November 20, 2008

Best Books of the Year 2008 #3 - "The Spectator"

"The Spectator" magazine uses the technique of asking a number of their reviewers to pick their best and worst of the year. It works.

Rupert Christiansen picked Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer, as it was new in paperback this year. "I loved it -- a daringly original piece of scholarship and speculation which makes one rethink received suppositions and opens up fascinating new possibilities."

Posted by Perry Middlemiss at 01:23 PM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2008

Best Books of the Year 2008 #2 - "Publisher's Weekly"

"Publisher's Weekly", from the US, usually puts out quite a comprehensive Best Books list each year. The Australian books I've found - and I should warn you that there is always a good chance I've missed something - are as follows.

Fiction
The Boat, Nam Le (Knopf): "The stories in Le's stunning debut collection cover a vast geographic territory and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure."
Breath, Tim Winton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): "Two daredevil Australian teens get involved with a dangerous surfer (and his more dangerous wife) in this taut story of death, life, pleasure and thrill-seeking."

Children's Picture Books
Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, Mem Fox, illus. by Helen Oxenbury (Harcourt): "In a paean to babies around the world, Fox's rhymes feel as if they always existed in our collective consciousness and were simply waiting to be written down."

Children's Fiction
Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Knopf): "Dense, atmospheric prose holds readers to a cautious pace in an often dark fantasy that explores the savage and gentlest sides of human nature and how they coexist."

Posted by Perry Middlemiss at 08:59 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2008

Best Books of the Year 2008 #1 - Amazon

Mid-November and the Best Books of the Year entries start up again. I thought this was pretty early, but a brief check in the 2007 archives shows that I made the first such posting in that year on November 12. We'll call that even.

In the Science Fiction and Fantasy category, Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan comes in at number 4.

In the Comics & Graphic Novels category, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard by Eddie Campbell is listed at number 10.

Under the Editor's Picks: Top 100 Books, The Boat by Nam Le sits at number 29, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (yes, I'm still thinking about whether this one should be included here) at number 32, Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan at number 71, and The House at Riverton by Kate Morton at number 90.

Posted by Perry Middlemiss at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2008

Nobel Prize Odds

In Australia the Australian Rules Football season is over for another year, the National Rugby League grand final is this coming weekend (Melbourne vs Sydney, sweeeeet) and then we drop headlong into the Spring Racing Carnival. So we all start thinking about betting and odds, and quinellas and trifectas.

Which leads me to the news that Ladbrokes is running a book on this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Outright favourite is Claudio Magris (yes, I shrugged as well), the Italian novelist, at 3/1, with our man Les Murray on the 8th line of betting at 10/1; Peter Carey sits at 40/1, and David Malouf at 66/1.

The laureate will be named on or about October 16th.

[Thanks to The Literary Saloon for the link.]

Posted by Perry Middlemiss at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

Digitised Newspapers at the National Library of Australia 2

As a follow-up to my piece about the newspaper digitisation project being undertaken by the National Library of Australia, I've been tracking the number of pages the project has scanned. On 12th September that number was 207,172, and as of this morning the figure is 294,181. A touch under three weeks and a touch under 90,000 pages. According to the project schedule, the aim is to hit 500,000 by the end of 2008, and 4 million by the end of 2010.

I'll be checking back in from time to time to see how they're going, but on current rates they should hit their end of year target without too much trouble.

Posted by Perry Middlemiss at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2008

Exposing Untruths

After exposing the fraud of Norma Khouri's memoir Forbidden Love back in 2004, Malcolm Knox now looks at another memoir of suffering, Cola's Story by Cola Bilkuei.

After the Khouri affair, publishers promised to investigate their authors' backgrounds. But a publisher's task in checking on its author is very different from that of the journalist in uncovering a fraud. The publisher has little incentive to unveil a lie. The publisher is unwilling to commit scarce finances to a job that may confirm the author was trustworthy after all, leaving the publisher with a credible book that has sucked in too many resources to make a profit.

With Cola, I was asked to do the checking. It was, of course, impossible to verify exact dates from deep inside his African childhood. Most of his family, including his mother, two brothers and two sisters, died from war and disease. All he has left is his father and Monyleck, who live in Sudan and speak no English. Short of going to Sudan, there were limits on how much I could verify there. If Cola was a liar in the Norma Khouri class, he could line me up to speak to Sudanese impostors who would cover for him.

Posted by Perry Middlemiss at 10:31 AM | Comments (1)

September 24, 2008

2008 "Australian Book Review" Poetry Prize

The "Australian Book Review" Poetry Prize, worth $4000 plus publication in the magazine, is back on. Entries close on 10th December 2008. To quote from the press release:

"The guidelines and application form are now available on the ABR website: www.australianbookreview.com.au. Poets must reside in Australia or be Australian citizens living overseas. Each entry must be a single poem of no more than 100 lines. Multiple entries are permitted, and all poems will be judged anonymously. A shortlist comprising a maximum of six poems will be announced and those poems published in the March 2009 issue of ABR. The winner will be announced in the April 2009 issue."

Posted by Perry Middlemiss at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2008

Digitised Newspapers at the National Library of Australia

David, at the "Sarsaparilla" weblog, has alerted me to the Australian National Library's newspaper digitisation project.

According to the website:

The National Library of Australia, in collaboration the Australian State and Territory libraries, has commenced a program to digitise out of copyright newspapers.

We are creating a free online service that will enable full-text searching of newspaper articles. This will include newspapers published in each state and territory from the 1800s to the mid-1950s, when copyright applies. The first Australian newspaper, published in Sydney in 1803, is included in the Program.

As someone who looks at a lot of very old newspapers I can only applaud this initiative, as it will certainly make my personal projects a lot easier in the future. At present, only a very small number of newspaper issues have been digitised but that number will continue to grow. So far it looks like the project has picked one or two newspapers in each Australian state, and chosen only a few contiguous years. Part of the difficulty here concerns the availability of the material and whether or not it is out of copyright.

The paper chosen from Victoria is "The Argus" and thus far the project has digitised each edition from 1915-1925 and from 1945. Given that this paper published 6 editions a week - with the possible exceptions being Good Friday, ANZAC Day and Christmas Day - there are approximately 310 editions a year. The early years of the paper, which was printed in broadsheet format, contained 8 pages per weekday and 16 pages on a Saturday. Not a lot by today's standards, but you have to see the material to understand how much text they were able to squeeze into those pages: advertisements were nearly all of the "classified/textual" variety and pictures were almost non-existent.

Most of the originals of these old papers in libraries are bound into large ledger style volumes, so scanning in the central gutter - the part of the paper that is closest to the spine of the books - is fairly difficult without breaking open the books and laying the pages flat. Some modern photocopiers scan an opened volume by tilting the books during the process to get full access to the pages. But this presupposes that the central gutter is wide enough to allow for this. Modern books are formatted with the fore-knowledge that the pages would be bound between covers; newspapers had no such knowledge and the gutter margin, in many cases, is very narrow. By the look of the "Argus" pages here I suspect they have utilised microfilm copies of the papers rather than the original sheets.

There is both good and bad in that approach. Good because you can actually get the scanner to see all of the page, and bad if the only film you have available is one that has seen a lot of use. Microfilm readers are notorious for scatching the film, which, when copied using any form of photograph or photocopying process, leaves long black streak marks across the final image. This is merely a nuisance when it comes to reading that image, but a hindrance when the digitised image is optically scanned and run though a character recognition process as it is here. For that is the final aim of this whole project: not only to make photo images of the newspaper pages available to the world at large, but also to convert the embedded text into editable files.

This is a wonderful idea of course, because it make available the full text of this material, not just a graphic image. I've transcribed a number of pieces from old newspapers and magazines over the years. Most of it poetry but, more recently, a number of prose pieces that I've posted here. This has involved a complete re-typing of the material because I found out, fairly early, that basic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) run through a basic scanner was - well - pretty crap. I seemed to spend longer fixing the material than I would have if I typed it out straight from the start. The NLA's OCR results tend to be of a different breed all together. And of interest is the fact that you can register as an editor on the NLA website and actually correct the scanned result of the text yourself.

For example, on Tuesday 21st November 1916, "The Argus" printed the following:

Mr. C..J. Dennis, author of "Tile Senti-
mental Bloke" and "The Moods of Ginger
Mick," has resigned from the position of
secretary to Senator Russell, .Assistant
Minister in the Federal Cabinet. ' He in-
tends to retire to the country for 1 time to
give his undivided attention to the produc-
tion of another book.

Or so the scanned version showed. This was pretty easy to convert to a corrected version:

Mr. C.J. Dennis, author of "The Senti-
mental Bloke" and "The Moods of Ginger
Mick," has resigned from the position of
secretary to Senator Russell, Assistant
Minister in the Federal Cabinet. He in-
tends to retire to the country for a time to
give his undivided attention to the produc-
tion of another book.

You could almost do that without the original text being handy.

And then sometimes you get something like this:

Sir Herbert Wallen, professor of poetry
at Oxfoul, read an inlet c-ting papct on
"Oversea« Poetrv" nt the Jtovnl Colonial
Institute on Wcdnesdiy He said that Aus-
tralian poetr} was still I irgely "open jur,"
anti consisted of poems ot men, action, nnd
movement Sir Hcibcit Warien pud n
tribute to the woik ot ]'--cx Hvuns, Arthur
Adams, anil John Sandes amongst Hie
younger generation Ile jaitl that Ml

jCvuns's "Commonwcilth Ode" was a
"laureate piece" worthv to live Although
he lind been startled bv the slang used by
U J. Dennis, his woik was leal pootiy.

Which has a sort of poetry all of its own.

A friend told me recently that New Zealand is way ahead of Australia in terms of digitising its newspapers, so its good to see us starting to catch up. I'll be using this site as a major resource over the coming years, and you'll start to see some of the results of that here quite soon.

Posted by larrikin at 03:02 PM | Comments (1)

September 08, 2008

Melbourne Writers' Festival Reports 2

The 2008 Melbourne Writers Festival is now finished and the second round of reports have been appearing.

Hackpacker laments the way bloggers were put down at the Festival. This goes the the very nature of thesetype of Festivals. The problem with charging a ticket price for each session means that the general audience wants to see "names" on the panel items. And, to be frank, so would I at $17 or so a pop. But the consequence of this is that you get a general consistency of message. Where are the articulate amateurs? Nowhere to be seen I suspect.

Angela Meyer kept bumping into authors at the Festival - which is hardly surprising - only to have them seemingly avoid her.

More Readings' photos.

Estelle, from "3000 Books", worked on a number of sessions but was still able to give her "best-of", etc, lists.

Sue Burszytynski concluded that YA and genre writers didn't get a lot of exposure.

And, finally, Readings gives the list of the bestselling books of the Festival.

Posted by larrikin at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)

September 03, 2008

The "Guardian"'s World Literature Tour

The Guardian's World Tour of Literature is heading to Australia. Basically the newspaper runs it as a means of introducing a country's literature to its readers by requesting suggestions about the best books to read.

I made a suggestion a few years back with my list of 10 "Essential Modern Australian Novels", and kimbofo also put forward her proposal for "Favourite Novels about Australia" about the same time. There are only a couple of overlaps between those two lists. Failing those two there is always Jane Gleeson-White's list of 50 Australian classics. That compilation is more emcompassing as it includes poems, short stories, non-fiction and biographies, rather than the straight list of novels that Kim and I came up with. In any event, go have a look at the Guardian site and enter your suggestions. I'm interested to see the final results even if they may be skewed somewhat to more recent Australian works.

By the way, the original article features a photo taken in Melbourne of an old W-class tram. And it looks like the shot was taken from the middle of Swanston Street - looking south towards the Shrine - with cars in it. How old? Probably twenty years. You'd think they'd try to find something a little more up-to-date. But maybe that's an indication of the suggestions they are looking for.

And the first suggestion: "I think joining world literature to Australia is a very good idea." Oh dear. You can just tell what the tone of the conversation is going to be like.

Posted by larrikin at 09:05 AM | Comments (2)

August 29, 2008

Melbourne Writers' Festival Reports

As the Melbourne Writers' Festival moves though its first week a number of bloggers have been writing up their experiences.

Judith Ridge, of "The ::New:: Misrule" weblog dropped into three schools' sessions.

Jo Case, on the Readings bookshop weblog went along to see Louise Asher in conversation with Susan Johnson.

And further to the Readings coverage of the MWF are these photos from the first weekend.

Karen Chisholm, of the "Australian Crime Fiction" weblog has a few friends staying with her for the Festival. Whihc has probably made it difficult for her to post about anything. I suspect she'll be at the Ned Kelly Awards tonight so we might see something out of that.

Margo Lanagan has been and gone, appearing on a few panels earlier in the week; one at least that Judith Ridge went to.

Estelle, from "3000 Books" had a busy first Sunday.

"Hackpacker" went along to see David Sedaris, and Angela was interested in Augusten Burroughs.

The "Speakeasy" weblog mentioned the launch of a new edition of The Australian Writers Marketplace at the Festival.

And Mark Lawrence wonders why the MWF doesn't have "official" lit-bloggers covering the events as other Australian festivals have done.

Posted by larrikin at 11:43 AM | Comments (1)

July 23, 2008

Upcoming Literary Lunches

Debra Adelaide and Toni Jordan will appear at a writers' dinner in Goondiwindi, Queensland, on August 1st.

Lonely Planet writer and regular contributer to "The Age", Victoria Kyriakopoulos will speak at the Friends of Nunawading Library Literary Lunch on July 30th.

A number of writers will feature in literary lunches associated with the Tasmania Book Prize, during the "Ten Days on the Island Festival", held from 27th March to 5th April 2009.

Sheryl Gwyther, authors of Secrets of Eromanga and Children's Literature Trust fellow, will be farewelled at a literary lunch on Friday, 29th August, in Burnside, South Australia.

Author and photographer Holly Kerr Forsyth will talk about her book The Constant Gardener at Pialligo Estate, ACT, on Friday 19th September.

Jane Gleeson-White, author of Australian Classics, will be in Port Macquarie, NSW, on Friday 5th September.

Tobbie Puttock, author of Italian Local, will be in Palm Beach, NSW, on Wednesday 6th August, and Balmoral, NSW, on Thursday 7th August.

Lee Tulloch, author of The Woman in the Lobby, will speak at dinner in Camberwell, Victoria, on Wednesday 3rd September.

Posted by larrikin at 11:13 AM | Comments (1)

July 14, 2008

Crime Fiction in Australia

As we lead into the Crime and Justice festival this coming weekend here in Melbourne, Liz Porter writes about the state of the genre in Australia for "The Age". She talks to Peter Temple, Garry Disher, Kerry Greenwood, and Jarad Henry.

Posted by larrikin at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

June 11, 2008

Preserving Literary Collections

For at least the past twenty years, and maybe even as long as thirty, I've been a party to discussions relating to what could or should be done to help preserve the large number of private science fiction collections in this country.

Probably more than any other group of readers and enthusiasts, science fiction and fantasy fans tend to collect and hoard: everything from bookmarks and convention membership badges to club flyers and movie figurines. Some of this ephemera is quite rare and valuable, and helps provide a view of the times in which we have lived. [From somewhere I have this memory of reading a report about a group of Sydney sf fans who were interrogated during the Second World War about the amateur sf magazines they were receiving in the mail from overseas. It seems some of the slang and acronyms were being investigated as possible wartime code.]

So those conversations have continued on and off over the years, generally at sf conventions and generally after a noted sf collector had died. There was nowhere in Australia that allowed for a single point of contact, somewhere to deposit collections where people could be sure they would be looked after. A few universities have taken collections - long-term fan Leigh Edmonds deposited his fanzine collection with a university in Western Australia - but this was haphazard and uncoordinated.

Now, it seems a group in Australia has set up an organisation to work towards this preservation aim. Long-term plans are in place and now all that needs to be done is to raise the capital to achieve their goals. It is possible to join the group to support the cause, and that's something I'll be attempting to do as soon as I can.

Posted by larrikin at 09:00 AM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2008

Slow TV Revisited

It's been a few months since I last mentioned Slow TV, the video podcast from "The Monthly" maazine, and quite a few new videos have been made available.

Recent entries of interest include:

Luke Davies discussing God of Speed
Deborah Robertson from Adelaide Writers' Week
Tim Winton in conversation with Martin Flanagan
Christos Tsiolkas from the Sydney Writers' Festival
Helen Garner from the Sydney Writers' Festival
Kate Jennings in conversation with Eliot Perlman
Michelle de Kretser in conversation with Gail Jones
David Marr and Gideon Haigh discuss journalism.

Posted by larrikin at 01:36 PM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2008

2008 Best Young Australian Novelists

Each year "The Sydney Morning Herald" present a list of the authors they consider to be the best young novelists in the country. This year the judges - Matt Buchanan, Emily Maguire and Jenny Tabakoff - have chosen the following:

Max Barry, Jennifer Government and Company
Belinda Castles, The River Baptists
Jessica Davidson, What Does Blue Feel Like?
Jessica White, A Curious Intimacy

Posted by larrikin at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2008

Australian Poetry on the Radio

I've been meaning to write about the Australian Poetry series that was featured on ABC Radio National's "The Book Show" from May 12 to May 16. I kept putting it off until a comment today led me to the realisation that I had inadvertently included the wrong date in a previous mention of this series, in particular the episode in which I appear.

Anyway, hie yourself over to the program's website and listen to the podcast of each program. Lyn Gallacher and the program's producers have done a wonderful job. For the life of me I can't figure out who is speaking about C.J. Dennis using my words. Doesn't sound like me at all. My wife picked it straight away somehow.

The programs featured:

"Five Bells" by Kenneth Slessor
"Rockpool" by Judith Wright
"The Glugs of Gosh" by C.J. Dennis
"The Continuance of Poetry" by Rosemary Dobson
"The Death of the Bird" by A.D. Hope

Posted by larrikin at 01:53 PM | Comments (1)

May 20, 2008

Australian Novelists Gaining Recognition?

Caroline Baum, presenter of the Talking Books television program on the Foxtel channel Ovation, provides on overview of the current Australian literary landscape for readers of "The Times". She starts by contrasting the latest novels from Tim Winton and Helen Garner before moving on to mention Michelle de Kretser, Julia Leigh, Charlotte Wood, Markus Zusack, Richard Flanagan and Peter Temple, amongst others.

Posted by larrikin at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

May 14, 2008

"Patrick White: The Final Chapter" by David Marr

"Monthly" magazine has freed up its April 2008 content which allows us all now to read "Patrick White: The Final Chapter" by David Marr. An excellent essay. You may find the novels a bit hard to get through, but the life, and after, is fascinating.

Posted by larrikin at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2008

Victorian Booktown

The 2008 Clunes Booktown event was held over the weekend of May 3-4. "The Age" ran a report on what was to be expected at this year's gathering, ABC Radio's "Book Show" was there and spoke to author John Marsden, "The Brisbane Times" ran a feature, and "The Courier" out of Ballarat reported favourably on the whole event.

On the blog front:

• Beth Driscoll found the books a bit underwhelming


• Hackpacker has a "great day"


• Chocolate Cobwebs combined a visit to Clunes with another stop at a bookshop near Castlemaine


• The Book Grocer sold books in Clunes and promises a follow-up to this post


• Caroline took along a friend and found a friendly atmosphere

It sounds like the weekend was a great event. I just hope my life's under enough control by this time next year for me to go along.

Posted by larrikin at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2008

Political Memoir

Ex-Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, has reportedly been offered a large advance (some say high six figures) for his political memoir. On ABC radio's PM program last night it was revealed that he was writing this book in collaboration with his father-in-law, Peter Coleman, a former NSW state Liberal leader, federal MP and editor of "The Bulletin" and "Quadrant".

And now, a report in "The Australian" has ANU academic Wayne Errington, who co-wrote last year's controversial John Winston Howard: The Biography, stating that Costello would be a more interesting subject.

Some commentators believe this might be a push by Costello to regain the Federal Liberal leadership. I can't see that: Costello could have the leadership if he wanted to. All he'd need to do is put his hand up.

On the other hand, Stephen Mayne, of Crikey.com fame, said on ABC radio yesterday that he thought Costello might be writing it now when he had the use of taxpayer funded staff and offices, and that his aim to mainly to fill in time till the right job offer landed on his desk. That sounds far more likely to me.

There is more on this story here.

Posted by larrikin at 10:23 AM | Comments (2)

March 26, 2008

More Literary Videos

Grouped together under the title "Slow TV" is a set of streaming videos from "The Monthly" magazine.

This set includes the David Malouf videos linked to the other day, plus such people as Don Watson with Tom Keneally, Peter Carey, and Siri Hustvedt with J.M. Coetzee. These all appear to have been taken from the Adelaide Writers' Week.

That's under the "Culture" heading. There are also videos under Politics and Society, featuring such people as Robert Manne, Mungo MacCallum and Shane Maloney.

Posted by larrikin at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2008

Upcoming Books

Abbey's Bookshop brings us news that Tales from Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan's follow-up to The Arrival, will be published in June. You can have a sneak peek at the book cover. Outer Suburbia, Outer Limits. Yes, I can see the comparison. The publisher's page allows you to view an extract from the work [PDF file].

The long awaited new novel by Helen Garner, The Spare Room, will be published by Text in early April. The publishers have a funny webiste which doesn't allow me to link directly into the novel's page. The link shown here will get you to the publisher's front page, once there click on the link, "Upcoming Titles", at the top of the left-hand column.

"Boomerang Books" has a pre-release review of Tim Winton's upcoming novel Breath. The verdict: "This is as powerful and heart-rending a story about youth as you'll find. It will stay with you."

Posted by larrikin at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2008

Another View of Writers' Week

Stephen Orr is not happy with the way the Adelaide Writers' Week is being run and lays out his arguments on the ABC website.

Basically he believes that the programming revolves solely around the big names imported from overseas to the detriment of the upcoming local talent.

Writers' festivals do have the job of exposing locals to a wide range of the world's best writers - in this case, Carey, McEwan, Germaine Greer and dozens of others. But they also offer the opportunity to celebrate our own writing culture, to tell our own stories and populate our pages with recognisable characters; to ask the difficult questions, to say, 'Hey, are we really a generous, giving people? Are we a bit dim, obsessed with hamstrings and the sound of V8 engines?'

[Thanks to Sean Williams for the link.]

Posted by larrikin at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2008

2008 Adelaide Writers' Week

The 2008 Adelaide Writers' Week is well under way and you can follow what's been happening by reading Kerrie's accounts on her "Mysteries in Paradise" weblog.

Posted by larrikin at 08:54 AM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2008

The Best of the Booker

As we hit the 40th anniversary of the Man Booker prize (previously just the simple Booker), the prize trustees have announced a prize for the best book out of all the previous winners. A similar prize was awarded in 1993 (on the 25th anniversary) and the winner at that time was Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.

The Australian entrants in the Best of the Booker, with odds as released by Ladbrooks.

14/1 - True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001)
25/1 - Schindler's Ark by Tom Keneally (1982)
25/1 - Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
33/1 - Disgrace by J.M Coetzee (1999)
40/1 - Life and Times of Michael K. by J.M Coetzee (1983)

For the record, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie is a 4/1 favourite this time round.

Posted by larrikin at 01:24 PM | Comments (1)

February 27, 2008

Clarion South 2009

Applications are now open for entry to the 2009 Clarion South science fiction and fantasy writers' workshop. The scheduled teachers are as follows:

Week 1: Sean Williams
Week 2: Marianne de Pierres
Week 3: Margo Lanagan
Week 4: Jack Dann
Week 5: Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant
Week 6: Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant

The workshop runs from January 4 to February 14 2009.

Posted by larrikin at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2008

Australia Without Borders

Back in March 2007 I first made mention of the report that US bookselling chain Borders was intending to sell its stores here in Australia and concentrate on its US market. Subsequent reports proved this rumour to be true and the Borders stores were put on the market. "The Age" last weekend examined the implications of that sale in its Business pages.

The fate of the Australian outlets hangs in the balance after a bid by A&R Whitcoulls Group, the owners of the Angus & Robertson book chain, that is being assessed by the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission - Australia's consumer watchdog] after it raised concerns about the impact on competition. A&R is Australia's largest book retailer with 119 company-owned and 63 franchised stores.

At stake is the future of the superstores, which, if the deal is approved, could remain as they are, close down, or be converted into conventional Angus & Robertson stores.

But also at stake is whether Australians will enjoy the current competitive diversity of outlets selling books and music, or a smaller number of retailers gain a stranglehold, as has been the pattern overseas.

Posted by larrikin at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2008

Best Books of the Year #12 - Locus Magazine (Recommended Reading)

In addition to yesterday's Best Books of the Year, Locus Magazine has also published a Recommended Reading list for sf&f works from 2007. The Australian items are listed below (chances are I've missed one or two - feel free to point them out to me):

Young Adult Novel

Magic's Child by Justine Larbalestier

Collection

Rynemonn by Terry Dowling
The Jack Vance Treasury, Jack Vance, edited by Terry Dowling & Jonathan Strahan

Original Anthology

Wizards edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
The New Space Opera edited by Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan
Eclipse One: New Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Jonathan Strahan

Bests of the Year

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One edited by Jonathan Strahan
Best Short Novels: 2007 edited by Jonathan Strahan

Art

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Novelette

"Dark Integers", Greg Egan (Asimov's 10-11/07)
"Glory", Greg Egan (The New Space Opera)
"Steve Fever", Greg Egan (MIT Technology Review 11-12/07)
"Holly and Iron", Garth Nix (Wizards)
"Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go to War Again", Garth Nix (Baen's Universe 4/07)

Posted by larrikin at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2008

Best Books of the Year #11 - Locus Magazine

Each year Locus Magazine - the major newsletter of the sf and fantasy publishing world - gets one critic to list their best sf&f works of the year. For 2007, Jeff VanderMeer offers his suggestions, and has chosen an Australian book as one of his worthy novels: "Black Sheep by Ben Peek served up dystopia Pacific Rim-style, in often searing and seering prose." He also picked out, as a first novel, "Amberlight by Sylvia Kelso should appeal to anyone who enjoys urban fantasy with its splendid evocations of place." Which is a bit strange as Amberlight is her third novel. Maybe it's got something to do with where the books are published.

Elsewhere, "Billed as an exciting new original anthology, Eclipse One: New Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Jonathan Strahan wound up being less adventurous than any of the anthologies listed..[the book] was entirely too comfortable and familiar to support Strahan's assertion that he's operating in the tradition of classic series like Terry Carr's Universe -- although the series may well grow into that role over time."

In the graphic novel section it's hardly surprising to see him chose "The Arrival by Shaun Tan, about an immigrant to a fantastical city, is an instant classic."

Posted by larrikin at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2008

Cover of His Illegal Self

Long time readers of this weblog will remember this post about the first hardcover edition of Kate Grenville's The Secret River. The basic problem was that while the dustjacket carried all the book's identification - title, author and publisher - the cloth case did not.

A few months later the second edition of the hardcover had rectified the problem and all was well.

Now, the latest novel from Peter Carey, His Illegal Self, suffers from the same problem. As bookseller Jack Bradstreet pointed out in a letter to "Australian Book Review" regarding the previous example, if the dustjacket is lost the book becomes unidentifiable on the shelf. Grenville's book was worse in that the cloth cover was fully black. Carey's novel at least has a printed photo on the cloth. Not much good if you shelve your novels with the spine out, however.

Posted by larrikin at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)

The Transit of Venus Revisited

Michael Gorra takes a retrospective look at Shirley Hazzard's novel The Transit of Venus.

Henry James once wrote that he wanted "to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am, at a given moment, an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America." The Transit of Venus fulfills that ambition -- or no, it's got a different one, that of making such terms seem irrelevant. It's set mostly in Britain, in the decades after the war, and follows two Australian-born sisters through their very different lives, their very different experiences of sex and marriage and career. Its social landscape will be familiar to any reader of Lessing or Murdoch or Drabble, and yet it is not an English novel. Hazzard lacks the concern with gentility -- for or against -- that marks almost all English writers of her generation. She has the keenest of eyes for the nuances of class, class even in a university laboratory, and yet doesn't appear to have anything herself at stake in getting it all down. Nor is the book exactly American, despite Hazzard's long residence in New York. She has more restraint and less bravado than her American peers and she isn't nearly so ingratiating.

Posted by larrikin at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2008

Australian Honors List

I didn't go through the list of Australian Honors recipients this Australia Day, but David Marr did, and he's not happy. The list honors "42 researchers, half of them medical, another dozen or so medicos, a dozen or so bureaucrats and 37 sports folk", but not a lot from the literature field.

There isn't a novelist on the 2008 list. This year the nation could have tackled the backlog of great writers unhonoured by Yarralumla. But Helen Garner, Peter Carey, Shirley Hazzard, Alex Miller, Kate Grenville and Tim Winton -- among many others -- have still to be recognised by the nation for their services to literature. Republicans among them may feel now is not the time to accept such honours, but clearly the business of writing isn't high on the list of achievements officially blessed in today's Australia.

The best I could find was Louise Adler - publisher of Melbourne University Publishing.

Posted by larrikin at 12:07 PM | Comments (1)

Miles Franklin Was Big in the Early 1900s

You may have read about the new Amazon ebook reader, the Kindle, when it was released a few months back. Now the folks at Amazon have started a blog devoted to works available for the Kindle - which seems natural enough.

Their latest entry reprints a list of ten bestsellers from the decade 1900-1910 first compiled by Nancy Pearl, author of the Book Lust and More Book Lust reading guides. Amongst that august bestseller list is My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin. Needless to say, this is now available for ebook purchase.

[Just as an aside, I always thought decades started with the "1" year, ie 1901-1910. But maybe I'm just picking nits again.]

Posted by larrikin at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2008

Sean Lindsay on The Great Australian Novel

Sean Lindsay, proprietor of the "101 Reasons to Stop Writing Weblog", is interviewed by the good people on the Jossip website. Sean has some interesting things to say about The Great Australian Novel (caps compulsory). It doesn't start out that way, but bear with it:

What's the deal with the great American novel? Why does everyone want to write it?

When people talk of the "Great American Novel", what they mean in more concrete terms is "The Book Everyone Reads". Every writer dreams of writing the book that is foisted on every teenager in high school English class, and the guaranteed sales, frequent movie adaptations and honorary doctorates that come with it.

There's no consensus on what constitutes the Great American Novel, which leads some writers with Ozymandian egos to think they're going to write it. You never hear debate over the Great Russian Novel, because it's War and Peace. The only discussion about the Great English Novel is which Dickens novel it is. There is zero discussion over the Great Australian Novel, because there are no great Australian novels.

It's also because of Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, which would certainly be on the shortlist for the Great American Novel if such a list existed. Lee is a perfect example of a writer who did the honourable thing after producing her masterpiece -- she stopped writing. She didn't whittle away her reputation on increasingly erratic minor novels and getting into fistfights with other ageing writers. But she's also a terrible counterexample: her best work was her debut, providing a convenient exception to the rule that you have to 'hone' your writing talent over years and hundreds of thousands of words. Now all aspiring Great American Novelists cling to the Harper Lee Fantasy that they will magically produce a masterwork, when they eventually get around to writing. It's the literary equivalent of aspiring to win the lottery.

Posted by larrikin at 10:12 AM | Comments (1)

January 21, 2008

How to Get Children to Read

Some 10 days old now, but still relevant, is this piece by Agnes Nieuwenhuizen in "The Age", which poses the question "How do we help our young enjoy reading?".

I'm actually amused when the question comes up about how much reading people's children do. Generally you find out the kids aren't doing a lot. I then ask "Do you read read much?", to which the answer is, again, "no".

My kids live in a house that has books all over the place, generally fairly well shelved, but they are in most rooms. So our kids see them all the time, on shelves on tables, being read and handed around. They are part of the life of our house, and, so, they have become part of the life of our kids as well. My 15 year-old daughter reads about a book a day over the holidays and is moving through that transition period between young adult and adult fiction - our local library is a god-send here. My 8 year-old son is currently reading Asterix, Tin Tin and as many books on Ancient Egypt as he can find.

It doesn't matter what kids read as long as they are actually doing it: comics, sf, fantasy, trash, classics, or young adult; it makes absolutely no difference. But if they aren't seeing you, as a parent reading on a regular basis, then chances are they won't read much either.

Posted by larrikin at 12:11 PM | Comments (5)

January 16, 2008

Even More Forthcoming Books for 2008

Sophie Masson writes with the news that she has the following books forthcoming in 2008.

March

Thomas Trew and the Selkie's Curse
Thomas Trew and the Flying Huntsman
Thomas Trew and the Island of Ghosts

(These are nos 4 5 and 6 of her Thomas Trew series for younger readers, already published in UK by Hodder Children's Books)

July

The Case of the Diamond Shadow, a YA mystery novel set in the 1930's, to be published by ABC Books. Sophie has started a blog for it at Case of the Diamond Shadow.

Posted by larrikin at 08:44 AM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2008

Online Zombie Novel

Chuck McKenzie, Australian sf and horror writer, is writing an online zombie novel, titled One Day at a Time: Life, the Zombie Apocalypse and All That, in the form of blog entries. The first entry is dated January 1st 2008, and deals with what happened on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Looks interesting.

[Thanks to Horrorscope for the link.]

Posted by larrikin at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)

Major Australian Literary Anniversaries in 2008

Births in 1908

Sir Donald Bradman (d. 2001)
Harry Hooton (d. 1961)
Eve Langley (d. 1974)
Ronald McCuaig (d. 1993)
Cynthia Nolan (d. 1976)
T.G.H. Strehlow (d. 1978)
Frederick J. Thwaites (d. 1979)
R.M. Williams (d. 2003)

Deaths in 1908

Ernest Favenc (b. 1845)
David Syme (b. 1827)

First Publication in 1908

"The Austra-laise" by C.J. Dennis
The Call of the South by Louis Becke
For Life and Other Stories by Steele Rudd
Maurice Guest by Henry Handel Richardson
The Missing Link by Edward Dyson
"One Hundred and Three" by Henry Lawson
Sea and Sky by J. Le Gay Brereton
The Squatter's Ward by Edward S. Sorenson
That Girl by Ethel Turner
We of the Never-Never by Aeneas Gunn

Births in 1958

Debra Adelaide
Graeme Base
Isobelle Carmody
Lilian Darcy
Sarah Day
Michelle de Kretser
Lionel Fogarty
Steven Herrick
Paul Hetherington
Christopher Kelen
Stephen Lawrence
Kathy Lette
Rownena Cory Lindquist
Kathryn Lomer
David Metzenthen
Kathleen Stewart

Deaths in 1958

Ethel Anderson (b. 1883)
Mary Grant Bruce (b. 1878)
C.R. Jury (b. 1893)
Philip Lindsay (b. 1906)
Hugh McRae (b. 1876)
Ethel Turner (b. 1870)

First Publication in 1958

All the Rivers Run by Nancy Cato
Antipodes in Shoes by Geoffrey Dutton
The Backlash by Morris West
The Boys in the Island by Christopher Koch
The Four-Legged Lottery by Frank Hardy
Girl with a Monkey by Thea Astley
Inland: Poems by David Rowbotham
Kings of the Dingoes by Judith Wright
The Penguin Book of Australian Verse edited by John Thompson and Kenneth Slessor
Naked Under Capricorn by Olaf Ruhen
The Rainbow and the Rose by Nevil Shute
To the Islands by Randolph Stow

Posted by larrikin at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2008

Best Books of the Year #10 - Detectives Beyond Borders

Peter Rozovsky, of the "Detectives Beyond Borders" weblog, has been listing his favorite crime novels of 2007. Included in the list are a few Australians:

Nice Try by Shane Maloney
Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland
Crook as Rookwood by Christopher Nyst
The Broken Shore by Peter Temple

Posted by larrikin at 09:07 AM | Comments (1)

January 07, 2008

More Forthcoming Books for 2008 [Updated]

Additions to the previous list of forthcoming Australian books for 2008:

February

• Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan (F)

March

• School for Heroes by Jackie French (F)
• The Dragon Queens: Mytique Book Two by Traci Harding (F)
• Creeping in Reptile Flesh by Robert Hood (F)
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed by Sean Williams (F)
• The Changeling by Sean Williams (F)

April

• The Gypsy Crown by Kate Forsyth (F)
• Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch by Simon Haynes (F)
• The Dream Horsemen: Dreaming in Amber Book Four by Tony Shillitoe (F)

May

• The Steele Diaries by Wendy James (F)
• The Serpent Bride: Dark Glass Mountain Book One by Sara Douglass (F)
• The Twisted Citadel: Dark Glass Mountain Book Two by Sara Douglass (F)

June

• Mer Magic by Kate Forsyth (F)
• Hammer of God: Godspeaker Book Three by Karen Miller (F)

July

• Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy: Fourth Annual Edition edited by Bill Congreve & Michelle Marquardt (F)
• Dreaming Again edited by Jack Dann (F)
• The Black Madonna: Mytique Book Three by Traci Harding (F)
• Runcible Jones and the Frozen Compass by Ian Irvine (F)

August

• Riversend: Book Two of the Amberlight Series by Sylvia Kelso (F)

September

• The Ultimate Fairy Book by Justine Larbalestier (F)

October

• Macabre: A Journey through Australian Horror edited by Angela Challis and Marty Young (F)
• Wolf Kingdom by Richard Harland (F)
• The Red Country: Book Three of the Chronicles of Rihannar by Sylvia Kelso (F)

November

• The Destiny of the Dead: Book 3 of the Song of the Tears Trilogy by Ian Irvine (F)

A lot of the entries here were taken from the list of forthcoming Australian sf and fantasy compiled last year by Deborah Biancotti, Garth Nix, Trevor Stafford and Jonathan Strahan. And one directly from the author.

If you want a bit more information about some of the big-hitters returning in 2008 (Carey, Garner, Bail etc) have a look at Susan Wyndham's post on her "Undercover" blog.

Note: I've updated this list to remove Dragon Moon by Carole Wilkinson. It appears the item listed will be a new international edition. The Australian edition was published in 2007 by Black Dog Books.

Posted by larrikin at 10:03 AM | Comments (3)

Centenary of Simone de Beauvoir's Birth

This week will be the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir's birth. Angelique Chrisafis, in "The Guardian", talks to someone with a major interest in the subject.

Hazel Rowley, an Anglo-Australian writer whose recent book Tête-à-Tête detailed how De Beauvoir and Sartre's open relationship polarised public opinion, said she was worried that next week's rush of debates would see the couple described as "monsters". She said it could set off a stream of pronouncements on De Beauvoir's sex life, including "cruel, sadistic, manipulating, lying and all these stupid words".

"I don't think we should be trivialising this incredible figure by fixating on lascivious sex," Rowley said. "Why are we doing this? Are we puritanical? Do we think we're superior, and why?" She said she hoped the centenary year would "stop people mocking and belittling De Beauvoir".

Posted by larrikin at 08:37 AM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2008

Best Books of the Year #9 - Kirkus Reviews

A few Australian books have made the grade in the "Kirkus Reviews" Best Books 2007 listing [PDF file]. In the fiction section, Arabella Edge's The God of Spring is decribed as gathering "together threads of artistic obsession, urgent sex, beyond-horrific deprivation, the dizzying spin of madness, scandal and the need to make palpable the awful and awesome possibilities of the human condition."

Amongst the non-fiction is J.M. Coetzee's Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005, and in the "Best Indie Books" list lies Chain of evidence by Garry Disher, though there doesn't appear to be any review or description of either.

Posted by larrikin at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

December 31, 2007

Forthcoming Books for 2008

"The Age" newspaper has published its rundown on what books we can expect to see on the shelves over the next 12 months. Here are some Australian highlights (the "F" signifies fiction):

January

• Just Words? Authors Writing for Justice edited by Bernadette Brennan

February

• The Dressmaker's Daughter by Kate Llewellyn
• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (F)
• The Best Australian Political Writing edited by Maxine McKew
• After the Election by Peter van Onselen and Philip Senior
• Addition by Toni Jordan (F)
• Fan Mail by P.D. Martin (F)
• Gathering Storm by Rosie Dub (F)

March

• Births Deaths Marriages by Georgia Blain
• I Peed on Fellini by David Stratton
• Thirteen Tonne Theory by Mark Seymour
• Dear Mr Rudd: Ideas for Australia by Robert Manne
• American Journeys by Don Watson
• Princesses and Pornstars by Emily Maguire
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (F)
• Quakers by Rachel Hennessy (F)
• The Comfort of Figs by Simon Cleary (F)
• Dark Integers and Other Stories by Greg Egan (F)
• Murder on the Apricot Coast by Marion Halligan (F)
• Open File by Peter Corris (F)
• Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970 by Anna Haebich

April

• The Spare Room by Helen Garner (F)
• His Illegal Self by Peter Carey (F)
• God of Speed by Luke Davies (F)
• The Good Parents by Joan London (F)
• Disquiet by Julia Leigh (F)
• Unstill Life by Judith Pugh
• Stella Miles Franklin by Jill Roe
• Life in His Hands by Susan Wyndham
• The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie (F)
• Bluey's War by Herb Hamlet (F)
• Alibi by Sydney Bauer (F)
• Gospel by Sydney Bauer (F)

May

• A Family History of Smoking by Andrew Reimer
• Stanley and Sophie by Kate Jennings
• My Reading Life by Bob Carr
• The Lucy Family Alphabet by Judith Lucy
• Breath by Tim Winton (F)
• The Woman in the Lobby by Lee Tulloch (F)
• Nocturne by Diane Armstrong (F)
• The Sydney Pen 3 Writers Project
• Whale Song by Karen Viggers (F)
• Monster Blood Tattoo, Book Two: Lamplighter by D.M. Cornish (F)
• Incandescence by Greg Egan (F)
• The Keys to the Kingdom, Book 6: Superior Saturday by Garth Nix (F)
• Earth Ascendant by Sean Williams (F)
• Panic by Katherine Howell (F)
• Musk and Burn by Fiona Capp (F)
• The New Angel by Ali Alizadeh (F)

June

• The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide (F)
• Bird by Sophie Cunningham (F)
• Sea of Many Returns by Arnold Zabe (F)
• Dreamland by Tom Gilling (F)
• The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper
• Thirsty Country by Asa Wahlquist
• The Wisdom of Water by John Archer
• Enid Lyons: A Biography by Anne Henderson
• The Economy of Light by Jack Dann (F)

July

• Life in Seven Mistakes by Susan Johnson (F)
• Ice by Louis Nowra (F)
• The Pages by Murray Bail (F)
• The Boat by Nam Le (F)
• The Time Engine by Sean McMullen (F)
• Voodoo Doll by Leah Giarratano (F)
• One Foot Wrong by Sofie Laguna (F)

August

• The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (F)
• Everything I Knew by Peter Goldsworthy (F)
• Blood Oil by James Phelan (F)
• a novel by Azhar Abidi (F)
• The Land of Plenty by Mark Davis
• Rebels: The Life and Times of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin by Alasdair McGregor
• Gentle Satan by Alan Saffron (bio of Abe Saffron)
• Eddie by Patrick Lindsay (bio of Eddie McGuire)
• The Hidden Garden by Kate Morton (F)

September

• Arabesques by Robert Dessaix
• Have My Stuff by Corinne Grant
• Deception by Michael Meehan (F)
• Hamlet: A Novel by John Marsden (F)
• The Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer
• Manning Clark by Brian Matthews
• Dissection by Jacinta Halloran (F)
• Life in the Bus Lane by Ian Commins (F)
• Time of Grace by Robyn Annear (F)
• Cook and His Rivals by Geoffrey Blainey

October

• Byron or Bust by Wendy Harmer (F)
• Shots by Don Walker
• To Love, Honour and Betray by Kathy Lette (F)
• a "what if" novel by John Birmingham (F)
• The Science of Climate Change by John Zillman
• Doing Life by Brian Dibble (bio of Elizabeth Jolley)
• Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan (F)
• The People's History of Australia by Thomas Keneally

November

• a novel by Garry Disher (F) - probably a Wyatt novel
• David Williamson by Kristin Williamson

December

Too far off it seems.

In addition, look for The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro later in the year; a novel from Kate Grenville in October or November; On Rage by Germaine Greer; On Longing by Blanche D'Alpuget; On Shame by Steve Vizard; and a new crime novel, Siren, by Tara Moss later in the year.

Addition material obtained from various sources, including Locus Magazine and various publishers' webpages.

Posted by larrikin at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2007

Best Books of the Year #8 - Various

"The Observer" picks Bad Faith by Carmen Callil, as a Best Book of the Year in their biography section: "This brilliant and disturbing book is the result of years of courageous and no doubt heart-rending research, but the results are absolutely worth the effort. Callil's portrait is of a monstrous man, but not a monster."

"New York Magazine" picks The Arrival by Shaun Tan as its Best Comic of the Year: "A nameless man leaves his family behind in search of a better life in a new land -- a universal saga given a strange twist in this wordless, gorgeously illustrated story of human striving by Australian artist Tan."

"The Economist" has chosen Carpetaria by Alexis Wright as one of their best picks in their Fiction section: "A sweeping novel that will be published in Britain next year (though not in America) about the unhappy relations between the white majority and indigenous aboriginals, by a notable Australian narrator. A voice to remember."

Posted by larrikin at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2007

Best Books of the Year #7 - "The Sydney Morning Herald"

"The Sydney Morning Herald" has asked its reviewers to choose their best of the year:

Andrew Riemer:
Typewriter Music (UQP) by David Malouf
Diary of a Bad Year (Text) by J.M. Coetzee
Shakespeare's Wife (Bloomsbury) by Germaine Greer
Jamaica (Allen & Unwin) by Malcolm Knox
Afterwards (William Heinemann) by Rachel Seiffert

Sue Turnbull:
Sucked In (Text) by Shane Maloney
Chain of Evidence (Text) by Garry Disher
The Calling (Hodder) by Jane Goodall

Bruce Elder:
The 7.56 Report (Text) by John Clarke and Brian Dawe
Bondi Badlands (Allen & Unwin) by Greg Callaghan

Angie Schiavone:
That's Why I Wrote This Song (HarperCollins) by Susanne Gervay
Joel And Cat Set The Story Straight (Penguin) by Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow
Right Book, Right Time (Allen and Unwin) by Agnes Nieuwenhuizen

Meg Sorensen
Is Your Grandmother a Goanna? (Viking) by Pamela Allen

Posted by larrikin at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2007

Best Books of the Year #6 - "The Age"

"The Age" asks a number of writers, both Australian and non, to select their best reads of the year. Australian selections follow:

Charlotte Wood: The Broken Shore by Peter Temple
Christos Tsiolkas: Jamaica by Malcolm Knox
Peter Carey: The Trout Opera by Matthew Condon
Les Murray: Fear of Tennis by David Cohen
Alexis Wright: The Trout Opera by Matthew Condon, and The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
Jeff Sparrow: Napoleon's Double by Antoni Jach, and Carpentaria by Alexis Wright
Chris Wallace-Crabb: Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany
Peter Temple: Maroon and Blue Recollections of the Fitzroy Football Club by Adam Muyt
Michelle de Kretser: Jamaica by Malcolm Knox, The Children by Charlotte Wood, Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming by Robert Kenny, and Other Summers by Stephen Edgar
Matthew Condon: The Complete stories by David Malouf
Jennifer Maiden: Not Finding Wittgenstein by J.S. Harry, and El Dorado by Dorothy Porter

Posted by larrikin at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2007

Scribe Publications

Ray Cassin continues his irregular look inside the world of Australian publishing with a visit to the office of Scribe Publications.

There is a loyalty, a group identity, at Scribe that is not like the usual contrived allegiances of large corporations. The interaction between Scribe's publisher, Henry Rosenbloom, and his small staff - all up there are fewer than a dozen, including Rosenbloom - is collegiate. It is not simply about touting the product - though everyone works hard at that - but about believing that what the house does is worthwhile.

Truth is that you have to be very committed to work at Scribe.

Posted by larrikin at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2007

The Summer Read

Over the past week or so, and presumably over the next few weeks, I've been listing holiday reading suggestions from various sources: authors, newspapers, and magazines. The State Library of Victoria also puts out their recommended summer reading list under a program they title, aptly, The Summer Read. All books are written by Victorians, or set in Victoria.

The books listed are:

Company by Max Barry
Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds by Gregory day
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
Chain of Evidence by Garry Disher
The Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize by Peter Doherty
Broken by Isla Evans
Delinquent Angel by Diana Georgeff
Well Done, Those Men by Barry Heard
In My Skin by Kate Holden
Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland
Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy
Spiral Road by Adib Khan
The Unexpected Elements of Love by Kate Legge
Cricket Kings by William McInnes
Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller
Dodging the Bull by Paul Mitchell
Patriot Act by James Phelan
El Dorado by Dorothy Porter
Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung
Hoi Polloi by Craig Sherborne

In addition to the list, the library has included the opportunity for readers to comment on their reading, and to vote on their favourite of the books.

And in a more recent bit of news, the Library will be interviewing a number of the authors on the list, and placing those interviews on YouTube.

The first interview was with Garry Disher and is available here: Part 1 and Part 2.

[Update: I previously said that the books were all written by Victorians AND set in Victoria. The "AND" should have been an "OR", so I've fixed it.]

Posted by larrikin at 10:14 AM | Comments (4)

November 28, 2007

Best Books of the Year 2007 #5 - "The Telegraph"

"The Telegraph" out of the UK has produced its lists for the annual Best Books event. Some of the category links didn't work for me, so there might be some Australian books missing.

Australian entry on the lists:

Deborah Robertson's Careless (Sceptre, £12.99, T £11.99) is a book I am still thinking about. It shows what happens when the bond of care and responsibility between a mother and child is inverted, so that the child becomes her mother's carer.

When circumstances demand it, eight year-old Pearl is capable of delivering: "the Madonna of smiles; serene and consoling, a smile so at odds with her own true feelings that only a grown woman should have been capable of it". Set in Australia, paced like a thriller, this is an entrancing novel that deserves to be more widely known.

Posted by larrikin at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2007

Author Recommendations 2007 #2 - The Observer

Peter Carey picks the same book for "The Observer" as he did for "The Guardian": too busy writing his next novel obviously. The others:

MJ Hyland

Callisto (Atlantic) by Torsten Krol. Although it's sometimes flawed, I admire almost everything about it. It's a well-made story, often funny, often suspenseful, a wonderfully strange tale about, among other things, a young, gormless man who lands in a Guantanamo Bay-style prison for no sane or good reason. Callisto is a shrewd satire on the 'war on terror'; a subtle and moving account of a nationalistic paranoia induced by unexamined fear and phobia. The lack of attention it has received says something grim about the sheep-like nature of the making and following of literary trends

Michael Ondaatje

I came to it late but the best book I read this year was a novel by JM Coetzee. The Master of Petersburg (Vintage) is an overpowering work about grief -- involving Dostoyevsky and the death of his stepson -- that gradually turns into a novel about revolution and political paranoia. This is a world of dark hallways and basements and whispers and fear, starkly written and just about flawless.

Posted by larrikin at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2007

Author Recommendations 2007 #1 - Guardian Review

On the other side of the ledger from "Best Books of the Year" - the evil twin if you prefer - is the list of authors' recommendations. First one of the year that I've seen is from the "Guardian Review".

Peter Carey

Remember the Christmases before Thatcher and Reagan? Remember when the free market was still seen as theology, not economics? Remember when Milton Friedman was generally regarded as a dangerous lunatic? So much weird shit has happened since then that a Keynesian writer, in favour of a mixed economy, can now be seen as a dangerous radical, even as a Marxist! Welcome to our confused, overwrought Christmas present, the year of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine (Allen Lane). It has the power to make us change the way in which we see exactly how Friedman and his Chicago boys created a new orthodoxy in which Chile, Iraq, New Orleans and South Africa -- that is the short list -- have been grasped as opportunities to create that mythical perfect place, that tabula rasa, where the free market can finally exist. If you know people who still believe that free markets and democracy walk hand in hand, give them this for Christmas. This is past, present and future all in one.

Colm Tóibín
Tim Winton's Breath (Picador, May), a coming-of-age novel set in the world of surfing in western Australia, is his best to date. It is written with great tenderness and sympathy and rhythmic energy, and structured with immense skill.

Posted by larrikin at 04:25 PM | Comments (0)

Best Books of the Year 2007 #4 - "The New York Times"

"The New York Times" always lists 100 Notable Books of the Year.

The only Australian on the list:

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James

Posted by larrikin at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

The Bloke in Politics

If you've any interest in Australian politics you would have seen that a Federal election was held in this country over the weekend. That election resulted in the sitting Coalition government being over-thrown by the Opposition Labor Party.

The government lost office, the Prime Minister lost his seat, and then the Liberal Party's heir-apparent, Peter Costello, lost his nerve and decided not to run for leader of his party. He cited a desire to spend more time with his family, and then, in a rare moment, handed the podium over to his wife Tanya, who explained her feelings by quoting a few lines from C.J. Dennis' The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke.

Yeh live, yeh love, yeh learn; an' when yeh come
To square the ledger in some thortful hour,
The everlastin' answer to the sum
Must allus be, "Where's sense in gittin' sour?"
...
Livin' an' lovin' -- so life mooches on.

Which seemed like a pretty fair way to explain it all.

Posted by larrikin at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2007

Hardie Grant Books

As the small Australian publishing firm Hardie Grant Books celebrates 10 years in business, Jason Steger of "The Age" profiles the company.

After 10 years, Hardie Grant now has a yearly turnover of about $40 million, with books accounting for 70 per cent of the business.

"We think we are the biggest independent publisher in Australia after Allen & Unwin. We are mid-size and that's what we set out to be. We didn't want to be a big player, but we didn't want to lick the stamps ourself," Grant says.

Highlights in the 10 years include the spoof travel guides by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch such as Molvania that have been sold round the world and "having a stable business that you don't wake up worrying about in the middle of the night". Like he was doing in the early days.

Posted by larrikin at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2007

50th Anniversary of They're a Weird Mob

Humphrey McQueen looks back at 50 years of a novel and the film it spawned:

They're a Weird Mob leapt out of Australian bookstores from November 1957. By Christmas, the first edition of 6000 had sold out. Five reprints followed by the end of February and by 1981, the book had sold half a million copies, making it Australia's best-selling novel.

I have a feeling he's probably talking about Australian sales here. In a recent piece on Neville Shute's On The Beach, Gideon Haigh states that the book sold 100,000 copies in the first 6 weeks. These are world-wide sales and unfortunately Haigh doesn't give any final figures. But you would have to suspect that, at least following the sucess of the subsequent film version, Shute's novel would have passed 500,000.

Beyond the sales figures, however, it was the timing of the novel's publication that helped to impinge it on the nation's consciousness.

Weird Mob appeared just after the vernacular had triumphed on stage in Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1955. O'Grady's prose lacked the vibrancy of Doll's colloquialisms, as in "getting a sea breeze off the gutter". Nor did Weird Mob aspire to the lexical wit of Let Stalk Strine in 1964 from "Professor Affabeck Lauder" (A. A. Morrison), resplendent in his "gloria soame". Instead, A Weird Mob was "slanguage"-based. "Mate" or "matey" appears on an average of once for each of its 200 pages, on top of a chorus of "Howyergoin' mate orright?".

O'Grady confirmed prejudices about the workers' twang -- "ut" for "it" -- at a time when proper people said they voted for Mr Menzies because he spoke so "naicely". That class divide has dissolved. The ABC would not have allowed many of its current presenters to go to air in 1957. Australian English now has a few Italian inflections.

The novel was a product of its times, and, as McQueen puts it: "Today, both novel and [subsequent] film can seem little more than curiosities. Yet, they offer a place from which to ponder the recasting of our daydreams, and nightmares."

As a final note, in the middle of this piece, McQueen states that "O'Grady churned out 17 more novels" after They're a Weird Mob, which I find to be a rather peculiar turn-of-phrase. I know what he's getting at; he's taking a sly shot at what he considers to be O'Grady's hack work. Eighteen novels in 24 years (he died in 1981) doesn't seem all that bad to me. Plenty of novelists these days - especially those that tend to the genre side of the street - produce as much, if not more. Not all of it is of the highest quality, but it is still possible for them to achieve a quite reasonable hit rate. For most of the piece in question McQueen is quite appreciative of O'Grady's pioneering work. And yet he has to take this dig at him without backing it up. Strange.

Posted by larrikin at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2007

Best Books of the Year 2007 #3 - Amazon

Amazon have released their Best Books of 2007 list. It's interesting to note that 3 Australian books made the Amazon editors' list, and all appear in the Teens section:

The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier
Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks

Posted by larrikin at 04:23 PM | Comments (3)

November 14, 2007

Best Books of the Year 2007 #2 - New York Times (Illustrated Children's)

It's all go for Shaun Tan at present as his latest book, The Arrival, is chosen as one of "The New York Times" Best Children's Illustrated Books of the Year. The link takes you to a slideshow of the books nominated. Tan's is about 3rd or 4th in.

Posted by larrikin at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2007

Best Books of the Year 2007 #1 - Publisher's Weekly

"Publisher's Weekly" is first out of the blocks this year with its list of 2007's Best Books. I've named this entry "#1" as I suspect we'll be seeing quite a lot of these in the coming weeks.

Australian books on the list:

Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks
"A web of criminal machinations infiltrates every aspect of an impossibly brilliant boy's life in this thoroughly entertaining and engrossing novel."

Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan
"Rarely do YA readers find such uniformly strong short fiction as in Lanagan's dark and provocative fantasy collection of 10 stories, striking for their beautiful, quirky language and deep psychological insight."

The Complete Stories by David Malouf
"Australia's stark landscapes are at the harsh, violent center of a career's worth of Malouf's fictions, where relationships enter uncharted territory."

The Arrival by Shaun Tan
"This startling wordless tale chronicles an immigrant's attempt to build a new life through lush, sepia-toned illustrations of an enigmatic alternate universe."

Posted by larrikin at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2007

Australian Writers in New York

It appears that a number of Australian sf and fantasy writers are attending this year's World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga, New York, November 1-4. Just prior to that, four of them, Margo Lanagan, Justine Larbalestier, Garth Nix and Scott Westerfeld are signing at Books of Wonder on Saturday October 27th from 3-5pm. Margo has the details on her blog.

Posted by larrikin at 12:37 PM | Comments (1)

October 08, 2007

Voss by Patrick White

In 1957, Voss by Patrick White won the first Miles Franklin Award. Now, 50 years after its publication, Chris Middendorp in "The Age" praises its virtues and hopes that it won't be forgotten.

White's most remarkable novel, Voss, was first published in 1957. It's now 50 years later, and where's the celebration? What's missing is some appropriate commemoration for the book that was once considered one of our greatest stories. A novel that the author Thomas Keneally described as one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century has been barely referred to all year.

Is this a unique Australian characteristic? The Spaniards revere Cervantes. The French worship Proust. The English lionise Dickens. Who do we idolise? It's the old story: there's no end to our adulation of sport stars, but authors seem pretty low on our awareness level. I guess White's Nobel Prize for Literature can't compete with the Don's prodigious cricket scores.

Posted by larrikin at 08:57 PM | Comments (1)

Betting on the Nobel Prize for Literature

Leading British bookmakers, Ladbrokes, have set their yearly market for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Their leading contenders read as follows:

Claudio Magris	5/1
Les Murray	6/1
Philip Roth	7/1
Thomas Transtromer	7/1
Adonis	8/1
Amos Oz	10/1
Haruki Murakami	10/1
Hugo Claus	10/1
Joyce Carol Oates	10/1
Ko Un	10/1
Antoni Tabucchi	20/1
Cees Nooteboom	20/1
Margaret Atwood	20/1
Milan Kundera	20/1
Thomas Pynchon	20/1

Australian contenders, other than Les Murray, include Peter Carey at 25/1, and David Malouf at 50/1.

Posted by larrikin at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)

October 02, 2007

First Tuesday Book Club for October

Don't forget that the First Tuesday Book Club is on ABC TV this evening, at 10pm. Books considered tonight: East of Time by Jacob G. Rosenberg, and Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Guest reviewers will include David Malouf (who chose the Melville novel as his favourite book), though I'm not sure who the second one will be.

The ABC have pushed this program out onto the internet quite well and it is possible to download a video file in either MP4 or WMV format. The most recent four episodes are available on the site as of today.

Posted by larrikin at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2007

What's in a Title?

I would have thought that the title Global Savage would be quite a good one for a book about globalisation, nationalism and tribalism. Short, catchy, with some neat references built in. But not in the world of academic publishing it seems.

Paul James, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's professor of gobalisation found that the suggested title just didn't cut it. The final agreed titled was Globalism, Nationalism and Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In. And the reason? "The publisher explained that the book's title was chosen to make it easy to find in a database search. A book on tribalism, nationalism and globalism is, after all, likely to get a more favourable ranking in an electronic search if the keywords are in the title."

I thought that was what sub-titles where for.

Posted by larrikin at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2007

Obligatory AFL Grand Final Entry

Thomas Keneally will tell you that it is eminently possible to have a literary career of some note and still be interested in football. Keneally's problem is his football is Rugby League - the fourth version of football in my view. First, is Australian Rules Football, whose Grand Final is played out tomorrow between Geelong and Port Adelaide.

Kerryn Goldsworthy, literary critic and blogger, is a dyed-in-the-wool Port Adelaide supporter and had an article publshed in "the Age" this week - enemy teritory as it happens - in which she attempts to explain exactly why she follows the team. Does a pretty good job as well. The only pity is, it's the wrong Adelaide team.

Posted by larrikin at 10:26 PM | Comments (8)

September 21, 2007

Carbon Credit for Books

A new organisation, Eco-Libris, offers book-lovers the opportunity to offset some of the carbon usage involved in reading books. The aim is for reader to determine how many books they would like to balance out, and a specified number of trees will be planted. In addition, "Customers also receive a sticker made of recycled paper for every book they balance out saying 'One Tree Planted for this Book.' They can later display these stickers on their books' sleeves." A book a week looks like working out to a cost of about $A57. Definitely worth considering.

Posted by larrikin at 01:10 PM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2007

2007 HRC Seymour Lecture

The "Australian Book Review" has announced that the 2007 HRC Seymour Lecture will be titled "Biography and the Struggle for the Soul of Australia", and will be delivered by Professor Jill Roe AO, a well-known historian with a particular interest in historical biography. Professor Roe will be publishing a life of Miles Franklin in 2008.

The lecture will be delivered in Melbourne on Wednesday, October 3 (NGV Australia: The Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square) and in Sydney on Wednesday, October 10 (National Maritime Museum), both at 6pm.

The lectures are free and open to the public, and you can get further details at the lecture website.

Posted by larrikin at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2007

Melbourne University Press Profile

In an occasional series for "The Age", Ray Cassin profiles Melbourne University Press and its publisher and chief executive officer, Louise Adler.

MUP has changed its policy direction since Adler came on board in 2003. The aim has been to move away from being a purely academic publisher to one which also publishes books for the intelligent informed reader. Recent successes have included The Latham Diaries by Mark Latham, Voyages to the South Seas: In Search of Terres Australes by Danielle Clode, and the recent biography of Australia's Prime Minister, John Winston Howard by Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen. If the intention is to inform, and occasionally lead, public debate, then it would appear that the press has certainly succeeded.

The next publisher to be examined in this series with be Scribe.

MUP website.

Posted by larrikin at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2007

No Taxation Without Compensation

Michael Heyward, publisher with Text Publishing, calls on the Federal Governement to return some of its taxation revenues, from the sales of books, back into the Australian publishing industry. As Heyward puts it, while it appears that the number of books published in Australia is quite high, it is actually on the lower end of the global scale when you compare book publication per million of the population. The argument goes that putting extra money into the Australian publishing industry by employing and training more book editors will act as a stimulus to the industry and allow publishers to publish more Australian content.

Posted by larrikin at 08:08 AM | Comments (1)

September 11, 2007

Rare Book Auction

The library of Dudley Dickison (together with other properties) is to be auctioned over the weekend of 17-18 September at Ormond Hall, Prahran. You can see the full catalogue of the natural history, voyages & travels, literature and art books on the auctioneer's website. So if you've ever hankered after a signed first edition of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (a steal at $A10-12,000) or a first edition of Ulysses printed in English at $A1500-2000, then here's your chance.

One of the highlights would have to be a first edition of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin. One of only 1250 printed, this one is yours for $A70-90,000.

Posted by larrikin at 09:08 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2007

Writers at Literary Festivals

Mandy Sayers writes about what goes on behind closed doors at various literary festivals.

I always like statements like: "The world's first official writers festival was staged in Adelaide in 1960." In that year the 18th World Science Fiction Convention was held in Pittsburgh, and Australian sf fans had already held 6 conventions of their own. I wonder what makes a writers' festival "official"?

Posted by larrikin at 01:24 PM | Comments (2)

September 05, 2007

First Tuesday Book Club for September

Last night's "First Tuesday Book Club" on ABC TV discussed Peter Temple's The Broken Shore, with all the commentators deciding it was quite brilliant. I have some reservations about the book,but you can see what was said last night by visiting the program's website and scrolling down to video highlights.

Posted by larrikin at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2007

Various Bits of Interest

Clive James wants to go to the Sydney Writers' festival.

Australian author Katherine Howell - Frantic - gets a guest-blogging stint on Sarah Weinman's Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

John Joseph Adams interviews Margo Lanagan on "Sci-Fi Wire".

Tim Winton has been hanging around the Sydney Fish Markets.

"Ben Hills, the Australian journalist who wrote a controversial biography of Japan's Crown Princess Masako, has received death threats ahead of the September release of the Japanese translation of his book, according to a Kyodo News report".

Posted by larrikin at 04:28 PM | Comments (1)

August 28, 2007

Hazel Rowley on Christina Stead

Hazel Rowley pops the big questions in the first two paragraphs of her piece in "The Australian".

Why aren't Australians proud of the writers and artists who have sprung from our soil? The French treat theirs as heroes. The Irish love theirs. Even though James Joyce fled from Ireland as a young man and much of his writing is ferociously difficult, you'd be hard put to find a self-respecting Irish soul who hasn't read something by him, and taxi drivers will tell you: "Today is James Joyce's birthday."

Christina Stead surely vies with Patrick White for the status of our greatest writer, but most Australians couldn't tell you whether she is dead or alive, let alone name one of her books.

Well, I can tell you she is dead and the name of her best known work is The Man Who Loved Children. I know this because it has been sitting in my To Be Read pile for longer than I care to remember. I'll get to it soon, I promise.

Posted by larrikin at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2007

How to Get Published

A week late but...

Clare Kermond talks to a number of writers and publishers about the tricks of the publishing trade, how to get started and all that. She talks to authors Max Barry, Adrian Hyland, agent Mary Cunnane and Joel Becker, director of the Victorian Writers' Centre.

Posted by larrikin at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2007

Shared Worlds in Literature

In "The Courier-Mail" Jason Nahrung looks at the curious phenomenon of the "shared world", or "shared universe", as it is sometimes called. This is a literary technique which allows several authors to share a pre-defined literary world. It's more likely to be found in the fields of science fiction and fantasy than anywhere else, though it has been known by the term "crossover" in television series where a main character from one program will turn up on another. A recent, or upcoming (depending on when and where you are reading this) involves a character from "Cross Jordan" appearing on "Las Vegas".

"Shared worlds" series can be either short stories or novels, it matters not, and some of the major examples of the past include Robert Lynn Asprin's Thieves' World, C. J. Cherryh's Merovingen Nights, and George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards series. Nahrung, however, concentrates on Australian versions such as "The Lost Shimmaron" - which will include novels by "Queenslanders Rowena Cory Daniells, Marianne de Pierres, and Trent Jamieson, New South Wales writers Maxine McArthur, Margo Lanagan and Richard Harland, and Dirk Flinthart and Tansy Rayner Roberts from Tasmania" - and the Quentaris series of books which, since 1993, have featured books by Paul Collins, Michael Pryor, Gary Crew, Isobelle Carmody, Lucy Sussex and Margo Lanagan.

Posted by larrikin at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)

William Dyson Exhibition Poster

Posted by larrikin at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2007

Australian YA Literature

Over the past couple of years Australian Young Adult (YA) fiction has been gaining a reputation as some of the most interesting and diverse examples of the genre anywhere in the world. The pity is that not much of it gets reviewed in the literary pages of our maor newspapers and magazines. So it is pleasing to see Rosemary Neill provide a survey of the field in "The Australian." She mentions all the main practitioners and mentions the interesting fact that, each year in Australia, sales of children's books account for about 20% of the $1 billion in retail sales. (I assume she means YA books as well as children's.)

In addition to Neill's article you will also find, on the webpage, a list of recent top reads recommended by Agnes Nieuwenhuizen. It's a pretty impressive list.

In an odd co-incidence, at the same time as the article by Neill, a group of American-based litbloggers has started a series of interviews with Australian YA writers. You can get a full list of the interviews on the "Chasing Ray" weblog. The list of authors includes Margo Lanagan, Melina Marchetta, Anna Feinberg, and Simmone Howell. Along the way a number of Australian YA books are reviewed. An impressive effort.

Posted by larrikin at 08:20 PM | Comments (0)

Characters in Works of Fiction

If there is one thing that all writing manuals tell authors about characters it's that they have to be careful in choosing names. Mostly, I think, they do this to forewarn against the possibility of litigation: using the name of a well-known person - actor, politician, businessman - for the vile, disgusting villian of your piece is not considered to be an exercise in good judgement. If you even slightly get close to the real person's character they tend to take offence, and their lawyers become very happy again.

But it strikes me as being nearly impossible for any author to pick a name that is completely unique. Who would have thought, for example, that there would be another Perry Middlemiss in the world? There are at least two others, and one of them has a father with the same first name as my father's. Co-incidences occur, and you've just got to make the best of them.

Unfortunately, in this modern age of the internet, everyone is on the lookout for references to their name cropping up on the WWW. (Back in my fannish days this was called "ego-scanning".) So, whatever name you choose, you can pretty much guarantee that someone out there with an internet connection is going to become aware of it. What you probably wouldn't expect is that one such will write about the co-incidence in a major newspaper. Such is the case with Gina Davies who happens to share her name with the protagonist of Richard Flanagan's latest novel, The Unknown Terrorist. She states her problem right up front: "I know we've only just met, but I feel it's important to get through to you before I see that knowing glint in your eye as I introduce myself - I AM NOT A POLE DANCER." The article is rather mild - there's isn't a big rant from Ms Davies - but it does highlight a problem that authors need to be aware of. As if getting the bloody thing finished wasn't enough of a problem in the first place.

Posted by larrikin at 09:37 AM | Comments (1)

August 13, 2007

A Brief History of Australian Crime Fiction

If all you now about Australian crime fiction is Fergus Hume and the authors that I've been going on about on this weblog, then I suggest you read Lucy Sussex's brief history of the genre in this country. Lucy looks at some of the forgotten writers from the 19th century and finds that some of their life stories were almost as strange as their works of fiction.

Posted by larrikin at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2007

The Beginning of the End for A&R Bookshops?

The mainstream media has been reporting, over the past week, a strange letter from Charlie Rimmer, Group Commercial Manager for Angus and Robertson bookshops, to a number of Australian independent publishers. In essence, this letter states that A&R will no longer take books from small suppliers for sale in their bookshops, without the payment of a fee to offset the suppliers' "unacceptable profitability". Books such as this year's Miles Franklin Award winner, Carpentaria by Alexis Wright published by Giramondo Press, will no longer be available in A&R bookshops. It all seemed a little strange to me at first. But I'm coming to the conclusion that we are probably witnessing the beginning of the end for A&R bookshops here in Australia. If you go into any of their outlets you will be, to put it bluntly, pretty bored by the product