An end of week fortnight recap

“There are always more stories. They never end.”
– Tove Jansson (Fair Play, 1989)

Thank you for your patience while I had a few days away. It has been something of a scramble trying to catch up with everything (when is it not?), but if you are game, so am I.

Tomorrow is Tove Jansson Day (also known as Finnish Art Day), when Finland raises its flags in recognition of their cherished icon’s one‑hundred‑and‑twelfth birthday. This means, of course, that we are now deep into Tove & Moomin Month here at Book Jotter – so we can be as exuberantly Toveish or as downright Moominminded as we wish over the next 24 days! 🎩👜

In addition to all this, today is International Cat Day (one of Tove’s favourite animals) as well as Scottish Wildcat Day – and we can all reflect on limitless possibilities for International Infinity Day. Tomorrow, would you believe, is National Book Lovers Day, which, despite its title, occurs internationally (so absolutely no excuse for not curling up with something Tovian). Also, those in South Africa may like to combine their reading with National Women’s Day. Finally, you can if you wish make like a Moomin for the final two days of Simplify Your Life Week.

Among the very few literary types born on this day are American lyric poet Sara Teasdale (1884), American writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896), British writer and broadcaster Sarah Dunant (1950) and Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder (1952). 🥂🍾 Some of those sharing Tove’s birthday on Sunday are Australian-British writer P.L. Travers (1899), English poet, novelist and librarian Philip Larkin (1922), American SFF writer Daniel Keyes (1927), Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson (1934), American romantic author Barbara Delinsky (1945), British cartoonist, writer and illustrator Posy Simmonds (1945) and Indian-American poet Reetika Vazirani (1962).

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.

* Set Sail in September for Remote Nations *

Three-hundred years ago this October, “a very singular tome was published” by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels (or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships as it was then known) has since become one of the most famous works of both English and world literature – a “savage political satire” that popularised the fictional island of Lilliput – and Chris Lovegrove of Calmgrove Books would very much like to gather everyone together for a Brobdingnagian celebration of its tercentenary. With your assistance, he proposes “a slow read of [the book] straddling the actual date of commemoration, from the start of September to the end of December.” You can see exactly what Chris has in mind at Gallivanting with Gulliver: #Gulliver300th.

* Blogs from the Bookcellar *

A couple of Tove-related features from the archives: (1) I was most impressed to see a “mint condition”, 65-year-old Puffin edition of Finn Family Moomintroll from 1961 (priced 2/6) reviewed by Ramblings on my bookshelves in early June. Included in this piece is the photograph of a “charming letter from Moominmamma introducing the Moomins and saying that she has heard that there aren’t any Moomintrolls in England” – a bonus not included in “the more recent Sort Of Books edition”. Please do head over to Finn Family Moomintroll – Tove Jansson to read this lovely post. (2) Back in April, Wendy G was “looking online for something quiet and contemplative to end her day” when she came across an “illustration [she] remembered from childhood.” She immediately hopped over to Tove Jansson’s website and there “picked out some of the loveliest images to share” on her blog, travels with my art. In Tove Jansson: A Quiet Comfort, she includes illustrations from several books in the original Moomin series and discusses the writer-artist’s “deceptively simple” linework and her “landscapes that shift between the safe and the unsettling” – commenting that no matter “how strange everything seems, there is something quite comforting about the world of the Moomins!” (3) Changing tack but very much remaining in Tovian territory, we retrieve The Hermetic Library Blog’s short review of [eminent folklorist] Jack Zipes’ Once Upon a Time There Was Truth: or, Why We Need Fairy Tales from October 2025. Published in April, this collection “[takes] us to a world where magic is commonplace, where wishing works, where the conflicts in our hearts are literalized in the world around us […] and explores why the stories retain such a fierce hold on our imagination.” 

* 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 recent weeks:

Book Review: Habits of the Sea by Shea Ernshaw – If you enjoy mysterious, romantic fantasies centred on islands and the sea, Shea Ernshaw’s “lushly written” Habits of the Sea, set in a Nova Scotian coastal village, may be the ideal accompaniment to the writings of Tove Jansson through August. Lisa Wolf of Bookshelf Fantasies describes this “beautifully emotional story about a love powerful enough to cross the boundaries of time” as the tale of a “devastating” storm in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, during which “a piece of land” breaks away, taking with it a farmhouse belonging to a “grief-stricken man” who has just buried the bodies of his wife and stillborn babies. Over time, “the legend of Saltwell Island spreads”, with fishermen and sailors claiming to have seen it. Then, many years later, during another great storm, Ellie Mills encounters a man with whom she spends a brief few hours on a mysterious island that appears as if from nowhere – but “when she returns home, a full week has passed.” Lisa discovers a “thread of passion and purpose” running through the narrative, and the coming of this “mystical, fairy tale-like place” leads to “conflicted [loyalties and unforeseen] emotional entanglement[s]” for the protagonist as she wrestles with confusion over “belonging, obligation, and fulfilment.” Habits of the Sea, says Lisa, will remain in her “thoughts and dreams for a long time to come.”

* 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 is 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! 🎩👜

**************************** 

World Collectors Net: 🎩👜🧙‍♂️🍻 From the Moomins to Middle-earth Tove Jansson’s The Hobbit Illustrations Published in English for the First Time – “Fans of both The Hobbit and Tove Jansson have something special to […] celebrate”. For the 90^th anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel, HarperCollins has published “a landmark new English-language edition” of the famous fantasy, which, for the first time features Tove’s “celebrated illustrations.”

Nation Cymru: Book review: ⚢📜🪶 Love all love excels by Norena Shopland – Anglo-Welsh royalist poet, translator and woman of letters Katherine Philips (1631-1664) “was among the first identifiable female poets in English, and among the first to write of same-sex attraction”, says Desmond Clifford. She lived in Cardigan Priory, which was “set in two hundred acres adjacent to Cardigan Castle, [where she was raised] in a highly literary atmosphere”, before spending time in Dublin cultivating her career. She “left behind ninety-six poems, two plays and a cache of vivid letters.” My love – all Love excels: The Remarkable Life and Times of 17th-Century Poet, Katherine Philips, a new biography by Norena Shopland, is now available from Parthian Books.

ABC: 🦘🎤 Author Anna Funder talks about writing, AI and the rise of fascism – The award-winning Australian writer – author of Stasiland, All That I Am and most recently Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life – talks to Nicola Heath about the Stasi, diminishing democracy and her favourite Australian books.

Publishers Weekly: ✍️🎤 Writers Talking Writers: Sigrid Nunez on Virginia Woolf and Keith Ridgway on Samuel Beckett – Nick Hilden attempts “to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, [he talked to] Sigrid Nunez […] about the boundary-pushing genius of Virginia Woolf, and […] Keith Ridgway […] about the despair and humor of Samuel Beckett.”

Financial Times (via Archive Today): 🤖✍️ The new premium product: books written by people – “Some publishers think AI could not only help authors but replace them”, reveals Daniel Thomas.

Salmagundi: The “Lost Girls” of the Yellow Book – “Jad Adams’s Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives tells the story of the Yellow Book, a magazine that was ‘a force and famous’ during the late nineteenth century in England. The author’s distinctive approach is to conceptualize his study [of this trailblazing publication], as a group biography focused on the journal’s most courted contributor, the woman writer”, says Barbara Black.

Dispatches from Biblioll College: The Eleven Best Translations of The Divine Comedy in English (and One to Avoid) – “Despite having been written more than 700 years ago in medieval Italian, despite devoting much of its length to seemingly arcane theological musings, our affinity for [Dante’s] poem only seems to grow with time.” Boze Herrington celebrates what he describes as “literature’s greatest poem” with his pick of the best and worst of the current English translations.

Loving Sylvia Plath: 🕵️‍♂️🔪🫣 Furious Violet – “Furious Violet [by Sarai Walker] follows Violet ‘West’ Shelley, a true-crime writer very loosely inspired by Frieda Hughes” – in which the protagonist is the daughter of “poetic geniuses”, characters based on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Emily Van Duyne says she “loved” this thriller-cum-horror novel and urges others to read it. Joumana Khatib’s positive review of this title for The New York Times – A True-Crime Writer Becomes a True-Crime Victim is also worth reading. She describes it as “outrageously entertaining.”

The Irish Times: 🎩👜 The Summer Book review: Lovely moments in unhurried adaptation of treasured Tove Jansson novel – “English-language film directed by Charlie McDowell is old-fashioned in both good and bad ways”, says Donald Clarke. Read his review of the newly released film adaptation of Tove Jansson’s beloved novel The Summer Book.

The Public Domain Review: 🪄📜 Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge – “Centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning. [In this excerpt from her book, The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts] Anne Lawrence-Mathers investigates the Ars notoria, its supposed powers, and the demonic influence it had upon some users.”

49^th Shelf: 🍁🦋 Reading About the Earth – “Last year, while [Katherine Koller] was editing the stories in Earthen, [she] read these Canadian books, and it [was] no surprise to [her] that each of them contains some kind of connection to the living earth, even in their titles. They represent many different forms, from poetry and children’s books to short and longform fiction, memoir and drama—forms that [she] also write[s]. They are also, remarkably, all written by women and appear here in alphabetical order by first name.”

Love London Love Culture: 🎩👜 Hilton London Bankside Launches Moomin-Themed Hotel Takeover – “The hotel has partnered up with Moomin for a special hotel take over which is now running until October. This new collaboration [with] the characters from Swedish-Finnish writer Tove Jansson’s books includes two themed rooms, a Moomin-themed suite and King Family Room, inspired by Tove Jansson’s 1948 novel Finn Family Moomintroll.”

The Decade Project: Fathers and Sons—Ivan Turgenev – In his ongoing Decade Project, professor emeritus of philosophy Robert Boyd Skipper reads classic novel Fathers and Sons (1862) by the Russian writer, poet, playwright, translator and populariser of Russian literature in the West, Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883). This work much “impressed” him, as “Turgenev builds his scenes carefully, including just the right amount of detail to make them live for [the reader].”

Kill Your Darlings: 🎤🦘 Merve Emre Has Her Eye on Australia – “Merve Emre is a bold and prolific voice in literary criticism. The Turkish American scholar’s byline appears in major magazines such as the New Yorker, where she’s a contributing writer—but this is just one facet of her busy career in books. Her ability to engage readers and generate debate led Lit Hub to dub her ‘a literary icon for the digital age’, and she can be credited in part with bringing renewed global attention to Australian luminaries Helen Garner and Gerald Murnane.”

LARB:  Anarcho-Thumbelina – Astronaut! Oana Aristide’s new historical novel about life under authoritarian rule in communist Romania is, says Cory Oldweiler, “an entertaining fable of serial murder, killer bears, and revolution.”

California Review of Books: Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran – “By the reckoning of the acclaimed Turkish writer, Ece Temelkuran, there are many ways to become unhomed. Climate change, war, and rising fascism are among the causes she cites in a Nation of Strangers, but some become unhomed without ever leaving their front door.” Brian Tanguay shares his thoughts on this collection of essays about exiles, the dispossessed and displaced.

Life and Letters: ✍️ Authorship After the Internet – Reading Ann Blair’s In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship sends Julianne Werlin down a “writers’ collaborative working methods” rabbit hole – eventually leading to her reading Aarthi Vadde’s We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature – which “shows how the Creative Commons movement championed the free reuse of creators’ work, provided it was properly attributed.”

The New Yorker (via Archive Today): An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist’s Afterlife as a BookTok Star – The Belgian-Jewish author Jacqueline Harpman “wrote her best-known works in the nineteen-nineties, but her fiction’s elegiac loneliness seems to anticipate our own solitary, screen-bound era”, finds Katy Waldman.

Literary Leanings: 🎤🎨 The Margins: Thao Thai – In the latest episode in this series, Michelle Martin sits down with Thao Thai to discuss her latest “richly drawn” novel, The Seekers of Deer Creek, a story of two estranged sisters on a quest to find a “mysterious, Surrealist painting” by a forgotten Vietnamese artist that “held great meaning for their recently deceased father.”

The Literary Edit: 🎤🏝️ Chiara Barzini’s Desert Island Books – This week Lucy Pearson’s castaway is an Italian writer known widely for her 2017 semi-autobiographical novel Things that Happened Before the Earthquake. In this fascinating selection of books, Chiara Barzini contemplates her time on the imagined desert island and picks her titles with care (Tove would have approved). Among others, she opts to take The Collected Stories of Diane Williams (introduced by Ben Marcus) since, as she suspects, while on her island she will crave “a variety of moods to get out of monotony” and feels the American author’s short works “would be essential for that reason.”

The Telegraph (via Archive Today): ⁉️ Why you should cut down on exclamation marks! – “Exclamation marks, like parentheses, were cooked up in the rhetorical hotbeds of Renaissance Italy,” writes Constance Higgins. Furthermore, she contends, “you may never type quite so enthusiastically again after reading [On the Mark: A History of Punctuation from Ancient Egypt to the Emoticon, Florence Hazrat’s] playful history of punctuation”.

Gathering Light: The Corner that Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1948) –   How does an “author who described her feelings toward religion as ‘anarchic’ write of a community of 14^th century nuns? For this reader, problematically…and irresistibly”, says Dominika in an introduction to her piece on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1948 historical novel The Corner That Held Them.

Two Salingers together:
The Free Press (via Archive Today): Read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ When You’re Young, or Not at All – “J.D. Salinger’s famous coming-of-age novel recently turned 75 […]. But if you ask Joseph Epstein, [The Catcher in the Rye isn’t] worth reading after the age of 20.”
The Decade Project: Nine Stories—J. D. Salinger – “The art of not saying” – Robert Boyd Skipper tells us why he enjoyed reading this 1948 short story collection by J.D. Salinger.

Afrocritik: 🪖🛸 “War Girls” Review: Tochi Onyebuchi Reimagines the Nigerian Civil War Through Science Fiction – “With War Girls, Onyebuchi has crafted not merely a conventional dystopian war epic, but an intimate portrait of a traumatised youth negotiating the emotional and moral devastation of war while clinging desperately to the bonds that make survival worthwhile.”

Korea Joongang Daily: Turkish readers write history as K-literature translation tops best sellers in 2025 – “Sales in Turkey of Hwang Bo-reum’s 2022 novel Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop topped LTI Korea’s list of translated works as Korean works fly off the shelves in the country.”

The Tokyo Hermit: ✍️ Sei Shōnagon’s Lists – “Around the year 1000, a woman serving at the imperial court in the old capital kept a private notebook. She filled it, over years, with observations, scenes, complaints, and — the part she is remembered for — lists. The book is the Makura no Sōshi, usually given in English as The Pillow Book” and its “author is known to us as Sei Shōnagon”, though sadly “her actual name is lost.” Astonishingly, the “notebook outlived the court it described”. Tōan explains here “why its form — not its content — is [an idea] worth borrowing.”

The Common: Egana Djabbarova’s My Dreadful Body: Exploring the Wounded Self and Belonging in Azerbaijani Diaspora Literature – “Every now and then, a book is spawned that renders you speechless, demanding recognition for its searing vulnerability and astute cultural criticism. Egana Djabbarova’s My Dreadful Body, translated by Lisa C. Hayden [and reviewed here by Britta Stromeyer] stands as one of those.” This coming-of-age novel set in a traditional Muslim Azerbaijani community in Russia seems a promising choice for Women in Translation Month.

Deccan Chronicle: 🕵️‍♂️ Book Review | Indian Noir, Strangely Familiar – “The stories of crime provide the occasion for exploring the emotional and moral forces that drive ordinary individuals towards extraordinary actions”, says Rupsa Banerjee of Indian crime fiction author Salil Desai’s The Perfect Day and Other Stories. You can read an excerpt from his collection at Scroll.in: Short fiction: A salesman who’s down on his luck takes it out on a young street urchin.

Noted: ✍️ John Milton’s Notes on Marriage and Divorce: A Notation – “With his commonplace book, Milton built a foundation of knowledge he could return to for his various projects. When [he] set out to write polemical works like those arguing for divorce, he had a wealth of history and quotations to draw on.” Jillian Hess scrutinises the 17^th century English poet and polemicist’s notebooks for his lists, stories and asides about marriage and divorce.

The Eclectic Reader: 🫣 Three Horror novels that did NOT give me nightmares – Chelsey Feder shares her “key to reading horror”, which she says is “make it gothic, make it meta.”

Black Inc.: 🦘 Read an extract from Little World by Josephine Rowe – “From one of Australia’s most celebrated literary voices comes a luminous and deeply original [historical] novella. In Little World, Josephine Rowe weaves together lives across continents and decades in a haunting tale of faith, memory and the mysteries that shape us.” You can read a little more about the book itself in Jane O’Sullivan’s piece for The Adroit Journal: A Review of Josephine Rowe’s Little World.

Women Writing: 🍁🎤 Featured Writer: Elizabeth Urso – In the latest issue Liisa Kovala chats to Canadian author Elizabeth Urso about her writing routines and her debut thriller, Hail Mary, which is due for release on 22^nd September.

Vorarlberg: Writer Monika Helfer has passed away – “The Vorarlberg author Monika Helfer died [last] Sunday at the age of 78 as a result of an accident. [She] wrote prose, plays and radio plays for over five decades. It was only [later in her life] that she celebrated her big breakthrough with autobiographical novels. She received numerous awards and was married to the author Michael Köhlmeier.” There is also a piece about her in Die Zeit: Austrian writer Monika Helfer has died.

Patterns of Translation: The most translated female author of German fiction – Postdoctoral fellow at the Research Group Visualization and Data Analysis at the University of Vienna, Lisa Teichmann has written a guest post about women writers in the German National Library for Péter Király and András Kiséry (aka Women in Translation).

The MIT Press Reader: 🛸 Jules Verne’s Empty Dream of Spaceflight – American author, sociologist and aid worker Martha Older, whose essay has appeared in a new annotated version of Jules Verne’s From Earth to the Moon, says in this 1865 sci-fi classic, “scientific advancement is treated as destiny — but no one quite asks why.”

Nippon.com: 🕵️‍♂️🔪 Remembering Higashino Keigo: A Tribute to Japan’s Mystery King – “Higashino Keigo, who died [last] month, was a monumental figure in Japan’s mystery genre, winning many fans at home and abroad. Hatori Yoshiyuki, the editor-in-chief of the magazine where Higashino’s classic The Devotion of Suspect X was first published, shares his memories of the author and his best-known work.”

The New Yorker (via Archive Today): ❄️🌷🏖️ The Best Books of 2026 So Far – “Each week, [the paper’s] editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads.” This is the complete Under Review list from January to the end of July. The book featured here is Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments by Franz Wright.

Five Books For: Five Novel Reimaginings Of The Victorians – “This month, [Kate Lillie looks] at five modern novels that revisit the nineteenth century from fresh perspectives. […] Whether you’re in the mood for literary mystery, Gothic suspense, sweeping historical fiction or brilliantly engineered plot twists,” she assures her readers “there’s something here to tempt you.”

Irish Independent (via Archive Today – it’s a bit skew‑whiff but perfectly readable):  Mary Kenny: The Edna O’Brien I knew – generous, glamorous, and gloriously romantic – “Possibly the most famous fact attached to Edna O’Brien is that her early books were so scandalous they were publicly burned [in County Clare] by a parish priest”, says Mary Kenny. “Two years after the death of the author, Mary […] assesses the legacy of the woman she knew first as a boss, and then a friend”. We are also informed here that “a selection of non-fiction essays by Edna O’Brien will be published in 2027; her son Carlo Gébler has written a book about Edna’s final days, to be published by New Island in September”.

A double Drabble:
The Middle Shelf: A Summer Bird-Cage – A lifelong admirer of Margaret Drabble’s writing, Lee chose to reread her 1963 debut novel A Summer Bird-Cage, in which protagonist Sarah “returns home for her [far from close] sister Louise’s wedding, following a period of post‑university travel.” She is invited to attend “her [sister’s] stylish soirées” but soon picks up on “an undercurrent of romantic feelings” between Louise and her husband’s best man. Filled with “sparkling prose” and “entire chapters of spikily realistic dialogue,” Drabble, says Lee, captures the “atmosphere of […] a particular set of educated young people” from the 1960s.
A Narrative Of Their Own: Short Story Salon – This week, Kate Jones discusses Margaret Drabble’s short fiction collection A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (1966). The title story, she tells us, “introduces the idea of the brisk, busy, highly efficient and professional woman emerging in the workplace”, and its theme is similar to other works in the collection.

Chytomo: Decolonizing culture in Ukraine: A global norm misunderstood as ‘barbarism’ – “A monument honoring Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov has been removed in Kyiv.” Russia has labelled this “rewriting history” – “but in reality”, argues Dariia Hirna, “Ukraine is doing exactly what dozens of postcolonial states have done before: reevaluating the place of imperial culture in its public space.” She shares four examples from around the world, including Albert Camus in Algeria, Rudyard Kipling in India and Edmund Spencer and Ireland.

Reading on Trains: 🚂 Reading on Trains 95: Summer Books. – Andrew Martin, author of To the Sea by Train, with all the gen on the latest railway reads, including Every Other Hour: Travelling Wales Without a Car by Alice Hughes and Fast Track: The Extraordinary Story of High-Speed Rail by Christian Wolmar.

South First: Hyphen and the dream of a shared Indian literature – “The first issue of [Hyphen: Connecting Literatures – a translation initiative spread across Indian languages] was formally launched by Namita Gokhale, Ranjit Hoskote and Geetanjali Shree”, reports Ashutosh Kumar Thakur.

The Guardian: 🍁 Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot review – Anne Enright celebrates a landmark feminist novel – “Half a century on, this tale of a woman who abandons her children in search of herself remains thrillingly original”, says Enright of Gaining Ground by Canadian novelist Joan Barfoot. In her fabulous post at Radhika’s Reading Retreat, Gaining Ground / Abra – Joan Barfoot, Radhika Pandit tells us that this “intense and rich” work “compels the reader to hold two seemingly incompatible truths about Abra at once: that leaving her home destroyed her family to some extent, yet that freedom was also necessary for her own survival”.

MQR: 🗣️🌍 Collaborative Translation: Creativity & Praxis – “The following essay is adapted from a talk delivered as part of the 2026 AWP panel entitled ‘Collaborative Translation: Creativity & Praxis.’ This panel centred around the concept that literary translation is inherently collaborative”, writes translator Nancy Naomi Carlson. The book featured here is Suzanne Dracius’s The Dancing Other – a story from Martinique (partly set in France) about the struggles of people who belong both places, but never quite feel at home in either.

The Clearing: 🎩👜 New/Renew Subscriber giveaway – I point you in the direction of Katherine May’s latest newsletter and her August giveaway, which this month comes courtesy of Conic Film, “whose adaptation of Tove Jansson’s classic novel The Summer Book” has finally arrived in UK cinemas this weekend – though, apparently, “US readers have been able to watch it for a while now”. If you subscribe or renew your subscription to her excellent Substack site before the end of the month, your name will be put into a hat to win a box containing “exclusive film merch, a copy of the book and some rather lovely chunky socks, ready for the chill to set in.” Katherine adds that she will also “throw in some Clearing postcards and stickers too!”

Arkeonews: 🏛 Oldest Roman Library in the Iberian Peninsula Identified at a Villa in Spain – “A room at the Roman villa of Fuente Álamo, long interpreted as a sanctuary of Mithras, has been reidentified as a private library—and may be the westernmost known library in the Roman Empire”, reveals Leman Altuntaş.

Slate (via Archive Today): Is Rachel Cusk’s Life of M Actually About Natalie Portman? – Life of M, the acclaimed Canadian-British novelist and writer’s latest book, “is supposedly about her famous friend [Natalie Portman]”, says Laura Miller. But having read it she concludes it is “something else entirely.”

The Metropolitan Review: The Latin American Americans – Manuel M. Novillo, a writer and academic based in Tucumán, Argentina, reviews Suzanne Jill Levine’s Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir – a bird’s-eye account of a life lived in and through translation.

New Voices Down Under: 🦘 Dark suburbia, disappearing bodies [and] young love are our featured reads – “Not sure if you’re in the mood [for] crime, a love story or something out of the ordinary?” asks Meredith Jaffe. She suggests you check out the latest edition of her newsletter as it has all bases covered.

Ancillary Review of Books: 🛸 Alien Laughter: Review of The Playful Lem – Polish writer Stanisław Lem “was a pioneer of many of the conventions we invoke when we discuss ‘science fiction’ today,” says Cole Adams, but he was also “a legendary curmudgeon when it came to the genre’s communities of writers and readers in America.” The Playful Lem: A Short Story Sampler – a new edition of Lem’s comedic fiction (translated and edited by Michael Kandel) – distils his humour “for a new generation”, while “[encompassing] a spectrum of awfully familiar absurdities.” Adams finds the collection “heartening, like laughing with someone over a shared resentment”.

Bloomberg (via Archive Today): 🏛️🔱🏺 Are You an Iliad Person or an Odyssey Person? – “For centuries, readers have argued over which Homeric epic is greater. The debate reveals as much about us as it does about the poems themselves”, writes Daniel Mendelsohn. Which one do you prefer? The Iliad or the Odyssey?

Wired: 3 Clever Things You Can Do With an Old Amazon Kindle – E-readers “are more useful in their old age than you might think”, says David Nield. “If you’ve just upgraded to a new Kindle and are looking for something to do with your old one, or if you’re simply interested in seeing how hackable these e-readers are, [he’s] got three projects for you to attempt.”

****************************

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: Tove Jansson, Winding Up the Week

Tags: #Gulliver300th, #ToveTrove, #WITMonth26, Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Ars notoria, Best Books of 2026, Fantasy Fiction, Finnish Art, Finnish Art Day, Finnish Literature, Franz Wright, Indian Literature, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jack Zipes, Jonathan Swift, LGB Literature, Little My, Medieval Literature, Moomin, Moomin Day, Moomin Month, National Book Lovers Day, Nordic Literature, Salil Desai, Shea Ernshaw, Suzanne Dracius, Thao Thai, Tove Jannson Day, Tove Jansson Month, Tove Trove, Women in Translation Month 2026