An end of week recap
“Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.”
– Jack London (The Editor, March 1903)
Today is European Day of Languages, celebrated by countries across the continent, then in Canada, the UK and America it is National Ghost Hunting Day. For those needing a chocolate fix (i.e. me), it is National Chocolate Milk Day in the same three countries, and the Mid-Autumn Festival (also known as the Chinese Moon Festival) – whose roots can be traced back some two to three millennia – also takes place over the weekend.
Wordsmiths born on this day include the American-English poet, essayist and playwright T.S. Eliot (1888), English writer Minette Walters (1949), American novelist Jane Smiley (1949), English writer and journalist Will Self (1961), English novelist Mark Haddon (1962) and American novelist Bernice L. McFadden (1965). 🧁 Among those celebrating on Sunday are the Italian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Grazia Deledda (1871), British publisher and writer Michael Joseph (1897), American crime novelist Jim Thompson (1906), English literary critic and poet William Empson (1906), Scottish novelist, short story writer and screenwriter Irvine Welsh (1958) and American writer Jonathan Evison (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.
* October Tales of Terror *
* Count the Days till the Christmas Challenge *
* Blogs from the Bookcellar *
* 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 two – posted earlier this week:
* 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 or the Diary of Tovian Events. Be sure not to miss out on all the goings-on in your part of the world! 🎩👜
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Underline: 🏆 What Does the Booker Think a Novel Is For? – “The easiest, and I think least critical, way to read the Booker longlist is as a competition. The more interesting way to read it is as an argument.” Riley Herbert-Henry on “literary taste, institutional prestige, and the strange business of deciding which novels matter.”
Eurozine: 🗣️📜🪶 A country between being and nothing – “In search of traces of the Belarusian diaspora in the West after 1945, the poet Volha Hapeyeva considers how language and literature provide a sense of belonging away from home, helping to conserve an identity that is both Belarusian and European.”
The New Yorker (via Archive Today): 🎤🎶🎹 What Barbara Kingsolver Believes the Novel Can Do – American novelist, essayist and poet Barbara Kingsolver “writes what she calls socially engaged fiction. In her new book [Partita], she considers the role of art—and who it’s for”, says Casey Cep.
Book Idle: 🤬 Poorly arranged indexes – a lonely cri de Coeur – “This is an extended quibble about indexes – those alphabetised directories at the ends of books entrusted with unlocking the book’s valuable stores of information. Sometimes useful, sometimes an insult to logic and common sense. I have only one goat and it gets got with surprising frequency when I turn to the back pages of non-fiction books.” Tash gets testy about one of my pet hates.
The Monthly (via Archive Today): 🦘🪖 Battle lines: Australian stories of war – “While our bookshelves heave with military mythology, where are the Australian novels examining our participation in modern conflicts, including our longest war?” Canberra critic Beejay Silcox goes in search of “war-fic” written “after the United Nations was established” and comes up with “a hard-found baker’s dozen.”
LARB: A Humanism of Bad News – “Revisiting Chekhov’s literary prescriptions for our divided times”, Raymond De Luca reviews “Yuri Corrigan’s dazzling new book”, Chekhov’s Antidotes: Prescriptions for an Age of Unrest – an electrifying journey through the early modernist Russian playwright, short story writer and physician’s stories and plays.
New Scientist (via Archive Today): 𖤍𖣐🪓 New Scientist recommends a fascinating deep dive into the real Vikings – “The stories we tell about the Vikings often say more about us than them. Archaeologist Neil Price’s new book The Sea-King and the Sorceress tries to show the Norse as they were, says Michael Marshall”.
Independent: Ian McEwan to release first major nonfiction collection ‘Between Books’ next spring – A landmark new collection brings together for the first time Ian McEwan’s brilliant, wide-ranging essays, written across a lifetime. Following a celebrated career spanning decades as a world-renowned novelist,” the essay and speech collection Between Books will be published by Alfred A. Knopf on 25th May 2027. The “volume ranges from ‘intimate personal recollection to bold intellectual enquiry,’” they say, “combining previously published pieces with unreleased work, alongside a newly written introduction”.
The Montréal Review: 📖 Four Years Spent Reading the World’s Most Complex Books – “A long, complex novel has the capacity to capture not only a personality that seems as intricate as a real person—Raskolnikov, Clarissa Dalloway, Humbert Humbert—but also places as textured as ones we know—Halldór Laxness’s Iceland, Dickens’s Chancery Lane […], Anna Burns’s unnamed Belfast”, says author and critic James Elkins. “The most complex novels are endless projects of rereading, each deepening the last. Over months and years you get to know it, slowly and imperfectly […] like a person.”
The Wire: An Ice Factory, the Great Famine and the Mystery of Missing Dalit Workers – “We have long read Indian characters written for the Western eye”, says Surya Bulusu, but in B. Jeyamohan’s historical novel, “White Elephant [translated by Priyamvada Ramkumar,] we read Western characters written for the Tamil eye, in an English that renews as much as it challenges.”
BookTrib.: ⚢😢😌 “The Weight of One Pomegranate” Explores Grief and Moving Forward – “The Weight of One Pomegranate is the second YA novel, also highly recommended for adult readers, of notable author Brynne Rebele-Henry […]. While savoring the precise fine prose, you might linger to re-read certain passages in this bittersweet coming of age drama that ponders the sudden inexplicable death of a vibrant young person”, writes Linda Hitchcock. She also recommends it to “teens struggling with their awakening sexuality [in this instance, female same sex attraction]”.
Foreign Policy Magazine (via Archive Today): Chinese Literature Is Undergoing a Vibe Shift – “Beijing long promoted novels about working-class travails [but] what happens when authors point fingers at the state?” asks Kimberly Lim.
Washington Independent Review of Books: 🕵️♂️📜🪶 Twenty Minutes of Silence – “Twenty Minutes of Silence is the second of [French novelist and playwright] Hélène Bessette’s books to be translated by Kate Briggs in recent years.” It “is a whodunit, albeit a stripped-down, experimental one. The premise is that a man [ – a father and husband] has been killed during the night at his home in the north of France. His wife and 15-year-old son were home and, consequently, are the lead suspects.” First published in 1955, it is reviewed here by Samantha Neugebauer.
Meant For you: 🪖 Pages One Cannot Turn Over – Arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau, Robert Antelme regained his freedom a year later when François Mitterand – visiting the camp in an official role – recognised the gravely ill man and arranged for him to be taken swiftly back to Paris. The Human Race, his 1947 memoir of his experiences in Germany (translated by Jeffrey Haight), does not “waste time with hatred. It isn’t absent due to saintliness or even forbearance”, says Charlotte Shane. “Judgement simply does not serve Robert’s purposes. It would be a distraction. It is not ‘the point.’” If you would like to explore his life and work further, I would also recommend On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentary (1996), edited by Daniel Dobbels.
afrocritik: An Odyssey of Small Lives: A Review of Famous Chukwuemeka’s “Many Ways to Die” – Nigerian novelist and essayist Famous Chukwuemeka’s short story collection Many Ways to Die, “succeeds because of its capacious ability to reimagine worlds and deliver vulnerable characters whose plight moves the audience”, writes Azubuike Obi. “The people who populate the pages of these stories”, he says, “are all struggling to keep their heads above water, often against forces beyond them. It is as though fate has conspired against these souls, and so they are left tugging, flailing, gasping for air.”
LALT: 🫣🌡️⛈️🎤 Issue 39: Featured Author: Fernanda Trías: Pink Slime, translated by Heather Cleary – Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías, the Uruguayan writer, translator and creative writing teacher, is described here as “a hair-raising, poetic work of literary horror and climate fiction about a woman and the people who depend on her as the world around them edges toward apocalypse.” It is, we are told, an “evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency.” You can also read an interview with her in the same issue. Juan Camilo Rincón’s Working with the Hidden Story: A Conversation with Fernanda Trías on Miembro fantasma.
Literary Review (via Archive Today): 🎓👻 No Thinking, Gentlemen, Please – M.R. James is regarded as being one of the greatest ghost story writers of all time. Every Christmas he would gather friends and students in his rooms at King’s College Cambridge to read his eerie stories, known to them as a ‘dark séance’. In For the Dead Remember: The Life of M R James, Darryl Jones “has done a huge amount of work [telling] you everything you could possibly want to know about [this English medievalist scholar], from his literary interests to his dental problems”. And by “seeking to situate [him] within his own time and place, [he has provided] a real insight into how we might understand him, even if it does bring him down to size”, says William Whyte.
From My Bookshelf: 🕵️♂️✨ The Mean Streets of Kyiv – Peter C. Meilaender on The Stolen Heart (translated from the Russian by Boris Drayluk), the second book in Andrey Kurkov’s three-volume ‘Kyiv Mysteries’ series.
Literary Hub: ✍️🎨📚 What Learning to Paint and Reading The Elements of Style Have in Common – “I envy painters the freedom to convey thoughts without words. So much so that at one difficult stretch in my life I resolved to give up writing and pick up a paint brush. […]. You are no doubt familiar with the little book [The Elements of Style, a highly regarded writer’s] guide [to American English,] first written and privately printed in 1918 by William Strunk Jr.” Susan Coll, author most recently of Word Salad – the fictional tale of a young woman working at a bookstore in Washington D.C. (as the novelist does in real life) – talks here about “letting your mind wander outside the box”.
The Paris Review: ✉️📮 “Laugh? I Thought I’d Die!!”: Richard Yates’s Unpublished Letters – The American novelist and short story writer Richard Yates (1926-1992) “has a reputation for bleakness. But while the works for which he is best known […] do feature a cast of unhappy souls, they are also often funny. So are his letters, which have never before been published”, says Nathan Dunne.
Euronews: 🖨️ France’s literary season: a uniquely French phenomenon? – “Again, this year, several hundred novels come out at the end of summer for the ‘rentrée littéraire’. But what does this event look like in other European countries?” asks Nathan Joubioux.
Publishers Weekly: 🕵️♂️🔪 Genki Kawamura Knows the Lines Between Fantasy and Reality Are Blurred – Japanese writer and filmmaker Genki Kawamura’s “latest novel [The Horse and I (translated by Chikako Kobayashi)] explores the boundary between fantasy and reality and the nature of human-animal relationships.”
Monocle (via Archive Today): 📚🍽️ In Wenzhou, a culinary bookshop is serving up new connections – As a younger generation [in China begin] to re-embrace time in the kitchen, Dish Books is serving up community through food, culture and history”, reports Yang Xiong.
Financial Times (via Archive Today): ☭ Kolkhozby Emmanuel Carrère — the remarkable life of a literary grande dame – In his biography, Kolkhoz: A Personal History of War, Obsession and Truth, the “French author draws a fascinating portrait of his mother [Hélène Carrère d’Encausse], from the Russian Revolution to the heart of the Paris establishment”. The title of Emmanuel’s book “is a reference to the Soviet collective farms his mother pretended to study in Uzbekistan while gathering information about the Soviet relations with Islam for the French government. It also alludes to the arrangement by which her children slept on mattresses in her bedroom, a set-up she named after the Soviet communal living model”.
The Brussels Times: 📚 Reading the room: Brussels bookshops turn the page – “From Passa Porta’s multilingual literary hub to the dazzling Tropismes, the reborn Filigranes, Standaard Boekhandel and a century-old English bookselling tradition at Waterstones, Brussels has a remarkably varied bookstore scene. Jon Eldridge explores how the capital’s bookshops are adapting to changing habits, championing writers and finding new ways to bring readers together.”
Seize the Press: 🛸 Transcending the Triangle: The Politics of Flatland by Gwen C. Katz – Flatland, a satirical masterpiece of science and mathematical fiction by Edwin Abbott Abbott, is “the tale of a square who lives in a two-dimensional plane [which] has charmed readers since its initial publication in 1884. But while modern readers still enjoy the second half of the book, where the square meets a sphere and discovers the existence of other dimensions, many are troubled by the first half, where the narrator describes his two-dimensional world and its culture”, writes author, artist and video game designer Gwen C. Katz.
The British Columbia Review: 🍁 Brown Days, Green Days – Canadian author Leslie Howard is well-known for writing stories about the history and people of British Columbia. Ryan Frawley reviews her latest historical novel Shades of Emily, about two women living a hundred years apart: a 21st century lawyer and the pioneering Canadian artist Emily Carr.
The Lamp: ☭ Fireworks in Daylight – “This is the disgusting truth which is growing clearer every day: if the Soviet Union had bloodily crushed dissent throughout its empire in the late 1980s, Western leaders would still be making pilgrimages to Moscow to flatter and soothe whatever monsters sat in the Kremlin as a result.” Peter Hitchens on The August Coup: The Destruction of the Soviet Union and the Making of New Russia 1985–1991 – an account of an extraordinary moment in Russia’s history when Communist hard-liners attempted to seize control of the Soviet Union by holding President Mikhail Gorbachev captive.
Pittsburgh Review of Books: 📜🪶Fifteen Years, 944 Pages: Editing the Definitive Sylvia Plath – “Happiness, marginalia, and pink stationery. Greg Barnhisel interviews Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil on The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a definitive collection of one of America’s most significant poets.” Oddly enough, this, one of “the most anticipated collection[s] of the year by an American poet isn’t yet available” in the USA but was published in the UK last May.
Aeon: 🪖🛵🍋 Chasing la dolce vita – “I’ve hunted for echoes of these idyllic [childhood] days in Italian literature and art and added them to the building blocks of my emigrant longing”, says novelist and translator Ben Faccini, author most recently of Other People’s Children – a story going back to the chaotic days of the Italian resistance during World War II. Here he writes about “homecomings, fantasies, food and ghosts” and “how the myth of eternal return keeps the Italian diaspora in a state of longing”.
Asterism: 🎤🖨️ Kurdish Literature in Translation: Henar Press – “Aryan Omar Hassan, the founder of Henar Press, discusses what it’s like to be the first English language publisher dedicated to Kurdish literature in translation. He speaks on working against a long history of censorship and Henar’s latest publication,” Seyed Qader Hedayati’s GABOR (translated by Chiya Parvizpur and Hourieh Maleki Qouzloo).
Texas Monthly (via Archive Today): 🪄 The Mystery of Houdini’s Disappearing Bookcase – “Thanks to dogged detective work by [Eric Colleary,] curator at UT’s Harry Ransom Center, an important piece of furniture was rescued from oblivion. It [went on] display [last] month”, reports Katy Vine and, for “the first time since the 1950s, the books [were] reunited with their bookcase […] in Austin.” In addition to all this, Colleary’s landmark volume, Houdini’s Library: Inside the Spellbinding Collections of the Great Illusionist, the first-ever book on Houdini’s legendary personal literary collection, is to be published on the centennial of his death.
Gutter: A Wee Touch of Goodness – “This year Polygon [published] seven new editions of Agnes Owens’s novels and short stories. Each is introduced by an acclaimed Scottish writer and released in collaboration with the Agnes Owens Archive to mark the centenary of the author’s birth.” The works of this Milngavie-born novelist and short story writer, known for her unflinching portrayals of working-class life, are described here by Roxani Krystalli as being “work novels” in which she “allowed some of her own experiences to filter into her fiction.”
Fiction Matters: 📖 Letting a book teach you how to read it – In part three of her excellent Reading Well Challenge series, Sara Hildreth tells us she is “a firm believer that the best literature teaches its readers how to read it”, then goes on to look in more depth at “noticing instructions, guideposts, and gentle nudges”.
Forward: ✈️ How a Jewish, German-averse writer came to love Berlin – “For years, Wendy Lesser [founder and editor of The Threepenny Review] was a proud, Germany-avoiding Jew with what she calls ‘an ingrained distaste for the nation that gave rise to the Third Reich.’ Then, in 2003, [this] prolific critic and author, was the recipient of a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. Those few months in residence started her love affair with that history-embattled city, where she now returns regularly and feels surprisingly at home”, writes Julia M. Klein in her review of Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times.
1000 Libraries: ⚠️ Orwell vs. Huxley: Which Dystopia Are We Living In? – “Huxley taught Orwell French, then wrote him a letter saying he was wrong.” Vincent Phan on “Big Brother the game show, soma, your phone, and why the French army hires novelists.”
The Hedgehog Review: The Last Great American Novel – A quarter of a century on, “the book, written in an America on the verge of being transformed, remains connected with the twisted iron and pulverized concrete of September 11, seemingly anticipated by its second sentence: ‘You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.’” Ed Simon on Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections at 25 – “a 568-page doorstopper that was its author’s grand attempt at social realism.”
BBC Culture: 🎬 ‘The 21st-Century gym-toned bodies put me out’: Four things Jane Austen adaptations get wrong – according to experts – “A new film adaptation of the English novelist’s Sense and Sensibility adds to a long line of attempts to translate Austen’s timeless stories to the screen. But these are their common mistakes”, finds Molly Gorman.
The New Criterion: 📖 An unprecedented thing – “Michael Gorra’s The Storytellers: Reading the Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction is among the most beautiful—and wonderful—things that have ever happened to this reader”, says a greatly enthused Ernest Jesuyemi. A literary study of the tradition of short narratives that flourished in Europe and America, it is, he continues, “the work of a connoisseur” and possibly “the most comprehensive study of the development of the short story in the nineteenth century that we have, from Goethe through Turgenev to Chekhov”. Furthermore, “it is immensely readable”.
The University of Western Australia: 🦘 Richard Flanagan’s essays have a ferocious moral force – “Richard Flanagan’s latest book Heresies is a collection of 24 occasional pieces published between 2009 and 2025. They cover a range of topics dear to the author’s heart but also display the deep thinking and reading of one of Australia’s leading writers,” finds Tony Hughes-d’Aeth.
The Province: 🍁 ‘It’s not just people living on the street’: Novel about homelessness in Montreal finds a new audience – “They live on the street, these tiny Inuuk twins, Mary and Tracy, and they are reduced to begging for handouts from passing motorists. But there is still sparkle in their ravaged resilience. They are destitute, but they are not beyond caring for others — a tattered but palpable sense of community is there for all.” Jamie Portman reviews Michel Jean’s Ninan: Tiohtia:ke, Montreal (translated by Susan Ouriou).
Classic Literature: The Pig That Flew to the Stars – The anonymous writer of this article recently “came across [a] beautiful piece online” about the American novelist, short story writer, war correspondent and writer of the Great Depression John Steinbeck. S/he recalls the author once describing books as ‘“printed demons’ and that one of his professors once said to him that he could be a writer only when pigs fly.” Steinbeck, we are told, “took it personally”.
Fodor’s Travel: ✈️ 7 Books That Take You Places You Probably Shouldn’t Visit Right Now – “Travelers always have reasons to reconsider visiting certain destinations. Locals might feel the burden of overtourism and want a break. These places may not be easily accessible (location-wise or financially). Or, destinations may be experiencing conflict and under a Level 4: Do Not Travel warning.” Nevertheless, says Apeksha Bhateja, as inquisitive travellers, “you can satisfy your curiosity by turning to books that showcase their culture, history, beauty, or even the daily life of a local. Books have a way of transporting us to places, and this list of fiction and non-fiction is an effort to bring you somewhere you can’t or shouldn’t go right now.”
Nippon.com: 🎤🏆📜🪶 Kang Han-na: A South Korean Poet Finds Her Voice in Japan’s Tanka – “The South Korean poet Kang Han-na is the only foreign winner of an award for tanka, a Japanese poetic form with a history of over 1,500 years. She [tells Yoshino Taichirō] that breaking down complex, tangled feelings into a short tanka can reveal surprisingly simple answers.”
The Broken Compass: Bad choices and dangerous friends: the fugitive promise of George Gascoigne – Writer and historian Mathew Lyons explores the reasons why “one of Elizabethan England’s great literary innovators died a broken man”.
Strange Clarity: 🔎❓Elena Ferrante and the people who vouched for her – Doing some fascinating sleuthing, Laura Cecile Moore investigates the possibility that Elena Ferrante’s identity was never in fact discovered, despite popular opinion. She puts forward her theories, and even though the author’s publishing team had originally convinced her this mysterious person was a woman, she now suggests the writer may have been Ferrante’s husband – though she’s still far from sure.
CNN Asia: 📖 This country is paying its people to read. Can it stop brain rot? – “Whether it’s while waiting for the train or chilling solo at a cafe, a tiny nation in Southeast Asia is nudging its people toward an increasingly elusive habit: reading”, says Kathleen Magramo. “Singapore”, she reveals, has “this month launched a novel five-year national campaign to nurture reading habits, with incentives including small payments to citizens who log their reading minutes on a government website.”
Colossal: ✏️ Go Behind the Scenes of Blackwing Pencils’ Ode to Analog Creativity – Since I’m such a stationery person – pretty stationary too a lot of the time – I just had to share this link with you. Blackwing pencil company (also, in case you would like to know, stockists of pens, paper and various scribbling accessories) is headquartered in Stockton, California and, according to editor Kate Mothes, rather special. “In a behind-the-scenes video, the company shares how that process works, followed by how the utensils begin to take shape” – I was mesmerised (well, I’m easily impressed).
Miller’s Book Review: 🎬🦁 Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Freak-out Edition – “Last week Empire magazine revealed that Meryl Streep would voice Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Netflix adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s beloved classic The Magician’s Nephew, and people lost their everlovin’ minds. But is the social-media freak-out warranted?” asks a bemused Joel J Miller.
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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. >>