An end of week recap
“There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed.”
– Kate Douglas Wiggin (New Chronicles of Rebecca)
From today until 13th November, the USA is marking National Book Award Week 2026, recognising some of the finest achievements in American literature across a variety of categories. On Sunday, Remembrance Day will be observed in the UK and a few other Commonwealth countries, with people wearing red poppies and gathering for ceremonies that honour those who fought and sacrificed their lives in war. 🕊️
There are several notable literary birthdays this weekend. Today includes the British poet Ruth Pitter (1897), French writer and philosopher Albert Camus (1913), American science fiction, fantasy and historical fiction writer R. A. Lafferty (1914), American mystery writer Mary Daheim (1937), Australian novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter Helen Garner (1942), American literary historian and author Stephen Greenblatt (1943), Canadian fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay (1954) and American author Hilary Thayer Hamann (1962). 🎁 Sunday’s list includes English writer Sarah Fielding (1710), Irish writer, barrister, literary critic and theatre manager Bram Stoker (1847), Macedonian poet and writer Dimitrija Cupovski (1878), American novelist and journalist Margaret Mitchell (1900), American novelist and one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century Martha Gellhorn (1908), American writer and editor Ben Bova (1932), American poet Alice Notley (1945), Japanese-British novelist and short-story writer Kazuo Ishiguro (1954) and British author of sapphic dystopian and fantasy fiction Samantha Shannon (1991).
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.
* No Temptation to Hideaway in ’27 *
* 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.
Additionally, 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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Seven Stories Press: ✍️ “With the Smile of Saint-Just” by Annie Ernaux (1988) – Never before translated into English, Writing, The Other Life includes twenty-four previously unpublished pieces, as well as literary criticism, essays, interviews, diary entries, a song by Jeanne Cherhal, newspaper clippings, a comic strip by Aurelia Aurita and letters from Simone de Beauvoir. In this excerpted passage (translated by Frank Wynne), “Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux offers her thoughts on the significance of the 1789 Revolution to her political awakening — and her continued political ideology.”
The New York Times (via Archive Today): 🫣🕯️🖤 Why Is Every Book ‘Gothic’ Now? – “Candlelit corridors, eerie old portraits and other tropes aren’t exclusive to horror and romance this year — they’re everywhere.” Once “applied primarily to horror and dark romance,” Deirdre Coyle finds the “Gothic label” is now applied to “space operas, literary works and fantastical hybrids of all kinds.”
WLT (via Archive Today): ✍️🧠🦘 Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary and the Usefulness of Journaling – Last year, Australian writer Nick Roger Clarke found himself forgetting even the simplest words before eventually receiving a diagnosis for what he calls “a bizarre neurological health issue”. As he navigated this unsettling experience, he turned to journalling and to Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary. The book offered not only a glimpse into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s great literary figures, but also a source of “comfort, direction, and motivation” as he sought a way forward.
Jacobin: The afterlives of literary reputation – “Literary reputations are continually revised through political conflict, changing tastes, and rediscovery.” Christian Lorentzen asks: “What can contemporary disputes about writers tell us about that process?”
Peaceable Land: 🎤 Joyce Carol Oates contradicts herself – “How can the author of more than 100 books have ‘no personality’?” George Monaghan speaks to the “88-year-old American novelist” and Twitter/X warrior Joyce Carol Oates about Ovid, violence in her novels and “a 2001 suicide case”.
The National (via Archive Today): 🔵⚪🧙♀️ How witchcraft and Scottish folklore inspired Sir Walter Scott – “The ghost of a medieval wizard, a goblin, and a hermit who can see the future – Sir Walter Scott’s “out-of-the-way reading” and interest in a “hoary-headed tradition” of folk belief in the supernatural informed his poetry, according to literary scholar Natalie Tal Harries”, says Charlie Lynch.
Neos Kosmos (via Archive Today): 🦘🏺 Antipodes magazine recognised for contribution to Greek literature in Australia – “The Greek-Australian Cultural League’s literary and cultural magazine Antipodes has received an award from the International Patras Poetry Festival, recognising its long-standing contribution to promoting Greek literature and culture in Australia.”
Reading in Transit: 📚⚫🔴🟡 Berlin’s Most Impressive Bookshop, And Why You Should Go There. – “There are so many reasons to go to Berlin.” For the writer, this bookstore is “a big one”.
Smithsonian Magazine: 🔵⚪🕵️♂️🔍 Arthur Conan Doyle Based Sherlock Holmes on a Real-Life Scottish Surgeon Who Used Deduction to Diagnose Patients and Investigate Crimes – An excerpt from Lindsey Fitzharris’s new book, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, which “chronicles the exploits of Joseph Bell, an Edinburgh lecturer whose lessons sparked the creation of the world’s most famous detective”.
Leave It To Anna: 🎤✈️ Coffee Talk: Books That Take You Places – A Chat with Anna About Literary Travel – La Bibliotrek | Read the World “takes you on a journey around the world through excellent reading recommendations. Get ready to take notes on what you will want to read next”, says Anna – “an American living in London who’s made it [her] mission to uncover the hidden gems of Europe, one train ticket and factory shop at a time.” Here she chats to LaBibliotrek herself (another Anna) about “about pairing the perfect book with your next travel destination.”
The Atlantic (via Archive Today): 🕎 The Man Who Wanted to Understand Every Aspect of Jewish Life – “At the turn of the 20th century, some 5 million Jews lived in [a western region of the Russian Empire] between the Baltic and Black Seas, and by 1945, almost all of them had been murdered”, says Gal Beckerman. “In the Pale of Settlement, the [Belarusian-Jewish author, playwright and researcher of Jewish folklore,] S. An-Sky made an ecstatic, obsessive attempt to wrap his arms around an entire people just as it was disappearing.”
A Country of the Mind: 🔖 Personal Curriculum: American Literature & History – “This is the start of a new series in which [historian Maggie Desbaillets pairs] great works of literature with a core historical text to help enhance your next read. [Her] only criteria for this list is that it solely includes books that [she has] read and studied.”
France 24: 👊 Romanian writer Cartarescu hails books as balm in turmoil – “In an age of ‘overwhelming evil’ and ‘generalised lies’, Romanian novelist Mircea Cartarescu, a weaver of literary fantasies born from a childhood under a totalitarian regime, bets on writing to resist.”
The MIT Press Reader: 🎤🧠📜🪶 Beauty Is Everywhere. But What Is It For? – In his new book Why Is the World So Beautiful?, the evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey “explains how cognitive ‘rhymes’ help humans find sense and order in the chaos of the world” – drawing on “the poetic musings of Gerard Manley Hopkins”.
Blue News: Italy’s “Grande Dame” of literature, Dacia Maraini, turns 90 – Maybe she did glance at her phone after all when the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced again recently. The name of the writer Dacia Maraini has come up for years whenever people speculate about possible winners. But her phone didn’t ring this time either—the call never came. Yet she has been one of the most important voices in Italian literature for decades. It’s no coincidence that she is often referred to as its ‘Grande Dame.’”
Times Now: 🎤👘😌 Exclusive: ‘Novels Aren’t There to Teach Morals’, Says Japanese Bestselling Author Michiko Aoyama – “Some call her novels cosy. Others call them cruel. In an exclusive conversation with [Girish Shukla], Michiko Aoyama [whose latest novel has been translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda,] opens up about Matcha on Monday, reinvention and one surprising fictional crush.”
The New Yorker (via Archive Today): ✍️🖱️🛜💻 Did Substack Fix the Internet? – How to Save the Media, a new book by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, “argues that writers today are more empowered than ever. But online newsletters form their own kind of attention economy.”
Take a Sip: 📖 Why are we all talking about reading? – Recently, Sophie McIvor has come across many conversations about “people not reading, whether that’s ‘performative reading’, declining literacy rates, or people paying to make their books look well-read”. Here she discusses the reasons why “the classist gap in reading is getting worse.”
Reactor: 🦄🛸 Haunted Families: All the Hidden Places by Cadwell Turnbull – “Cadwell Turnbull’s All the Hidden Places showcases several facets of the author’s writing, marrying tenderness and horror”, says Tobias Carroll of the American science fiction and fantasy writer’s new short-story collection.
The Saturday Paper (via Archive Today): 🦘📜🪶⚢ Jeff Sparrow: Somewhere Here the Future’s Hid – In Somewhere Here the Future’s Hid: The Extraordinary Life of Lesbia Harford, Jeff Sparrow recounts the life of an early Australian poet whose work was discovered decades after her early death. “The eventual publication of the full scope of her work represents a long path towards establishing her deserved reputation as a major Australian modernist poet”, says poet and critic Kate Middleton. You can also listen to Sparrow discuss Lesbia Harford’s extraordinary legacy on ABC Nightlife earlier this year: Lesbia Harford: one of Australia’s greatest poets.
The Arts Fuse: ✝️ Author Interview: Meghan O’Gieblyn — “Harmony Requires Two Notes” – “In her twenties, [Meghan] O’Gieblyn renounced her faith, sank into addiction, entered rehab, and began eleven years of sobriety.” Henry Carrigan writes that, in the essayist’s memoir, Will and Attention, she “explores addiction, faith, and the divided self—and asks whether lasting change begins not with willpower but with attention.”
NPR: ‘Brother of the More Famous Jack’ finds its way to a new generation of readers – Back in 1982, when Heller McAlpin was in her 20s, she “first read Barbara Trapido’s sparkling coming-of-age novel Brother of the More Famous Jack”. She is “freshly enamored each time it’s rediscovered by a new generation and celebrated with a new edition” – most recently an imprint from NYRB’s Classics.
Women Writing the World: 🍁 Canada: Out of Work at 50, She Wrote a Novel that Had Me Cheering – The Book of Eve by Canadian novelist Constance Beresford-Howe is a book Lilian Nattel likes to press into other’s hands. “Though published in 1973 and set in the late 1960s”, she says, it is a “story about a woman’s journey to recover her lost self [that] still feels fresh.”
GQ: 🎤📖 Will Books Survive? 34 Insiders, Experts, and Icons on the State of Literature in an Age of Uncertainty – “There’s an undeniable energy bubbling up in New York, Los Angeles, London, and elsewhere. Readings are ‘sexy’ now, supposedly, and a medley of exciting new publications have popped up, both online and in print”, says Colin Groundwater. Here, “authors, publishers, critics, BookTokkers, and literary luminaries get real about the world of books in 2026—and why they’re not giving up on readers just yet.”
Islands: 🔵⚪✈️ Scotland’s Official ‘Book Town’ Is A Literature Lover’s Dream With Charming Shops, A Unique Stay, And Cozy Cafes – “Millions of travelers flock to Scotland every year in an effort to experience the country’s fairytale-like castles, wild natural beauty, vibrant cities, and world-famous whisky scene. But if there’s one group of people for whom a trip to Scotland should be a non-negotiable, it’s literature enthusiasts”, says Megi Canco.
The Critic: 📜🪶 The memory of lips – The American lyric poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay “deserved better than to be a victim of her own success”, argues Sarah Fletcher.
On Books: ✍️ Books Meant to Be Lived – “For some reason, we were taught to treat books like relics, as if a crime were committed whenever a reader bends the spine. And if you think that’s the worst you can do, the word ‘dog-ear’ is absolutely banned.” Although, writing in books is an absolute no-no, too. In this short piece, British reviewer Martina explains why some of her most loved books still contain traces of her handwriting.
Authors dropped by their publishers (including two recently convicted writers): 🚮
Pan Macmillan: Pan Macmillan withdraws Russell Brand’s books from sale – Last Wednesday, a spokesperson for Pan Macmillan announced: “Pan Macmillan is withdrawing Russell Brand’s books from sale following his conviction, and this process is under way now. We recognise the courage it took for those who came forward, and our thoughts are with everyone affected by his crimes.”
BBC Australia: Popular Australian children’s author jailed over child exploitation offences – “Australian children’s author Craig Silvey has been sentenced to seven months in jail for possessing and distributing child exploitation material.”
The Standard (via Archive Today): World Of David Walliams attraction permanently closes at Alton Towers – “Theme park Alton Towers has permanently closed its World of David Walliams attraction with immediate effect”, reports Laura Harding. “Walliams’ book publisher HarperCollins dropped him in December 2025, following an investigation into allegations he had “harassed” young women.”
The Guardian: Canadian publisher Boréal ends relationship with novelist Thélyson Orélien over alleged use of AI – “Author withdrawn from France’s Prix Goncourt last month has repeatedly denied using artificial intelligence to write novel”. Now, following fresh evidence, Boréal has announced it will be “ending its professional relationship” with Thélyson Orélien.
Notre Dame Magazine: ✍️🧠 At a Loss for Words – “As lightning strikes of inspiration become less frequent, a writer of a certain age finds reassurance in neuroscience research and the relatable testimony of literary lions in winter”, says Robert Schmuhl.
Caught by the River: 📜🪶⚣ The Lost Occult Books of Victor Neuburg – “In 1924 the poet, publisher and occultist Victor Neuburg was visited by unidentifiable spirits in his cottage in a small Sussex town. As he later put it, these voices ‘dictated’ poems to him – streams-of-consciousness pieces of prose steeped in esoteric symbolism. He wrote them down, nearly 100 pieces of writing, into the form of a book he called The Water Bearer.”
Intriguing Times: The Golden Hare That Sparked a Three-Year Treasure-Hunting Frenzy – “In 1979, a British artist buried a golden hare and hid clues to its location in an illustrated children’s book. Almost two million joined the hunt, but the way it ended was stranger than expected.”
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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.
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