An end of week recap
“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.”
– Luc van Donkersgoed
It is Saturday 22nd, which means the people of Brazil will be making merry on Folklore Day, sharing the stories, myths and legends passed down through generations. There will also be much dancing and feasting in honour of the ancient Armenian (or Pagan) New Year, Navasard – celebrations that continue until 9th September. Tomorrow brings both Find Your Inner Nerd Day and International Hashtag Day, but please don’t forget that here at Book Jotter we remain happily immersed in Tove & Moomin Month until the end of August.
Among those born on this day in history are Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and memoirist Alexander Chekhov (1855), wisecracking American poet, critic and writer of fiction Dorothy Parker (1893), American author and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920), American novelist, short story writer and journalist Annie Proulx (1935), British writer of crime fiction Peter James (1948) and English author Diane Setterfield (1964). 🎂 Sunday’s birthday bunch includes English poet, writer, critic and editor William Ernest Henley (1849), American humourist and literary critic Will Cuppy (1884), American author of action-adventure and suspense novels Nelson DeMille (1943) and English dramatist Willy Russell (1947).
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.
* Make Mine a Short *
I’m sure most of you will recall Lisa Hill of ANZ LitLovers LitBlog creating a short and exceedingly sweet reading challenge last year (see WUTW #436 for the original announcement) – namely Short Story September. Sadly, Lisa is unable to host the happening this year but, panic not, for Rebecca Foster of Bookish Beck has stepped in to ensure it goes ahead as planned. As before, you are encouraged to select a stand-alone short story (perhaps from an anthology, journal or similar), write something about it on your blog, then add the appropriate URL to the InLinkz party or paste it into a comment on Rebecca’s Opening Post. I suggest you take the shortest route over to Short Story September Is Coming Soon! – where you will find all you need to know about taking part. It would also be greatly appreciated if you could use the #ShortStorySeptember tag when discussing the event on social media.
* 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 recently:
Eva and the Island – Since we are celebrating the passionately islandophilic writer‑artist Tove Jansson this month, Reykjavík‑dweller Simon King’s tantalising review for Looking North of Tim Ecott’s account of life on Stóra Dímun – an island in the southern Faroe Islands, which he describes as “the smallest and most remote of the country’s inhabited islands” – seems an irresistibly apt Scandinavian supplement. The book centres on Eva úr Dímun (or Eva from Dímun), a native of the island, “whose ancestors have called it home for eight generations” and who, along with her husband, farms the land, keeps animals and, in more recent times, makes and sells “wine made from turnips.” Ecott, we are told, visits this tiny piece of land “across multiple seasons”, befriending the couple (now its only permanent residents), and his descriptions of helping out on the farm along with other family members “straddle[s] the line between insider and outsider, with vivid observations that benefit from the fresh eyes of someone participating in a new and difficult task”. Simon read Eva and the Island: Life at the Loneliest Farmhouse in the World shortly before visiting Stóra Dímun and meeting Eva himself. I thoroughly recommend you too spend time with this wonderfully engaging and personal piece about the book and the place. Who knows, you may one day make it over there yourselves.
* 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! 🎩👜
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AnOther: 🎤 Marie Darrieussecq’s New Novel is a Searing Study of Female Friendship – “Published by Fitzcarraldo [and translated by Penny Hueston], How to Make a Woman follows the diverging lives and desires of two childhood friends coming of age in a small Basque village community in the 1980s”. Jemima Skala speaks to Marie Darrieussecq about the importance of writing about her homeland, creating “men as secondary characters, and the feminist reasoning behind her decision to begin the book in the 1980s.” (If you get your biblioskates on, there’s still time to read this one for Women in Translation Month).
La Bibliotrek | Read the World: ✈️ In Their Footsteps: Victor Hugo in Paris and Guernsey – “Discover the places that shaped the life and work of one of France’s greatest writers”.
The Walrus: 🍁📚 Abolish the Top Ten Books List – “We’re saying the merit of a book is relative to other books, not internal, eternal, but external. We are voiding the work’s intrinsic worth. We are helping convert it into a floating commodity like Bitcoin or Air Canada stocks.” Canadian author Thea Lim believes “rankings are a capitalist scheme.” She wishes only to know about the text.
Seven Stories Press: Translation as witness – “Too Great A Sky, the latest English-language novel by Liliana Corobca and her award-winning translator Monica Cure, tells the story of the deportation of Romanians from Bucovina through the voice of an elderly woman named Ana” – who was eleven-years-old when the Soviet soldiers sent her from Bucovina to Kazakhstan. Here, Monica “shares some insight into the process of translating the text” in her “introductory letter”.
LARB: 💘 The Uncommitted Man – Returning to Russia after some years in the West, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov stops over in Baden-Baden to meet his fiancée. However, a chance encounter with an old (and manipulative) flame, unearths feelings buried deep within him. Eric Vanderwall finds “a new translation of Ivan Turgenev’s 1867 novel Smoke explores the main concerns of the author’s life.”
The Japan Times (via Archive Today): 🫣 Japan’s macabre literati go global – “As horror surges globally, writers are putting new twists on the genre”. Mike Fu explores the “Uketsu phenomenon”.
The Conversation: 😆✍️ Some of the most trusted political voices in 18th‑century Britain were fictional – why this tradition lives on – A fictional astrologist, parrot, Chinese philosopher and midwife wrote biting and sought after political satire in the 1700s. Adam J Smith explains why “British writers in the 18th century repeatedly invented fictional characters to intervene in the politics and culture of their day.”
Afrocritik: ⚣ “While the World Slept” Review: A Tender, Uneven Portrait of Gay Life in Nigeria – “It is hardly possible to cross the bridges of the stories in While the World Slept and not be moved. The collection contains ten stories mostly focusing on the life of gay men in Nigeria, often caught between allegiances by the condition of their sexuality”, writes Chimezie Chika.
Gathering Light: 🏖️🐚 Nine Intelligent Beach Reads – Dominika suggests nine “utterly riveting and often profound books to pack for your next vacation” with titles by the likes of Margaret Kennedy, Agatha Christie, Rose Macaulay and Maura Laverty – all of which are set “on, near, or around a beach.”
Le Monde (via Archive Today): Sylvia Plath’s lost novel – “In 1962, Sylvia Plath began writing her second novel, one that she discussed with those close to her. But the manuscript [of Double Exposure] went missing after her death, and has never been found since”, reveals Florence Noiville.
A Menagerie of Words: A dense and complex title that has me hooked – A literary puzzle about the mysterious afterlife of a writer and her work, The Song of Stork and Dromedary is, according to an admiring Deb Coco, “exquisitely crafted” and “incredibly complex” – and at 736 pages it is positively labyrinthine. First published in 2022, it has now been translated into English by David McKay and has received glowing reviews from critics far and wide. “A challenging book that rewards its readers with great depth and beauty”, says Kirkus. A “once‑in‑a‑lifetime reading experience” (Thomas de Veen). Comparable with A.S. Byatt’s Possession (Maaike Meijer)… It seems to me like the perfect read for those long winter nights.
The Globe and Mail (via Archive Today): 🍁📖 The latest trend in reading? Classic novels – “Earlier this year, something peculiar happened in the stacks of Munro’s Books. Copies of the classic adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo began flying off the shelves at the independent bookstore in Victoria. Even more strangely, the purchasers were mostly readers in their 20s and late teens”, discovers Lana Hall.
Book People: C.A. Dawson Scott and Uncovering Forgotten Texts – Book studies scholar Abigail Moreshead loves to “discover authors from the past who have fallen into obscurity.” She goes into detail about what she “learned from discovering Wastralls” – an epic generational family inheritance saga (first published in 1918), which “tells the tale of Sabina, an only child born to a Cornish landowner.”
Liberties: The Birth of the Author – “The impulse to separate the literary critic from the mere consumer, the serious reader from the lightweight, is abiding. Several means of demarcation have been used; one is how much interest, and what kind, a reader shows in the person behind the work.” Laura Cecile Moore uses as an example “the persistent interest in [and eventual exposure of] Elena Ferrante’s identity” and wonders if she had “the right to dictate the terms on which she would be known.”
Jonathan Bate’s Literary Remains: 🎨 What is Art? – Jonathan Bate has “been rereading Tolstoy’s extraordinary book What Is Art?” First published in 1897, the great Russian writer is “in many ways wrongheaded, but also full of wisdom” in this weighty analysis of the nature of art, in which he concludes, art must be a force for good for the improvement of mankind.
The Sydney Morning Herald (via Archive Today): 🦘🕵️♂️🔪 The Big Little Lies sequel is finally here. Good luck putting it down – Twelve years on, Liane Moriarty brings us back to the fictional Sydney location Periwee Peninsula – and paradise has never looked darker. Carmel Bird reviews her sequel, the thriller-mystery Big Little Truths.
Nordic Watchlists: 🎤🎩👜🎬 Anders Danielsen Lie on The Summer Book & Silent Grief – “Playing a character with minimal dialogue, who’s dealing with grief and constricted by emotional restraint is going to be a challenge for any actor. And this was very much the challenge that leading Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie faced when playing the father in Charlie McDowell’s film adaptation of The Summer Book. But at least this was familiar territory for [him]”, writes Tim Collison.
Books in the Scullery: 🕵️♂️ Brother Cadfael and the Country House – “Ellis Peters essentially built the historical detective novel, as we know it today. Whilst she was not the first person to set a mystery in the past, the ‘Brother Cadfael’ series did a great deal to construct the form. Her stories about a twelfth-century monk brought together the Golden Age mystery with the historical novel, establishing a style and model which was enormously influential.” Jem Bloomfield explains.
Engelsberg Ideas: Jonathan Swift’s literary world – “The summer of 1726 saw a unique meeting of three great literary minds, whose dazzling works of poetry, prose and satire would redefine the possibilities of the English language.” Derek Turner reviews Hester Grant’s The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire and the Writing of Gulliver’s Travels, a narrative history set during the months when Jonathan Swift arrived in London from Dublin with a draft of Gulliver’s Travels in his bag. It offers a vivid account of that creative season and may prove valuable supplementary reading for those taking part in Chris Lovegrove’s #Gulliver300th challenge.
The Korea Times: ⚢💘☢️ K-LIT REVIEW Sapphic love blooms in post-apocalyptic wasteland of ‘Everything Happened at Once’ – “Sapphic literature is a rare gem in a country where same-sex marriage remains illegal,” however, in this story about a mutant virus that destroys half of the world’s population overnight, Choi Jin-young explains to Faye Leung “that a novel putting a lesbian couple front and center had long been on her bucket list.” Everything Happened At Once “is told from multiple first-person points of view that extend beyond the young lovers” and her “broad yet sharp focus on the worlds within overlays the desolation of a dystopian plot with vibrant hues of humanity”.
The New York Times (via Archive Today): 🦋✈️🌐 Are We Living in the Wildest Natural Epoch Yet? – Nature writer Cal Flyn “treks across six continents […]. Each destination gives [her] an opportunity to contemplate history, religion, cartography [and] land use policy. She is excellent company: funny, soulful and casually brilliant, weaving together philosophy, literature [and] post-colonial critique”, writes Lauren Redniss. In The Savage Landscape: An Evolution of Wilderness, Flyn “argues that wilderness is just one more man-made invention.”
Book Idle: 💘 ‘A better writer than you think’ (according to A.S. Byatt) and ‘Readable even when in hospital beds awaiting drastic surgery’ (according to Lady Ellenborough, whoever that is) – “Romances middling. Detective fiction excellent.” Tash gives her verdict on spending a month with English novelist Georgette Heyer.
BBC Culture: 🐋 Moby Dick: The 19th-Century novel that challenged our fear of the ‘monstrous’ whale – “Now 175 years old, US author Herman Melville’s classic is the ultimate tale of man v whale – but in fact, it questions why humans have been so terrified of these great sea creatures”, says Elizabeth Sulis Kim.
Neos Kosmos (via Archive Today): 🦘 The best is yet to come: Anne Freeman on rewriting the life you didn’t choose – “In her gripping novel, The Time After Now, the [Melbourne-based] author explores the choices that shape us, the lives we leave behind, and whether we can ever find our way back to who we once dreamed we would become”, writes Iris Papathanasiou.
Reads With Alicia: 🟣⚪🟢 8 feminist books for Women’s Equality Day – “With Women’s Equality Day coming up on 26 August” – a significant event in the USA when the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment (granting women the right to vote) is celebrated – Alicia shares her “roundup of eight thoughtfully curated books walking us through the four waves of feminism, from Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir to Audre Lorde and Amanda Montell.”
Electric Literature: 🚂✍️ Why Do I Keep Coming Back to Trains? – Chinese-American author Weike Wang thinks it best writers “learn how to write under any conditions.” Train travel, she says, has “forced [her] to adapt”.
The Middle Shelf: A Private View – “Sometimes a sombre mood requires a more solemn and contemplative introspective book and Anita Brookner can always be relied on to deliver that”, says Lee in her appraisal of A Private View, the English novelist and art historian’s “melancholy” but “darkly sharp wit” novel about an aging bachelor set in London during the 1990s.
Frontline: 🦄🛸👻 The comic and the cosmic – “In her debut collection, [Indian writer] Sucheta Dasgupta firmly foregrounds women, recording their voices, fighting erasure, and celebrating autonomy”, finds Aditi Mishra.
Galley Beggar – Pressing issues: 📚🚨 In praise of booksellers – “It’s been calculated that [UK] bookshops will have to try to cope with an average annual increase of £4,563 by 2029-30.” According to a piece in The Bookseller: More than 200 bookshops implore PM Andy Burnham to offer them same tax relief as pubs. Sam Jordison, co-director of Galley Beggar Press, explains why “the UK government (and everyone else) should support bookshops”, arguing for the cultural and communal value they sustain. There is also an article in The Guardian on this issue: Philip Pullman and Maggie O’Farrell among authors urging Burnham to cut business rates on bookshops.
The British Columbia Review: 🍁🚶♀️🦋 From A to B and back again – “Women, Walking: Notes on Life in Motion is an anthology [edited by Zahra Ebrahim and Jane Farrow], an exploration of some of the reasons: in one case, to come to terms with the fear of walking alone in the dark—a particularly female fear; in another, the walking is to ease giving birth. So many reasons to walk, and reasons for women to walk”, says Alison Acheson. The collection brings together voices including Jenny Odell, Miriam Toews, Andrea Gibson, Zalika Reid‑Benta, Janika Oza, Ann‑Marie MacDonald and Catherine Hernandez, among others, each reflecting on the ways movement shapes women’s lives. Stacey May Fowles of Quill & Quire offers her own perspective on the anthology in Women, Walking: Notes on Lives in Motion.
Pioneer Works: 13 Ways of Looking: Ed Park – A writer and editor living in New York, Ed Park holds forth on “stamp collecting, maximum scrutiny, [homemade notebooks] and the genesis of his impossible book, Three Tenses” – a collection of autobiographical fragments he rescued from a floppy disc many years after rediscovering it.
NewScientist (via Archive Today): 🛸 The best new science-fiction novels of August 2026 – “Fascist empires and deadly sea monsters are on offer in the science fiction out this month, says Alison Flood”.
A Narrative Of Their Own: Marginalised Voices – Kate Jones with a fascinating piece on Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha, Wide Sargasso Sea and “how Jean Rhys gave voice to the voiceless”.
NPR: 🎤💘🦄 Oxford’s newest bookstore exclusively sells romantasy books – “Danielle Kurtzleben talks unicorns and dragons with bookstore owner Starlin Marot. Fantasy romance novels are her best – and only – sellers.”
Il Foglio: Fleur Jaeggy: the mystery of writing dissolved in the complicity of the heart – “In ‘The Last Days of Ingeborg’, the Swiss author describes her relationship with her Austrian friend and colleague. It is a unique dynamic, characterised by profound irony but also by long silences”, writes Matteo Moca.
Room to Think: ✍️📔 You Probably Need a Zibaldone – Last year, Heather Luczak “came across the old Renaissance practice of keeping a zibaldone” – an Italian commonplace book or notebook containing a wide variety of texts, copied into a small or medium-format paper codex. It is, she says, “a location for ideas to meet each other” but its “real value is in creating a place where something we’re thinking about today could bump into an idea from a month ago, or six months ago, and shape into new insight.” Heather has also written a follow-up to this article: Isn’t This Just a Commonplace Book? which is well worth reading.
Nippon.com: How Dazai Osamu’s “No Longer Human” Became a Bestseller in South Korea – Japanese author Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human “has become a publishing phenomenon in South Korea and is a particular hit with younger readers. Literary scholar Kim Yong-an analyses the appeal of this classic of outsider literature.”
The Telegraph (via Archive Today): 🦄👦👧 Katherine Rundell’s fantasies would make JRR Tolkien proud – “Tolkien argued that in order for a fairy-story […] to succeed, it must ‘within its own imagined world be accorded (literary) belief’. He would have approved of the 39-year-old Katherine Rundell, whose fantasy has always had such a strong internal logic that we accept its impossibilities without question. Her latest novel, The Neverfear, is a study in how it’s done”, declares Emily Bearn.
Very Bonjour Travel Diaries: ✈️ A Jane Austen-inspired Weekend in Bath – “All six of Austen’s novels mention Bath in some way” – Persuasion is set there. “The city was clearly a huge source of inspiration for her work and the life she lived there is flawlessly reflected on the page.”
Caught by the River: 🦋✈️🍁 Book of the Month: August – “August’s Book of the Month is [Canadian-born, Scotland-dwelling Muslim woman] Alycia Pirmohamed’s Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become. Winner of the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize, the book sees its author trace the legacies of migration and memory on her life, examining the idea of homeland and the mythmaking it demands.” You can read an extract of her memoir cum essay collection here.
The Rift: One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan and Gender Essentialism – Originally written in Tamil, “One Part Woman is about a married couple unable to conceive. However, their family and neighbours regard their childlessness as a failure of the wife for being unable to fulfil the responsibility of a woman. The author, says Asif Iqbal, “draw[s] a stark picture of women’s worth and identity, which is reduced to their biological capacity to bear a child.” This book has become a cult phenomenon in the subcontinent, captivating Indian readers and sparking conversations about caste and female empowerment.
The Literary Edit: 🎤🏝️🎩👜 Rachel Khoo’s Desert Island Books – We return to Lucy Pearson’s far-flung island this Tove & Moomin Month to discover current castaway, the British cook, writer, broadcaster and author of The Smallest Restaurant in Paris, Rachel Khoo, has chosen The Summer Book as one of her ‘must packs’ – which she apparently “read during her first summer in Sweden”. She also opts for Caroline Criado Pérez’s Invisible Women, “a book that makes her so furious she has to read it in stages…”
cultura_digital_: 💘 What We Become: Pérez-Reverte’s superb maturity – “Is the historical novel What We Become by Spanish author Pérez-Reverte his best work? Mature, elegant and engrossing, about love, time and chess. Yago González thinks it might be.
The i Paper (via Archive Today): 🕵️♂️ I’ve read every Poirot novel – these are the 11 best – “With his prim moustache and vast intellect, the Belgian sleuth is one of fiction’s best detectives.” Nick Hilton shares a list of what he refers to as “his greatest hits”.
Knowledge Lust: 📖 How I deep read classic novels – “You were probably never taught how to deep read a classic novel. Or maybe you were, but like me, you were too busy doodling stick figures or daydreaming about a particularly cute classmate to listen to your teacher’s lecture on the value of historical context or why every reader—scholar or not—should try to interpret a classic novel in their own words.” Sam Rinko shares the nine habits that help him “study, enjoy, and feel great literature”.
Radio Prague International: Velvet Blues: Czech and Slovak Romany story collection set for Frankfurt Book Fair – “Velvet Blues, a collection of 20th century stories by Czech and Slovak Romany writers, is set to be presented at October’s Frankfurt Book Fair, where this year Czechia will be guest of honour. [Ian Willoughby] discussed the anthology with Karolína Ryvolová of Kher, a publishing house focused on Romany literature, which is putting it out in conjunction with Karolinum Press.”
404 Media (via Archive Today): 🤖 We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility – “We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books”, reveals Emanuel Maiberg.
Literary Ladies Guide: ✈️ Armchair (or actual) travel to The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in the Berkshires – “Living in New York’s Hudson Valley gives [author and illustrator Nava Atlas] access to amazing array of day trips within a 2-hour radius, from the frenetic energy of New York City to the bucolic elegance of the Berkshires, where a group of culture-rich towns and villages are set amidst a modest mountain range in western Massachusetts.” In her latest newsletter she tells us how “the 1% lived more than 100 years ago”.
BBC Wales: Gillian Anderson felt ‘betrayed’ by The Salt Path allegations after appearing in adaption – “The Salt Path star Gillian Anderson has said allegations that the memoir was fabricated felt like “a betrayal” after spending time with the couple”.
The Times (via Archive Today): 📖🚨 The death of reading puts the world in a perilous place – “Books and newspapers are increasingly giving way to social media content as the habit of reading fades. This isn’t just dumbing-down, it’s a threat to democracy”. James Marriott jumps aboard the catastrophising bandwagon.
Publishers Weekly: 🎤🕵️♀️🦄🛸 Jasper Fforde Has Series Business – “With the final novel in his Thursday Next series, Jasper Fforde is taking no prisoners and has no patience for boring literature”. Fforde discusses Dark Reading Matter with Elaine Szewczyk over Zoom from his home in Wales – telling her this book is “the last hurrah” for Literary Detective Thursday and his humorous fantasy series that celebrates reading, writing and novels.
Vulture (via Archive Today): 🎤📖 How 20 Well-Read People Make Time for Books – Jasmine Vojdani talked to a broad range of readers, among them editors and publishing-industry people, actors, a playwright and the mayor of New York about “how, exactly, they carved out time for reading in their day-to-day lives.”
First Things: 🐂 The Sun Also Rises at 100 – “While his flagrant adultery was destroying his first marriage, he was also writing The Sun Also Rises, whose centenary year this is”, says Algis Valiunas of Ernest Hemingway’s first novel.
Realnoe Vremya: Overview of book publishing in Russia, H1 2026: publications grow, but print runs decline – “Every second book in Russia is published with a print run of less than 1,000 copies”. Ekaterina Petrova analyses “the most interesting figures and data” from statistics recently published by the Russian Book Chamber of the Russian State Library (RSL).
Boston Review: 🎤🦄🫣 Revenance Event – Weird fiction writer China Miéville “returns […] with a secret history of late-twentieth-century Britain.” Mark Bould speaks to him about his new fantasy-horror novel, The Rouse.
Review 31: ‘The Story Knows More than We Do’: An Interview with Eva Wyles – Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand but currently based in London, Eva Wyles’ Deliverywoman is, according to Nicolas Padamsee, “a raw and poignant collection, with darkly compelling short stories in which characters are painfully alert to the power dynamics of their interactions and in which scenes of hedonism and revelry are shredded to reveal stark loneliness and longing.”
AP: ⚣💘 Beloved author Benjamin Alire Sáenz, first Latino PEN/Faulkner winner, dies at 71 – The gay American poet, novelist and writer of children’s books, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, “who drew upon his sexuality and his life on the Southern border [in his work], has died at age 71. He was the first Latino to win the PEN/Faulkner prize.” You can also read a piece about him by Cindy Ramirez and Robert Moore in El Paso Matters: Renowned El Paso author, artist Benjamin Alire Sáenz dies at 71.
BBC Technology: 🤖📚 Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI? – “Something mysterious has been happening in the world of secondhand books. Over the last few months independent booksellers have been observing a strange pattern of purchases which have seen scores of their novels being shipped to far-off warehouses.” Philippa Wain asks Stuart Manley of Barter Books in Northumberland for his thoughts on the matter.
House Beautiful: A rare opportunity to live in Virginia Woolf’s childhood home – take a look inside – “Though Virginia Woolf is often associated with Bloomsbury, the writer grew up between Knightsbridge and Kensington, living in Hyde Park Gate with her sister, artist Vanessa Bell. Now, an apartment from the building could be yours”, reveals Liz Lane.
Tech Times: 🎩👜🎮 Moomin: Midsummer Madness Confirms Autumn Window; Environments Built From Jansson Drawings – If you are a gamer in addition to being a reader – and maybe a fan of the Moomins to boot – you may be keen to try out Moomin: Midsummer Madness for Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC via Steam. Developer Crossbridge Game Studios and publisher Shochiku Games announced the launch on Moomin Day along with the official trailer, which you can see at Moomin: Midsummer Madness Is Set to Launch This Autumn. Maxwell Templeton has all the gen on what makes this Moomin game different from others, how the art was built and more.
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FINALLY >>
If there is something you would particularly like to see in Winding Up the Week or if you have any suggestions, questions or comments for Book Jotter in general, please drop me a line or comment below. I would be delighted to hear from you.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I wish you a week bountiful in books and rich in reading.
NB In this feature, ‘winding up’ refers to the act of concluding something and should not be confused with the British expression: ‘wind-up’ – an age-old pastime of ‘winding-up’ friends and family by teasing or playing pranks on them. If you would like to know more about this term, there is an excellent description on Urban Dictionary.
>> See my monthly digest at the Book Jotter Journal on Substack. >>
Categories: Tove Jansson, Winding Up the Week
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