An end of week recap
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
– Salman Rushdie
I will be scooting off to Liverpool again towards the end of next week and probably won’t return until late on Saturday, which means my wind up may not arrive until Sunday 18th October – and in what form it will appear, I’m not yet entirely sure. 👽
We have an actual literary event to get our biblioteeth into today, for it is Bookshop Day in all manner of countries around the world – a fine excuse to celebrate the importance of local bookstores. In fact, Australia gets its own special Love Your Bookshop Day, giving readers there an opportunity to honour the independent shops that keep their communities reading. It is also the final day of Banned Books Week in the USA (primarily), though many other countries like to lend their voices informally to the freedom‑to‑read conversation.
Today, the birthday bells chime for (among others) the national writer of Finland Aleksis Kivi (1834), Indian writer and novelist R. K. Narayan (1906), French novelist and recipient of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature Claude Simon (1913), English surrealist poet David Gascoyne (1916), Australian-born English-American writer and filmmaker James Clavell (1921), English playwright and recipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature Harold Pinter (1930), American romantic novelist Nora Roberts (1950) and French-American novelist Amanda Filipacchi (1967). 🎊 Among those experiencing a ringing-sound in their ears on Sunday are French writer and recipient of the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature François Mauriac (1885), Welsh language children’s author T. Llew Jones (1915), American crime fiction writer Elmore Leonard (1925), Canadian poet, fiction writer and travel writer David McFadden (1940) and Irish writer and the first Laureate for Irish Fiction Anne Enright (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.
* MCMXLIX and All That *
This is your final call for Karen Langley and Simon Thomas’s autumn/spring Club outing, so please go immediately to gate 1949 and have your library cards ready for inspection. Once assembled, you may select from an enormous range of reading materials by the likes of Nelson Algren, Agatha Christie (naturally), Nevil Shute, Jorge Luis Borges, Georgette Heyer, Italo Calvino, Astrid Lindgren, Victor Canning, Shirley Jackson, Vilhelm Moberg, Cecil Day-Lewis, Graham Greene, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, E.C.R. Lorac, Knut Hamsun, Ana María Matute, Yukio Mishima, H. P. Lovecraft, Enid Blyton, Jean Genet and oh so many others (there are plenty of suggestions in The #1949Club – and some previous reads!). In a recent post, Whoosh! Where did September go????, Karen says she started reading for the #1949Club last month and describes it as “an interesting year.” Of that twelve-month period, she observes: “The world was still in a post-WW2 state, with a good number of countries still recovering from the conflict, so it’s fascinating to consider how literature reflected that.” You have from 12th to 18th October to find out!
* Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Sweet Sixteen *
Another immensely popular annual event has recently been confirmed by hosts Caroline from Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Tony Malone of Tony’s Reading List (the latter having stepped into the breach following the sad passing of co-founder Lizzy Siddal last year). German Literature Month, which is set to return for the 16th time from 1st November and run throughout the month, will, as ever, encourage participants to pick up German, Austrian and Swiss titles originally written in German. Caroline says, “you can read whatever you like”, or, if you prefer, get involved with the planned anniversary celebrations, during which a couple of weeks will be devoted to “two very special authors,” namely Ingeborg Bachmann and Rainer Maria Rilke. You can peruse the full schedule in Announcing German Literature Month XVI November 2026. Tony hopes that plenty of you will join him and Caroline “on [their] reading journeys.” Finally, please ensure that you use the #GermanLitMonth tag so that you can be found.
* Blogs from the Bookcellar *
Ágota Kristóf’s (1935-2011) acknowledged masterpiece, The Notebook Trilogy, about twins Claus and Lucas surviving the horrors of war by devising physical and mental exercises to render themselves invulnerable to living under a totalitarian regime, until separation forces them to confront who they are without each other, is to be republished in November by Penguin Classics (translated by Alan Sheridan and David Watson). Last March, author Dennis Cooper of DC’s, posted a long piece about this enduring work, in which he gathered a diverse selection of articles, documentary materials and other online resources (including a fascinating interview between the Hungarian-born Swiss novelist, who wrote in French, and Riccardo Benedettini). Spotlight on … Ágota Kristóf The Notebook Trilogy (1986–1991) is an excellent reference point if you are considering reading (or rereading) the series.
* 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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The Royal Society: 👨🔬🧪⚗️ ‘Dazzling’ globetrotting adventure in history of alchemy wins 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize – “The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry by self-proclaimed science adventurer Kit Chapman has been announced as the winner of the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.” In his book Chapman sets out on a global quest to achieve immortality, cure all disease and transmute lead into gold as he reveals the illuminating stories of how the alchemists first broke new ground and shaped the scientific method. This title may well be a good choice for Nonfiction November.
A couple of Nobels: 🪙
BBC Culture: 🏆🍁 ‘Bold and inventive’ Canadian poet Anne Carson wins Nobel Literature Prize – “Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature”, reports Ian Youngs. Aged 76, she “is celebrated for works that often cross the boundaries between poetry, fiction and scholarship” – having “been a professor of classics for more than 30 years […,] her writing is often inspired by Greek literature.” Also see Anne Carson Wins 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature at Publishers Weekly.
3 Quarks Daily: 🤔 Annie Dillard should have won the Nobel – “Annie Dillard is now ineligible for the Nobel Prize [because the] the Swedish Academy won’t award it posthumously.” Nevertheless, “in light of her recent passing,” Jonas Gardsby makes the argument that “she should have won the prize” during her lifetime.
The New York Times (via Archive Today): ⚠️📕🚫👦👧 An Unsettling New Novel From the Author of ‘The Giver’ – “Lois Lowry pioneered dystopian fiction for young readers. Building 903 adds to her legacy”, writes Neal Shusterman. You may also like to read Betsy Bird’s thoughts on this tale of book censorship at SLJ: Review of the Day: Building 903 by Lois Lowry.
The Literary Edit: 🏝️🎤 Larissa Pham’s Desert Island Books – Lucy Pearson’s latest castaway selects eight books she would most like to be stranded with on her remote fantasy island, including titles by Clarice Lispector, Leo Tolstoy and Marilynne Robinson. Brooklyn-based writer and artist, Larissa Pham’s, “brilliant” novel, Discipline, is described in Harper’s Bazaar thus: “A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from a ‘lit world phenom’”.
Literary Hub: 🧙♀️🧹 The Real Story of the So-Called “Witches” of England – An excerpt from Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter, Marion Gibson’s newly published account of the witch trials that started in southeast England and Lowland Scotland during the English Civil War of the 1640s: Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain.
The Australian (via Archive Today): 🦘🕵️♂️❓Bestselling author Michael Robotham releases first novel after 40 years in bottom drawer – “Michael Robotham wrote 19 novels before his actual first manuscript saw daylight – [although] some of Australia’s best authors [would rather theirs hadn’t].” After forty years gathering dust, Tell Me Something True was finally published last month and, Robotham says, “that original unpublished novel, set in a small Australian country town, has been rewritten and reimagined because I’m older and wiser and hopefully more experienced.” He asks other writers why they are often so “horrified at the thought of publishing their early manuscripts”.
Romanian Authors in English: A Rich Harvest: Romanian Literature in English, Fall Dispatch – Daciana Branea writes, “[…] this autumn, perhaps more than in previous years, the harvest of Romanian literature in English translation is both abundant and wonderfully diverse. From new poetry publications and an eagerly awaited American tour to an English PEN Translates Award, a book launch in New York City with perfectly fitting timing, the late bloom of a Romanian classic, and a brand-new translation imprint devoted to contemporary writing, the season has plenty to enjoy, admire, and celebrate.”
Independent (via Archive Today): 🎤 Margaret Drabble on the devastating reason she’ll never write another novel – “The celebrated author of The Millstone and The Realms of Gold is publishing her latest book [The Great Good Places], an elegiac collection of essays, short stories and memoir, at 87 years old. At home in Oxford, she speaks to Claire Allfree about never feeling inferior as a woman writer, her fraught relationship with her Booker Prize-winning sister, and how the death of her daughter has affected her creative imagination”.
The Korea Times: 🦄 K-LIT REVIEW ‘Bonobo’ asks who is the noble beast? – Bonobo (translated by Seon Jae An), by Jeong You Jeong, a well-known South Korean author known for her psychological thrillers and crime fiction is, says Arlo Matisz, her “latest book to be translated [into] English [and it] does not pull punches.” A fantasy-thriller about a primatologist whose consciousness merges with that of a bonobo after a car accident, it soon transpires that she “has a shared past” with the animal, through which the author takes “a familiar trope in a new and introspective direction.” The story is “not difficult to follow”, he concludes, “but it can be difficult to process”; ultimately, however, it is “original and gripping”.
The Wall Street Journal (via Archive Today): 😆📜🪶 ‘Peck & Peck’ Review: Their Vocation Was Verse – “A young man with an ear for poetry joins a community of literary misfits” in the latest comic creation from Bonnie Garmus – author of the immensely popular Lessons in Chemistry. Joanne Kaufman reviews Peck & Peck, a novel populated by a “roster of offbeat characters” employed by the world’s most prestigious, secretive and spectacularly dysfunctional poetry journal, describing it as “an affecting ode to poetry.”
Quill & Quire: 🍁 Two Days in Mayaro – “Jamaican-Canadian Pamela Mordecai’s [short story] collection Two Days in Mayaro is steeped in the centuries-long economic, political, and cultural exchanges between Canada and Jamaica”, says reviewer Kwame Eff.
Books of Titans: 😈 The Path to Candide by Voltaire – Erik Rostad recently read Candide by Voltaire for his reading group. He describes it as “an absolutely lovely tale of ‘rape, pillage, murder, massacre, butchery, religious intolerance and abuse, torture, hanging, storm, shipwreck, earth-quake, disease [and] prostitution.’” However, it is also “a satire where despite these horrors, Voltaire keeps you cackling with delight.” In this piece, he outlines “the genesis of the story.”
The New York Times (via Archive Today): 🫣👁️🕯️ A Gothic Puzzle Box of a Novel That Recalls Jekyll and Hyde – “Set just after World War I, The Eye of Goliath [translated by Rahul Bery] details a man’s descent into madness and a doctor’s unorthodox treatment methods”, says Dexter Palmer of the Argentine writer Diego Muzzio’s dark-humoured, macabre novel set in an Edinburgh sanatorium.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: 🍁📖👩🎓👨🎓 Long Live ‘Dead Book Clubs’ – “Dead Book Clubs started up at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute this fall”, says Professor Randy Boyagoda. “The members are exclusively undergraduate students, [each] given copies of the selected title a week in advance. They spend the first 45 minutes of each session reading in silence [and] the rest of their time together in conversation, without supervision […]. No technology is allowed, there are snacks, and every book is by a dead writer.” Could making “space for students to discuss literature outside the classroom” be a “solution to the reading crisis”? he wonders.
Scroll.in: How the Gujarati books of RF Sethna fed India’s appetite for books about Japan in the early 1900s – Murali Ranganathan and Riho Isaka discover that RF Sethna (1872-1965), a professional writer from colonial Mumbai, created “one of the many building blocks that helped Indians develop a better understanding of Japan and the Japanese.”
Kyiv Independent (via Archive Today): 🍂❄️ Kyiv Independent recommends 5 translated Ukrainian books to look out for in late 2026 and early 2027 – Kate Tsurkan “has compiled a list of five books coming out in the second half of 2026 and the first half of 2027 for literature lovers to keep an eye out for.”
InDaily South Australia: 🦘🪖💘 ‘A side of war you just don’t see’: Pip Williams explores love, art and trauma in The German Ward – “A series of wartime sketches and paintings in the Australian War Memorial inspired the latest historical saga The German Ward from [Adelaide] author Pip Williams.” She talks to Rachael Mead about her “story of forbidden love inside a hospital ward treating German prisoners of war.”
Financial Times (via Archive Today): 🧙♂️🍻 The King Under the Mountain: In Search of JRR Tolkien by DJ Taylor — the reluctant wizard – D. J. Taylor’s The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J. R. R. Tolkien is, says Marcel Theroux, a “witty, irreverent study [that] revisits the Oxford don whose private languages, losses and procrastinations helped to create modern fantasy fiction”.
Beck and Call: 📜🪶 Where Readers Meet Writers: The Sylvia Plath You Didn’t Know – “If all you knew of Sylvia Plath was based on the novel she wrote” or from “her most famous poems, including ‘Daddy, Daddy’”, you could be forgiven for thinking her a “fragile person, prone to depression and slated for a difficult life” in the case of the former – or in the latter, “an angry young woman who […] lashed out at her parents and others whom she believed had harmed her”. If so, Christine Beck suggests you read Helen Bain’s new historical novel, The Daffodil Days (first mentioned here in WUTW #464), for a rather different perspective. Also recommended in this thoroughly enjoyable piece is Undersong – “an historical fiction by Kathleen Winter about Dorothy Wadsworth, told in the voice of James Dixon, a man who was hired as a gardener, but became much more.”
Condé Nast Traveler: ✈️ A Book Lover’s Guide to the World’s Most Literary Hotels – Some of the “bookish hotels” on this list “have storied histories, with famous authors checking in as guests; others offer wonderfully over-the-top touches, from private libraries and book-filled suites to partnerships with local bookstores showcasing authors big and small. These are places built for lingering over a chapter with coffee, reading until the sun sets, and then reading some more—which, frankly, sounds like [the] perfect way to travel, if you ask [indulgent travel writer Jessica Chapel].
National Post: 🍁 Crisis in CanLit: Canada has a wealth of fiction writers. Its literary culture is holding them back – In an excerpt from his address to Universität Trier, marking 50 years of Canadian studies at the German university, David Staines commented during his lecture, Fifty Years on: Canadian Fiction Then and Now, that the “finest literary fiction being written is not American or British but rooted in Canada and speaking to the world”.
Washington Independent Review of Books: ✝️ The Unbroken Coast – “Faith sustains generations of Mumbai families plagued by misfortune.” Bruce J. Krajewski reviews The Unbroken Coast – Nalini Jones’ historical novel set in “Varuna, a devout Catholic fishing community”, which encompasses “Bombay’s transition to Mumbai, the Bombay riots of the 1990s, and India’s struggle with AIDS.”
Thinking Out Loud: ✍️ And You May Ask Yourself, “Well, How Did I Get Here?” – “My final (thousandth?) column appeared two months before I became eligible to receive Social Security. This was not entirely a coincidence.” Critic Scott McLemee with an inaugural essay about book reviewing for his new Substack.
The Atlantic (via Archive Today): Six Hard-to-Find Books Worth Reading – “These titles are no longer fashionable, if they ever were—but should you manage to read one, you might love it”, says Dustin Illingworth.
The National: 🪖 Anand Gopal’s book on Syrian revolution shortlisted for Baillie Gifford Prize – Days of Love and Rage by Anand Gopal, “draws on eight years of research and about 2,000 interviews to reconstruct the uprising in Manbij”, says William Mullally.
Slate: 🚫🫣 Stephen King Wrote a Book About a School Shooter. Then It Allegedly Inspired Several School Shootings. – Jack Hamilton recalls, “The one book so controversial that even the King of Horror pulled it from publication” was Stephen King’s Rage – a story “about an act of shocking violence at a high school” published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1977. “Sometime in the late 1990s, King quietly made the decision to let the original Bachman Books collection fall out of print” – proving that sometimes writers censor their own works.
Princeton University Press: The persistence of misogyny: 4000 years of demonized women – “For over 4000 years of western culture, we’ve had a robust ideology of monstrous bitchery, and that ideology has remained—in its largest contours—almost totally intact that entire time. But lately, something new has been happening.” Eleanor Johnson, author of Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women, explains why her “last hope for us all is art, and its fearless capacity to challenge long-established orders of power.”
Prospect (via Archive Today): Elif Shafak: Fiction is not a luxury. It’s existential – The Turkish-British author speaks to Graeme Green about “losing her homeland and finding a new one through literature”. Her latest historical novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, traces a path from revolutionary nineteenth-century France to Istanbul, Egypt and Beirut, bridging Western prose and Eastern poetry.
Pittsburgh Review of Books: 🎤❓👨🎓 The Elegiac Radiance of Ayad Akhtar – “Literature’s standard is not journalistic. Triple-sourced verification of one’s assertions is not an imprimatur of the kind of truth that literature is after, which is fundamentally metaphorical.” Ed Simon talks to Ayad Akhtar about previous works, language and his latest mystery campus novel The Radiance.
Reactor: 🫣🦄💘⚣ Fiction With a Grain of Salt: The Salt King by Natasha Pulley – “There are numerous ways to describe [this fantasy-horror novel] about a traumatized man coming to grips with the limitations of his own worldview; a story about an inexplicable global crisis that baffles scientists and theologians […]; a secret history of human civilization; and a slow-burning romance between two men haunted by their pasts.” Tobias Carroll says he “is ready for more stories in The Salt King‘s compelling setting.”
Sarra Manning is reading, writing, procrastinating: 💘 Long live love stories! – “Let me count the ways (but don’t ask me what a hucow is…)”. Sarra Manning divulges the many reasons why she loves reading and writing romantic fiction.
The New York Times (via Archive Today): He Landed in a Russian Jail Cell. Was It Just Where He Wanted to Be? – “In This Cursed Beautiful Land, the journalist Evan Gershkovich explores what he learned while imprisoned in the country his parents fled.” David Kortava describes it as an “enthralling memoir”.
Womack’s Wanderings: ✍️👦👧 On reviewing children’s books [thoughts] – “A curious snobbery exists around children’s books. Countless times I’ve informed someone at a party (on being asked, naturally) that I write children’s books, and have received a patronising smile, as if I had left my IQ on the bus.” Philip Womack explains why he reviews children’s books and the reasons he intends to keep on doing so.
The Point: 🦘🖨️ Literary pioneer Hilary McPhee launched Helen Garner, published Cloudstreet – and inspired me – Hilary McPhee died recently at the age of 85. In her opinion piece, Alice Grundy says of the late writer, editor and publisher that she “was already a legend when [she herself] started working in publishing, nearly two decades ago. McPhee Gribble, the publishing house she founded with friend Diana Gribble in 1975, was the first home for some of Australia’s beloved authors, including Helen Garner, Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette. [Her] legacy lives on in the editors she trained and in the standard she set.”
The New Yorker (via Archive Today): 🤖⁉️ The Curious Power of Punctuation – Commas, dashes, semicolons, and spaces have shaped how we read for centuries”, says Louis Menand. So, what, he asks, “happens when machines start crafting the sentences?”
The Lamp: 🛸 Surely Some Revelation is at Hand – Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel, first published in 1953, “takes place in the near future, after a race of technologically superior aliens—the Overlords—has descended upon the Earth. They proceed to bring health and safety to humanity, unifying it under one world government, and using their technology to solve all economic, agricultural, social, and political problems.” Santiago Ramos on Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End and the “fantastical […] becoming possible.”
Banned-ing together: 🫷🚫🫸
☭ The book featured here is Writing the Nation After Stalin: Literature and the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Erin Hutchinson, a non-fiction title based on new archival records, novels and KGB reports across Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and Moldova, about the ways in which young Soviet writers from villages navigated the challenging Soviet cultural and political landscape and pushed for reforms despite intense censorship. Could be an excellent choice for Nonfiction November (see WUTW #486).
SEEN in Publishing: The International List of Challenged Books – “Banned or challenged gender-critical books and authors from around the world”.
The Indian Express: US public schools see over 12,000 book bans, including works by Bronte, Atwood – “Texas recorded the most bans this year, more than 8,100. The surge is linked to a state law, SB13, which bars broad categories of books from schools. Florida had held the top spot for the previous three years. Both states have passed restrictive laws.”
Newsweek: How Banned Books Week Turned Liberals Into Conservatives – “The culture wars have colonized so much of American life that buying beer, watching football or driving an electric car can now acquire an ideological accent. But perhaps nowhere is the partisan sorting stranger than the library, where the country has managed to make left and right difficult to locate even with the Dewey Decimal System.”
Alta (via Archive Today): 🍂🛸❓ Upcoming Releases: Fall Fabulations and Nonfiction – “New perspectives on Western history, Hollywood glitter, and more” from Paul Wilner, including D: Heavy Water by “speculative fiction master” Neal Stephenson, which “takes place amid the competition to build nuclear weapons on the eve of World War II [when a] British journalist gets embroiled in the Allies’ efforts to stop the enemy from making them first.”
Asymptote: Out of Sight: The Untranslated Bookshelf of Kuwaiti Women Writers – “In this essay, Ibrahim Fawzy takes us through a canon of Kuwaiti titles that have yet to appear in English, offering a glimpse into a rich, ever-changing world wherein many of our contemporary intrigues collide.”
History Extra: 🎬 Is East of Eden based on a true story? Inside the new Netflix adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel – “East of Eden tells the story of two families, the Trasks and Hamiltons, and traces the impact of “psychic monster” Cathy Ames on their lives. But how true is the new Netflix series to Steinbeck’s epic tale – and California in the 19th and 20th centuries? Jonathan Wright investigates”.
Tracy’s Nordic Light: 📖✍️ The Shape of a Reading Life as a Writer – Since Norwegian writer Tracy began drafting a book, “something has shifted”. Although, “reading and writing have always lived side by side in [her] life”, she is “reading differently now” – and it “has taken a little getting used to.”
Independent (via Archive Today): 🍂 Books of the Month – “What to read this October, including a table-hopping tour of London’s most lavish restaurants. [Also, what] happens when someone in your family commits an earth-shatteringly evil deed? That question and more are answered in Martin Chilton’s favourite new book releases for October”.
Literary Ladies Guide: ⚢ An early 1950s lesbian pulp classic got me thinking about today’s college frat culture – “While researching [her] forthcoming book, Women Writing Dangerously,” author and illustrator Nava Atlas “read a lot of books [she] wouldn’t normally gravitate to, like Spring Fire by Vin Packer (1952)” – a “literary relic of the not-so-fabulous fifties [now credited with launching the genre, and which] struck [her] as painfully relevant.”
Punch: AU mourns Senegalese literary giant Cheikh Hamidou Kane – The African Union Commission has mourned the death of renowned Senegalese writer and intellectual, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, describing him as a “giant of African letters” whose work profoundly influenced generations across Africa and beyond.
The Telegraph (via Archive Today): Cormac McCarthy’s father beat him bloody – that violence never left his writing – Tracy Daugherty’s Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, the latest biography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist “reveals the troubled family history behind some of his darkest books”, finds George Berridge.
The Guardian: 🎤 ‘We have been dispossessed’: Nick Hayes on land rights and a peaceful revolution at the real Toad Hall – “The co-founder of the Right to Roam campaign and author of The Book of Trespass discusses the Oxfordshire riverside community he calls home […], how Hardwick Hall has been taken back by the people and “his new book, The Medicine Tree, a sweeping alternative history of England” in which Hayes “poses some big questions. [Such as:] Why do English people lack a culture of connection with their land? And how might [they] forge a new one?”
The Mainichi: Japanese fiction boom looks set to endure, experts say – “An unusual mix of stories about alienation, feminism, cats and coffee shops is charming foreign audiences as a boom in translated Japanese fiction shows little sign of fading”, reports William Hollingworth.
The MIT Press Reader: ☭🤫 How the CIA Smuggled Liberal Arts Behind the Iron Curtain – “From Orwell to Agatha Christie, operatives used Western literature to challenge Soviet censorship and spread anti-communist ideas across the Eastern Bloc.” Henry T. Edmondson III on “the secret distribution of books to key individuals, libraries, research institutes, cultural organizations, universities, and schools” between 1956 and 1991.
The Ink-Stained Desk: 🍂🫣 I Read Some Of The October Horror Releases. – Having received “advance copies of several of October’s horror releases”, Christine Maree Reid “thought it might be fun to tell you about them, [in the hope] you’ll be convinced to read one (—or more) in the upcoming months.”
Edmund de Waal: 🧑🎨📜🪶✉️ Forthcoming publication: How to Begin – English ‘poet and potter’ Edmund de Waal, author of the award-winning 2011 memoir The Hare with the Amber Eyes, has now written How to Begin, “a moving, intergenerational story about the traces of memory within a family and a deeply personal reflection on how we learn resilience with the support of others.” It will be published next month by Chatto & Windus.
Adrienne Arsht Center: 🎤👩🎤 Interview: For Patti Smith, memory serves – Jake Cline speaks to the “writer and Rock & Roll Hall of Famer [about] why her latest memoir [Bread of Angels] is an exercise in gratitude.”
Books and Bits: 🎬➡️📘➡️🎬 10 bestselling books that never made it to TV or film – and why – Pandora Sykes introduces her latest contributor as a literary scout and editor “who ‘reverse adapts’ screenplays into novels […] and gives publishing advice at The Secret Agent.” Philippa Donovan discusses “beloved books stuck in development hell”.
TechCrunch: 🎧🤖 Audible’s new features let you explore book worlds — and use AI to talk to characters – “Facing new competition in the audiobook market from Spotify, Audible is turning to AI and other technology to enhance the listening experience. [The] Amazon-owned company [has] introduced three new features that will allow listeners to explore a book’s characters, engage in interactive stories, and view additional imagery and bonus information about landmarks or places mentioned in the book.”
The Cut (via Archive Today): 💘🌶️ How Hot Do You Want It? Decoding spicy romance’s popular — and divisive — chile-pepper scale. – “Spend enough time reading romance,” says Angelina Mazza, “and you’ll start to see the peppers everywhere. Romance readers describe their favorite books like they’re hot sauces: So how many chile peppers does this have? This ‘spice scale’ […] has become shorthand for a novel or story’s sexual content — sometimes referred to as ‘smut’ in fan parlance. But what, exactly, each additional pepper measures is a subject of debate.”
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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
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