Rest in power

Want to spend fifteen minutes with Joan Aiken? You can - walk with her on the Sussex Downs, visit the house where she wrote Wolves, hear how she gets her ideas...this little treasure of a movie, made for just £100 gives you all these delights... joanaiken.com/puffin-club-mo…

“Literature is how we make our hearts grow bigger and that’s how we change the world” - Barbara Kingsolver scooping the Women's Prize in Bedford Square Gardens this glorious summer evening.

“It was like having an extra room in the house where you could just go” - Claudia Rankine talking about the role of reading in her childhood on BBC Radio 4’s #DesertIslandDiscs this morning. Also, pretty stellar playlist so far for a WFH kitchen boogie this summer Friday.

🐇 Described by the author as 'a love song to the forgotten & lonely', #TheRabbitHutch is a savagely beautiful & bitingly funny snapshot of modern America. Tomorrow, don't miss Tess Gunty & Hephzibah Anderson discuss the razor-sharp debut. 📝 Register FREE: fane.co.uk/tess-gunty

✍️ An online obituary writer. 🤫 A young mother with a secret. 🐀 A woman waging a war against rodents... Tonight at 6:30pm, join Tess Gunty & Hephzibah Anderson as they explore the characters all searching for meaning in #TheRabbitHutch. 📝 Register FREE: fane.co.uk/tess-gunty

Hello lovely Ocado. I put in a request for a refund for a supposedly missing product on my order but it's since turned up! It had fallen out of the bag in the hallway. Please could you let me know how to cancel my refund request? Many thanks!

Apropos Audible’s adaptation of her landmark comic strip, DTWOF, Alison Bechdel spoke to me about what she misses from the 1980s, overcoming “drawer’s block” and, yes, that test…

‘It’s vastly complex, even dangerous’: in defence of the recorder, the Marmite of the woodwind world | Music | The Guardian theguardian.com/music/2023/aug…

Times Books TOAST ‘There’s simply no way of telling how far she’ll [the narrator] go, and her increasingly volatile unreliability as a narrator makes the story all the more riveting.’ Hephzibah Anderson on Maud Ventur’s novel My Husband in today’s The Observer #MyHusband 💋 dlvr.it/SvYrHS

Hello Melville House, I'm keen to review the paperback edition of Steve Stern's The Village Idiot in my next 'In Brief' column for The Observer. Please could you point me in the direction of your UK publicist? Many thanks indeed!

Dear publicists and editors, do your lists include any upcoming fiction with illustrations? Not children's lit and not graphic novels, just fiction, short or long, that happens to have an image or several scattered among its pages. Would love to know if so!

The blue place: if anybody has a code going spare, I'm thinking it's probably time...

The Critical Quarterly editorial group (of which I’m part) is looking for contributors to the revamped Reviews section — new books but also ‘revaluations’. Next issue is on the life, work, and legacy of Christopher Hitchens. DM me and/or Joe Joe Williams with ideas or for details

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council will be holding a vigil tomorrow afternoon outside Downing Street. If you can be there, whether you're Jewish or just want to stand with us in support, please join us.

Dear PJ Library, thank you so much for this latest book. I don’t know if was despatched with astonishing speed or scheduled months in advance, but it felt an especially beautiful and necessary story for us to read together right now. תודה רבה #pjlibraryuk

Shirley Jackson responds to the 1950s version of being tagged in a bad review.

Variation on a familiar theme, from #Nabokov's discarded notes: "Student explains that when reading a novel he likes to skip passages 'so as to get his own idea about the book & not be influenced by the author.'"

Children's books mavens: are there any substack newsletters - blogs, even - that you'd recommend?

A candle lit this Yom HaShoah in memory of Elsa Sealtiel who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944, aged 38. #yellowcandle @yellowcandleuk