The United States has intensified its military pressure on Venezuela, while Nicolás Maduro's regime continues its systematic repression and commits serious human rights violations. With this in mind, ...

I’ve finished at work now and my leaving gift was bookshop.org vouchers (to quote my colleague: “Tell me what you want so you don’t get some rubbish you’ll never use” :-D ) which of course I starte…

I’ve always loved books about books and books about social movements, so when I came across Black Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore, which combines both of these topics, I knew I ne...

In this week’s halloween special I look at books read and reviewed, discover some of the best writing about literature on the blogosphere, announce ScifiMonth 2025, keep up with a variety of …

The sea on one side, steep and lofty mountains on the other; that’s our whole story in fact. The authorities, merchants, might rule our destitute days, but the mountains and the sea rule life, they…

I first came across Tarella Daskein back in 2021 when Bill (The Australian Legend) wrote a post about her as the result of her coming up in discussions and reading about Katharine Susannah Prichard…

The latest addition to the Moomin shelf in the Tove Trove library is the first book in the original series, published in 1945 during the final months of World War II. This year its 80th anniversary…

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

For a novel first published in 1934, Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross feels remarkably timely, charting, as it does, the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s, the falling apart of a country’s fundamental …

“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote. Words are the invisible hands with which we touch each other, feel the shape of the world, hold our own experience. We live in language — it is our interior narrative that stitches the events of our lives into a story of self. We love in language — it is the lever for every deep and valuable relationship, which Adrienne Rich knew to be “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to… read article

This week I look at books read and reviewed, discover some of the best writing about literature on the blogosphere, announce both Club 1925 and Margaret Atwood Reading Month, keep up with a variety…

Your Favorite Indie Bookstore!

This week I look at books read and reviewed, discover some of the best writing about literature on the blogosphere, announce German Literature Month 2025, keep up with a variety of literary anniver…

This week I look at books read and reviewed, discover some of the best writing about literature on the blogosphere, announce Nonfiction November 2025, reveal an exciting new book-about-books, keep …

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s short story “The scapegoat” is the fourth in the anthology Great short stories by African-American writers, which my American friend Carolyn sent me. Compar…

This week I look at books read and reviewed, discover some of the best writing about literature on the blogosphere, keep up with literary anniversaries, focus on a past post deserving to be read an…

I’ve been making my way through Anita Brookner’s exquisitely written novels slowly but steadily over the past eight years. As a long-term reading project, I’m finding it fascinating to see how Broo…

A series on the What, Where and Why of Literary Women

This sporadic post covering all manner of things I’ve recently read, watched and done is where I hold forth on matters both serious and silly. You are invited along for the ride.

In her memoir, "A Truce That Is Not Peace," Miriam Toews confronts why we write at all