the original”. 

* 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 all the more difficult to pick only this one – posted in the last week or two:

The Bane Witch, by Ava Morgyn – Over at A Bookish Type, academic librarian Annie Smith engages with a somewhat plot‑stuffed witchy fantasy, The Bane Witch by Houston‑based author Ava Morgyn. We meet protagonist Piers Corbin “on the morning she finally sets her plan into motion” to flee her “monstrous husband” by faking her own death. Taking sanctuary with a kindly aunt – one of the “odd women” in her family able to “eat plants that would kill most people” (although Piers, unlike her female relatives, has never used her “penchant for pokeweed” to see off “very bad men”) – she discovers her Bane Witch birthright. This alone would have offered narrative aplenty for Annie, but throwing “a serial killer into the mix” was, in her view, one incident too many. Please read her full review to discover which “elements” she enjoyed and which, she felt, belonged in a second (perhaps even a third) novel.

* 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 happenings, please head over to Tove Telegraph. Don’t miss out on events happening near you! 🎩👜

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Bookish: 🏖️ Summer Books 2026: The books of summer – “In summer, time blurs in slow motion; days shimmer in the heat. The world is in repose. With it comes an interruption to the rules as the haze makes limbs and morals indolent. In this liminal time, when usual service is paused, we can try on a different skin or manner – our holiday self,” writes Natasha Poliszczuk by way of introduction to her selection of recent novels “drenched in sunshine”. 

The Conversation: 🦘 Who was First Nations resistance fighter Musquito? A historian investigates a legend – “Musquito’s life and death can be read through the lens of a history of invasion and resistance. Or of the difficulties of being placed between two worlds”, says Tim Rowse in this fascinating piece on Naomi Parry Duncan’s story of one of the best-known First Nations resistance fighters of the early colonies, Musquito: The real story of a legendary colonial warrior.

The Tearoom: 📖 On Dog-Eared Pages and Margin Notes – “Every reader has their own habits—small routines that make reading feel like a sacred rite, a quiet return to a place that is always waiting for them.” In her latest essay, Mariella expounds on “dog-eared pages, margin notes, and the quiet rituals that shape a reader’s life.”

The Paris Review: ✍️ César Aira’s Art of Not Editing – In a piece adapted from Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s introduction to Five Novels by César Aira (translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews) we learn about the Argentine author’s “deceptively simple writing process” and why he finds “a noisy café” the perfect place to work.

Noēma: 🦋 Animals Have Culture, Too – “From architectural traditions to ancient courtship rituals, evidence of animal cultures is overwhelming but underacknowledged”, says Ryan Huling, author of The Hidden Nations of Animals: A Grand Tour of Earth’s Wild Civilizations (illustrated by Oliver Uberti).

Nippon.com: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō: A Writer in Pursuit of Transcendent Beauty – “The Japanese writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō established himself as a pioneer of sensual literature with a profound interest in aesthetic matters and was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The year 2026 marks 140 years since his birth”, reveals Yamanaka Takeshi.

The New York Times (via Archive Today): 🕵️‍♂️ Golden Age Mysteries: A Starter Pack – “Interested in these classic novels, but not sure where to start?” Editor and “third-generation mystery addict” Sadie Stein suggests you “clear your schedule, pour yourself a drink […] and lock up the cyanide” before delving into her list of suggested Golden Age mystery novels.

Aeon: ☕ Loitering towards war – “While Vienna’s coffeehouses bred modernism, in Belgrade’s kafanas grew conspiracy and rage. Their clash consumed Europe”, says writer and historian Anton Cebalo.

The Conversation: ⚢ The 16th‑century lesbian poet who could be Scotland’s answer to Gentleman Jack – In her review of Ashley Douglas’s new biography With My Own Hand: The secret life of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s sixteenth-century Sappho, Diane Watt describes Maitland as “an educated, intellectual and self-determining woman and who found (and, sadly, lost) her big love.”

The Irish Times (via Archive Today): The Red Mouth by Sheila Armstrong: A dazzling second novel as layered as the bog itself – “This tremendous book is concerned with the impact of the past upon the present”, says Neil Hegarty of The Red Mouth, Sheila Armstrong’s “dazzling second novel” about two discoveries made deep in an Irish bogland and the four strangers whose lives become intertwined in their wake. I should also like to point you towards Susan Osborne’s praiseful review at A Life in Books, The Red Mouth by Sheila Armstrong: Uncovering the past, in which she describes the book as “strikingly lyrical” and “almost hallucinatory”.

The Ink-Stained Desk: 🧙‍🐈‍⬛🔮 The Witch: A Literary History. – This week, in Christine Maree Reid’s thematic essay, she explores “witches and the way their portrayal has evolved from early literature and fairy tales, to the present.”

3:AM Magazine: 🦄 Animal Nightlife – Koushik Banerjea’s Animal Nightlife “immediately immerses the reader in a world of magical realism, layered language and music”, writes Elte Rauch. “We meet Ravi, Sean, and Vikram, three childhood friends from South London whose shared history binds them through deep loyalty and strong, albeit typical male-friendship kind of affection. They flock together like birds of a feather, quite literally, because one of the curious secrets they share is that all of them possess wings.”

A Narrative Of Their Own: 🗼🍷🥐 ‘The Image of Her’ – “A new edition of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Image of Her has recently been published […]. It features issues around the changing lives of women in 1960s France, as well as the falsities and edifice of bourgeois life, and the ways in which our children or the younger generation of women can lead us to remember our past selves.” Kate Jones explores “Simone de Beauvoir’s novel of bourgeois Paris life”.

Africa is a Country: 🗞️ Measured bodies and moving men – “In apartheid South Africa, Drum magazine showed Black readers what it meant to be modern. But not everyone got to be modern in the same way”, says Sabeeka Al-Kuwari.

The Republic of Letters: The Theology of Emily Brontë – Virginia Karnstein delves into “the nature of Emily Brontë’s faith, as can be ascertained through her poetry, her family, and the commentary of her sisters.”

Full Stop: 🪖 Arabesques – Serhiy Zhadan – “Translated from the Ukrainian by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, Arabesques features twelve narrowly focused vignettes set in war-time Kharkiv, brief snapshots from the lives of its residents that provide a roving gaze of a city at war”, says Eamon McGrath.

Luxe/Detour: 🎤✈️🦋 Julian Hoffman: the nature writer on moving to a Greek village and the book it took 25 years to write – With his memoir Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece appearing in paperback this month, we return to a feature about Anglo-Canadian author Julian Hoffman from a May issue of this luxury travel publication in which he talked about his latest book and what drew him and his wife to Prespa – “a remote village in the mountains of northwestern Greece.”

Times Now (via Archive Now): 📖 Why India Reads Its Authors Only After the West Approves Them – “From R.K. Narayan needing Graham Greene to Booker-driven reprint frenzies, a long pattern shows Indian readers embracing their own writers only after Western juries approve, and the habit carries real costs”, argues Girish Shukla.

The Seaboard Review of Books: 🍁⚠️ Excerpt: The View From Stansberry Lookout by James Gaitis – The View from Stansberry Lookout, a Canadian-centric eco-dystopian satire by “American lawyer, international arbitrator, and satirist James Gaitis” (described by author Will Ferguson as “a richly imagined satire of quantum doorways and dying republics engulfed in flames”), is a “cautionary tale […] come true.”

Hippocampus Magazine: ✍📖 REVIEW: Take This For the Pain: Essays on Writing and Life by Alex Boyd – “What Boyd has assembled in Take This for the Pain is […] an account of a life organized around the act of writing, and a simultaneous reflection on the act of reading that makes writing possible”, says Renée K. Nicholson. His collection, she continues, “showcase[s] a writing life that is also intimately shaped by reading.”

Two Tolkiens and a Lewis: 🧙‍♂️🍻🦁
Wardrobe Door: Lewis and Tolkien on ‘The Odyssey’ – Following the hullabaloo surrounding Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey, Aaron Earls wonders what J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis would have made of this cinematic interpretation – since both of them, he says, “appreciated Homer’s epic” and translated portions of it “during their Oxford exams.”
Personal Canon Formation: Gollum and the Fragmented Self – “Gollum is perhaps the most troubling figure in The Lord of the Rings for many readers. He reveals the fragmented, disassociated sense of self that many of us experience and that potentially deconstructs the narratives that we build in search of unity and coherence. We see ourselves in Gollum, and that is disorienting, frightening.” John Halbrooks suggests in this essay that “we are all Sméagol”.

Washington Independent Review of Books: ✍️ No Contact: Writers on Estrangement – Laura Fisher Kaiser tells us that “No Contact: Writers on Estrangement, an anthology edited by Jenny Bartoy, offers valuable perspective. In it, we hear from 32 writers […], most of whom have initiated estrangement in one form or another. That is, they made the deliberate and difficult decision to erect an invisible, deadening wall between themselves and a relative who treated them abominably.” You can also read Brianna Avenia-Tapper’s interview with the editor in Chicago Review of Books during which they discuss working on the collection: Composing a Chorus of Rebellion: A Conversation with Jenny Bartoy about “No Contact: Writers on Estrangement”.

Kill Your Darlings: 🦘🎤 Should We Be Publishing Fewer Books in Australia? – “With growing calls to address the viability of local literature, […] people across the book industry [have been asked for] their thoughts on the pace of Australian publishing.”

Big Think: 🛸 A universe with no humans: Strange sci-visions of intelligence escaping us – “From Gilded Age space dreams to AI’s cosmic endgame, fiction reveals how the drive to shed obligations to others can escalate.” Thomas Moynihan on A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future, John Jacob Astor IV’s 1894 science-fiction classic which “surveys the geopolitical state of the world in 2000”.

Himal Southasian: 🚂 Rahul Bhattacharya’s attempt at the Great Indian Novel – “Spanning three decades and multiple linguistic worlds, Bhattacharya’s Railsong writes India’s great events around the lives of its people – and not the other way around – reimagining the Great Indian Novel for the 21^st century”, finds Vikram Shah (requires email to access full article 🔓). If this has whetted your appetites, I recommend reading Lisa Hill’s review of the same at ANZ LitLovers LitBlog: Railsong (2026), by Rahul Bhattacharya. As you will see from her comments below, she was much impressed with this title.

Holly’s Literary Magic: 🏛️🔱🏺 Side Quests: Greek Mythology Reading Guide – In honour of Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of The Odyssey, Holly Fairall has put together an absolutely super “definitive list of books bringing Greek Mythology to life.” It’s a lively, generous guide that ranges from the familiar epics to more mischievous modern retellings, all offered with the kind of infectious enthusiasm that makes you want to drop everything and plunge straight back into gods, monsters and mortals behaving badly.

The Asian Age: 🥵 Book Review | How Literature Frames a Changing Planet – The title of The Climate Crossroads: Literature’s Encounter with a Planet on Fire is “misleading,” says Shashi Warrier, and although “the subtitle tries to set it right, […] it doesn’t quite succeed.” It is not, apparently “the story of a planet on fire”, but “the story of how stories about the fire on the planet have evolved over the last eight centuries or so, a sort of literature review.” Its author, the Indian-Bengali novelist and short story writer Rajat Chaudhuri, “is particularly well-placed to do this review”, we are assured, as “he is himself a well-known climate fiction (now cli-fi) writer and climate activist and was a book reviewer before he took to writing.”

Miller’s Book Review: 📖 Before You Panic About That Atlantic Reading Piece – In last week’s wind up I featured The End of Reading Is Here, a “grim prognosis” of literacy penned by Rose Horowitch for The Atlantic; this week, Joel J. Miller offers a far less gloomy rejoinder, meticulously picking apart several points in her essay that got his goat and suggesting, with a certain dry relish, that the sky may not be falling after all. Or as he puts it, it’s “easy to fear the future when we romanticize the past”.

BOMB Magazine: 🎤 Eoghan Walls by John Darnielle – “Eoghan Walls tells fantastic stories riddled with coincidence and unlikely events, but they read as if they took place in a recognizable world.” His latest literary thriller Field Notes from an Extinction – which is written in the form of a 19th-century notebook – follows “a fictitious English ornithologist sent by the Royal Society to a remote island off the Irish coast to document the Great Auk, who [instead] finds […] a feral, abandoned child and a population growing desperate around him.” Here Walls talks to John Darnielle about his new historical novel.

Dear Head of Mine: 📖✍ ️Can Reading Too Much Hurt Your Writing? – “This question arises not infrequently in the book world,” says Sean deLone. In his essay, he sets out to consider whether reading can ‘steal’ a writer’s voice – and whether one might, by reading deeply and well, read your way into becoming a great writer.

Griffith Review: 🦘📚 Confessions from a bookstore – Customers and visitors to Amplify Bookstore often sigh with envy at the idea of owning and operating an independent bookshop, say Jing Xuan and Marina Sano, owners of the anti‑racist social enterprise in West Melbourne. Yet, as they readily admit, all is “not as cosy as it seems”.

Caught by the River: 🦋☾☀︎🌱 Re-Wilding and Re-Childing Time with Rebecca Tamás – “Contributing editor Tallulah Brennan talks to Book of Mysteries [a blend of memoir, nature writing and ecological thinking] author Rebecca Tamás about wild time, children as animists, what kinds of seasons we deserve, and England as Stonehenge.”

BookTrib.: 🛸 The Story Eaters of Yamm by Kevin Hincker – “If you enjoy absurd humor, chaotic plots and over-the-top characters, you will love this book”, says Natalia Kavale in her review of Kevin Hincker’s The Story Eaters of Yamm, a “delightfully chaotic adventure” about a group of science fiction writers hired to gameplan an alien invasion.

The Writer’s Room: Henry James in Rye – Katie da Cunha Lewin, author of The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love, was delighted to visit Lamb’s House in Sussex – the home of American-British author Henry James. She did, however, wonder about “the missing secretary”.

Daily Mail: 🏖️ Melancholy and magic in this month’s historical fiction – Eithne Farry suggests three new historical novels to read in July, namely Roman Mornings by Matson Taylor, Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell and The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion by Beth Brower.

Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society: 🟣⚪🟢 Ray Strachey, Cambridge suffragist – Ann Kennedy Smith’s “historical theme for this month is Cambridge’s suffragists and suffragettes, and this week’s post is about a woman who became a friend of Virginia Woolf’s in 1909 and remained part of her Bloomsbury circle: Ray Strachey. Later, she would become one of the most influential figures in the fight for British women’s suffrage and employment rights in the first half of the twentieth century and write a book about it called The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain, published in 1928.”

From My Bookshelf: 📖 On Reading Too Many Books at One Time: How Many is Too Many? – “The question of how many books one can and should read at the same time is one on which book-lovers are sure to differ and about which a good debate can reliably be started”, writes Peter C. Meilaender. In the hope of doing so he shares here a “miscellany [of books]: Melville, Goodall, L’Engle, Lomax, Swahili Stories, Traiskirchen [and] Orwell”.

Publishers Weekly: Outsider Editions Wants the Backlist’s Outcasts – “A new reissue imprint at Doubleday offers a home to groundbreaking and hard-to-pin-down books that have disappeared from shelves”, reports David Varno.

La Bibliotrek | Read the World: ✈️ Exploring Tokyo Through Books – An exciting selection of books that “capture the spirit of Tokyo for travellers and armchair explorers” – including a taste of “Tokyo-centric” fiction, along with “several non-fiction titles”.

The Washington Free Beacon: Bloomswary – In his review of The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom – a selection of the American literary critic’s correspondence with eight of his favourite contemporary writers (edited by Heather Cass White) – Joseph Epstein admits he has never been Bloom’s greatest fan. In this “slender volume of just over 200 pages” we learn of his “flattery of those to whom he is writing”, his “antipathy to T.S. Eliot” and “his inability to break free for long” of depression. Had Bloom still been alive, Epstein believes “he would […] never [have] allowed publication of [this] fawning and dolorous collection of his letters”. A more positive review by Henry Oliver appears in The Common Reader, under the heading The Man Who Read Everything: Letters of Harold Bloom and six poets. He apparently read it in “two great gulps”. 

The Telegraph (via Archive Today): ⚢ The lesbian princess who was doctor to the Romanovs and hated Rasputin – “Vera Gedroits, the Russian imperial court’s first female physician, makes an electric subject for Miranda Seymour’s deft biography”, I, Vera: The Many Lives of Vera Gedroits, a Radical Princess – which reviewer Constance Higgins says, “has all the components of a Tolstoyan epic.”

Toronto Star (via Archive Today): 🍁🍹📚 Toronto’s hottest new bar is in a bookstore inside a former house in Mirvish Village – “With new culture publications, poetry readings and book launches seemingly every week, Toronto has proven it has an insatiable appetite for literature. Now, there’s a new spot in town to quench a related thirst: Book Bar, a combination bar/bookstore in Mirvish Village”, reports Winnie Wang.

The Novel Tea: When Obsession Takes Narrative Control – “Obsessive characters are […] compelling to watch or read. They move through stories with terrifying clarity. In a world full of ambiguity, compromise, and uncertainty, obsession offers direction. It strips away distraction and complexity until only one thing remains.” Neha shares a handful of her favourite books and films in which obsession is the “central theme”.

Artnet: 🎨🗼🍷🥐 Letters by Forgotten Surrealist Jacqueline Lamba Reveal Love Affair With Frida Kahlo – Jacqueline Lamba: The Forgotten Surrealist, a “revelatory new biography of the overlooked French Surrealist painter” by Salomon Grimberg “reclaims the spotlight for the French painter who has long been overshadowed by her husband, André Breton”, says Lawson-Tancred.

The Middling Place: 📖 The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Hard Books – “Good readers aren’t readers to whom every form, genre, or style comes easily. Those are not good readers. Good readers are those who read well. Sabrina Nesbitt attempts to explain “why hard books aren’t actually about intelligence”.

Hadassah: ⚣ REVIEW: ‘Place Envy’ – Place Envy, novelist Michael Lowenthal’s first collection of essays, traces his search for a place to call home as a gay, agnostic, Jewish man shaped by his family’s history. Reviewer Judy Bolton‑Fasman describes it as “part detective story, part genealogy scavenger hunt.”

The New York Times (via Archive Today): 📚 Too Many Books? – “Mendel Uminer faced a crisis when his landlord objected to the 10,000 volumes in his New York studio apartment.”

Reading in the Margins: What Jane Austen and Terry Pratchett Have in Common – “Terry Pratchett is a satirist and humourist, and many have described Jane Austen with just these terms”, says Amy Colleen. Furthermore, “both wrote comedic fiction that subtly, or not-so-subtly, pointed out the flaws and foibles, the whims and inconsistencies, of the people among whom, and the societies in which, they lived. Austen wrote of real life in England, of course, and Pratchett wrote of a flat earth carried on the backs of four giant turtles, but it’s mostly the same in the end.” Amy talks “satire with courage, brain, and heart” in Northanger Abbey and Maskerade.

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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: Ashley Douglas, Ava Morgyn, Biography / Memoir, Celia Fremlin, Emily Wilson, Greek Literature, Homer, Indian Literature, Jenny Jackson, Julian Hoffman, Kevin Hincker, Lesbian Literature, Lesbian Non-Fiction, LGB Non-Fiction, Miranda Seymour, Rahul Bhattacharya, Rick Bass, Russian Literature, Science Fiction, Vera Gedroits