I have long believed that a translator’s afterword can do something a novel itself cannot do, or at least not in quite the same way. It can step beside the book, not in front of it, and say: here is what changed in crossing languages, here is what could not cross, here is what I chose to...
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Deep Reads
I have a soft spot for the books that do not announce themselves loudly. In a...
Reading Guides
I have always believed that a publisher’s back catalogue is one of the most...
Reading Guides
I often begin a reading route with something almost embarrassingly small: a...
Reading Guides
I love handling restored classics—not because they smell of glue and oak...
I often begin a reading route with something almost embarrassingly small: a spine that has faded on a library shelf, a name I half-recognise, a cover design that feels out of step with its neighbours. A forgotten book can behave like a sealed room...
I love handling restored classics—not because they smell of glue and oak (though that’s part of it) but because each edition is a small argument about how a book should be read. The front matter, the little printer’s mark tucked into the...
If you’ve ever stumbled across a brief obituary in a local paper and felt the tug of a story that refuses to leave you alone, you’re not alone. I’ve learned to treat those short notices like doorways: small, oddly framed, but opening onto...
I keep returning to regional library catalogues when I'm hunting for mid‑century women writers who have fallen out of print. There’s something quietly thrilling about a catalog entry that points to a small press run, a local imprint, or a single...
I found the story on a rainy Wednesday, tucked between a volume of 19th‑century essays and a travel diary. It had been misfiled under "Foreign Literature — Misc." The card in the back of the book declared it a short piece by an unknown author,...
I have a small ritual that helps me steady the year: every season I assemble what I call a “discovery shelf”—a deliberately imperfect selection of books by overlooked regional women writers. The aim isn’t to make a canon or to be exhaustive;...
I’ve always been fascinated by the choices that happen off the page: the tiny compromises, the deliberate risks, the moments when a translator decides that something must change so the story can live in another language. Interviewing a living...
There’s a special kind of excitement when you hold a restored, annotated edition in your hands: the weight of history, the careful choices of an editor, the marginalia that promises to open up a text you thought you knew. But those scholarly...
I once found a single pencil note in the margin of a twentieth-century novel that read, in a hurried hand: "see: women who don't speak are not silent—listen for the unpaid sentences". That tiny observation sent me on a six-book rediscovery route...
Charity shops are little laboratories of discovery. I’ve spent years rooting through their racks and shelves—sometimes finding nothing but dog-eared romances, other times coming away with a book that changes how I think about an era or a voice....