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bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #TranslatedFiction #literaryfiction 📚💙

NPR's 2011 interview with David Bellos on the art of translation, & what gets lost in it.

www.npr.org/2011/11/14/1...

Book cover of David Bellos' Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (2011)

November 23, 2025 at 7:04 PM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #literaryfiction 📚💙

Obituary: David Bellos, 80, Dies; Brilliantly Translated French Wordplay to English, inc eight novels by Georges Perec, & Ismail Kadare. He also published acclaimed biographies of Perec, Gary, Tati, & a book on Hugo's classic.

bit.ly/4ieR8TQ

David Bellos took on the monumental task of translating Georges Perec's linguistic games, and also wrote about the art of translation. Photo credit: Wendy Laura Belcher

Book cover of Life: A User's Manual. Mr. Bellos's first translation, in 1987, was this novel by Georges Perec, a global bestseller and now a modern classic.

Book cover of David Bellos' The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables (2017).

November 23, 2025 at 7:04 PM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #biography #nonfiction #nature 📚💙

On Peter Matthiessen, the only writer to win the National Book Award for nonfiction (The Snow Leopard, 1979) & fiction (Shadow Country, 2008).

Lance Richardson talks about his biography of the remarkable author.

wapo.st/4remSMT

True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson. Pantheon. 709 pp. $40.

November 23, 2025 at 12:43 PM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #literaryfiction #womenwriters #ModernClassics #booklovers 📚💙

Neglected classic: On Jennifer Dawson's 1961 award-winning novel The Ha-Ha. Appreciation by Melissa Broder, novelist & poet.

lithub.com/melissa-brod...

The Ha-ha by Jennifer Dawson is a 1961 prizewinning, semi-autobiographical debut novel that explores a young woman’s struggle with mental illness at Oxford University in the 1950s—for readers of Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder, and Sally Rooney.

At a tea party at Oxford University in the 1950s, earnest undergraduates in floral dresses clink cups, discussing their studies, sports, and summer balls. But to one student, Josephine, they are grotesquely transformed: she is sitting among ominous armadillos. Then, the laughter comes. As she is engulfed in mirthless hysterics, her college has no choice but to send her away.

Since her mother’s death, Josephine’s reality seems a badly painted canvas, viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. It is a relief to find a sense of belonging, for once, within the mental institution where she is confined. But, eventually, she must reintegrate with society. Through a transformative encounter with a fellow patient, a return to real life seems possible.

Originally published in 1961, The Ha-Ha was met with critical acclaim and belongs on the shelf alongside Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Praised as “luminous” by The New York Times and “a singular, elegant novel” by The Guardian, and with a new introduction by Melissa Broder, The Ha-Ha offers a moving and timeless perspective on mental illness and coming of age.

November 23, 2025 at 11:27 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky 📚💙 highly
recommended for #BookAwards #NationalBookAwards

Winners of the National Book Awards Announced in Fiction, Non-Fiction, Lifetime Achievement, Poetry, Translated Fiction, & Young People's Literature.

wapo.st/44doH2R

Patricia Smith won the National Book Award poetry prize for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems.

The National Book Award for young people’s literature went to Daniel Nayeri for The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story.

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's novel We Are Green and Trembling, translated by Robin Myers, won the National Book Award award for translated literature.

Prolific author and social critic Roxane Gay received a lifetime achievement honor at the National Book Awards. (David Butow / For The Times)

November 20, 2025 at 5:02 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky for #history #Cundill #historybooks #womenwriters 📚💙

Historian Lyndal Roper's Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War is the winner of the $75k 2025 Cundill History Prize. The prize is one of the largest & most prestigious nonfiction book awards.

www.cbc.ca/books/lyndal...

Lyndall Roper was awarded the Cundill Prize (Hatchette and Basic Books)

November 19, 2025 at 6:44 PM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #poetry #booklovers 📚💙

This Book Affirms Seamus Heaney’s Towering Genius.
Even the previously uncollected work in The Poems of Seamus Heaney shows a master craftsman in full control of his powers. By Robert Pinsky, award-winning poet & translator.

bit.ly/4817jzp

THE POEMS OF SEAMUS HEANEY | Edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 1,231 pp. | $60

November 19, 2025 at 4:00 PM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #shortstories #womenwriters #literaryfiction 📚💙

At 81, Joy Williams is as great as she's ever been.
Her ‘knockout’ and rave reviewed new story collection, The Pelican Child, is her best book since her acclaimed novel, The Quick and the Dead.

wapo.st/4okCxbb

The Pelican Child: Stories by Joy Williams. Knopf. 176 pp.

About: LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A razor-sharp new collection of stories of visionary childhood misfits and struggling adult dreamers from this legendary writer of “perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read Williams is to look into the abyss” (The Atlantic).

“Night was best, for, as everyone knows, but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night.” “Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly.” “Caring was a power she’d once possessed but had given up freely.” The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other author's.

We meet lost souls like the twin-sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in After the Haiku Period, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds; in Nettle, a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdjieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the Pelican Child who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs.

All of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience (“I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable,” says one narrator ruefully), possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.

About the Author

JOY WILLIAMS is the author of five previous novels—including Harrow, a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein and the Los Angeles Times book prizes, and The Quick and the Dead, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—as well as four collections of stories. Her book of essays, Ill Nature, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Joy Williams. (Photo credit: Jonno Rattman)

November 18, 2025 at 9:58 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky for #literaryfiction #womenwriters 📚💙

Obituary: Marina Lewycka, British-Ukrainian author, dies aged 79. The writer, who was born in a refugee camp in Germany after the war, won the Wodehouse prize for comic writing for her debut, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

bit.ly/3LFnWt4

British-Ukrainian author Marina Lewycka, who has died from a degenerative brain condition. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

November 15, 2025 at 12:19 PM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky for #horrorfiction #booklovers 📚💙

Joe Hill's new novel, King Sorrow. ‘It’s a tour de force: a horror novel that is above all a paean to the imagination, and to love and friendship.’

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

November 15, 2025 at 12:12 PM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky recommended for #literaryfiction #womenwriters #shortstories #booklovers 📚💙

On Alla Gorbunova's (Th)ings and (Th)oughts, her strange & stunning new short story collection, translated by Elina Alter. Review by Madeline Schultz.

chireviewofbooks.com/2025/11/13/n...

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts: Short Stories by Alla Gorbunova. Deep Vellum Publishing

November 14, 2025 at 9:28 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #sociology #nonfiction #booklovers 📚💙

Obituary: Kai T. Erikson, eminent sociologist & historian of disaster, has died aged 94. He was a beloved teacher, distinguished professor, & the author of influential, award-winning books.

news.yale.edu/2025/11/11/k...

November 14, 2025 at 9:07 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #womenwriters #sciencefiction 📚💙

Great @libraryofamerica.bsky.social event: Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia E. Butler. Discussed by* scholar Imani Perry & novelist Tananarive Due.

Monday 24 November,
6–7pm ET. You must preregister to attend

rebrand.ly/Butler2025

November 12, 2025 at 9:12 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky for #literaryfiction #BookerPrize #booklovers
📚💙

Flesh by David Szalay wins the Booker Prize 2025. Here’s everything you need to know about the winning novel and its author.

open.substack.com/pub/thebooke...

Flesh by David Szalay © Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize Foundation

November 11, 2025 at 5:48 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #IllustratedBooks #PictureBooks #ChildrensBooks #booklovers 📚💙

The 2025 New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Books.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/b...

Collage by bobbygw of selected illustrations included in the linked article

November 10, 2025 at 6:17 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #literaryfiction #essays #ModernClassics 📚💙

The Essential James Baldwin.

He wrote with the kind of clarity that was as comforting as it was chastising. Recommendations by Robert Jones Jr., author of the novel The Prophets.

www.nytimes.com/article/jame...

Collage by bobbygw of selected James Baldwin's book covers used in the linked article

November 10, 2025 at 6:14 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky for #literaryfiction #womenwriters #booklovers
📚💙

The Essential Kate Atkinson:
Surprising, versatile, dark and funny, the British novelist and short story writer has something for everyone.

www.nytimes.com/article/kate...

Kate Atkinson book covers. Collage by bobbygw

November 9, 2025 at 9:26 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky recommended for #literaryfiction #womenwriters #memoirs #booklovers 📚💙

Margaret Atwood's long-awaited memoir: In Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, the author best known for The Handmaid's Tale offers a wise and witty account of the life that shaped her writing.

wapo.st/4hNsFVz

Atwood in Los Angeles in 1980. (Wally Fong/AP)

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood. Doubleday. 624 pp. $35.

‘Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.’

Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents – entomologist father, dietician mother – Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: 'It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn.’), but also thrilling and beautiful.

From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat’s Eye to the Orwellian 1980s Berlin where she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.

As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations.

Atwood in Nova Scotia in 2022. (Courtesy of Margaret Atwood)

November 8, 2025 at 8:23 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky for #literaryfiction #womenwriters #ModernClassics 📚💙

Neglected Classics: On Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows. By Adela Pinch, Prof. of English & author of The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living.

www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-rebe...

NYRB cover of The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West

November 4, 2025 at 9:25 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky for #essays #womenwriters #booklovers
📚💙

Dead and Alive: Essays by Zadie Smith. From cultural appropriation to gender, Smith nails the politics of creativity. But on actual politics, she is less assured.

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

November 2, 2025 at 11:30 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #essays #womenwriters #literarycriticism #nonfiction
📚💙

The first collection of Booker Prize-winning novelist Anne Enright's non-fiction, writing about culture, literature and her own life.

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World by Anne Enright. For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights.

These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras. They delve into Enright’s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. She offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter.

In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.

November 2, 2025 at 11:24 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky recommended for #fantasyfiction #booklovers
📚💙

Interview: Bestselling author Philip Pullman on his Dark Materials trilogy, & the recently published The Rose Field, conclusion to his Book of Dust Trilogy.
archive.is/x0scA

Plus two reviews of the novel
bit.ly/4hvk2yH

bit.ly/3JmyDzY

Philip Pullman at his home in Oxfordshire, England, in February 2024. (Shutterstock)

October 26, 2025 at 9:58 AM

bobbygw

@bobbygw.bsky.social

#booksky highly recommended for #literaryfiction #womenwriters #shortstories #booklovers
📚💙

An excellent essay-review in the NYRB of the oeuvre of the superb English novelist & short story writer, Tessa Hadley. By Hillary Kelly.

archive.is/X61Xo