New Zealand Listener November 3 - 9

Just "lost" an hour and a half over a couple flat whites at my local cafe, Agnes Curran, while reading the issue of The Listener on sale today.

Great issue.

Thoughtful editorial on climate change - should be compulsory reading especially for politicians!

Good Letter to the Editor from Anton Oliver giving Bill Ralston a few home truths.

10 pages for Arts & Books including the welcome return of Culture Vulture whose comments include the following:

Prizeless publicity
by Denis Welch

The vulture is back. Back from an intensive three-week Creative New Zealand training camp deep in the Ureweras, where participants were taught sustainable art, semiotics and the ukulele. We also learnt by heart the words of that rousing international anthem the “Venice Biennale”. Further charges are pending.

DON’T YOU JUST LOVE THESE publishers? They take an essentially sunny, Candide-like view of life’s little setbacks. “Although Lloyd Jones has failed to win the Man Booker Prize,” blogs Penguin’s Geoff Walker, “Mister Pip is in many ways the real winner of the overall process.”
No other Booker shortlister, warbles Walker, went from 20-to-one to two-to-one in the betting. And during that time the British publisher has sold 30,000 copies. And there’s “hot interest” in film rights.

Great stuff. We should all be proud. All the Vulture can say is, thank God Mister Pip wasn’t beaten by a French book, or there’d be hell to pay.

MEANWHILE, THE WORLD’S RICHEST short story prize has gone to Miranda July for No One Belongs Here More Than You (review, page 39). This is the prize Charlotte Grimshaw was shortlisted for: the $60,000 Frank O’Connor Award, dished out in Cork, Ireland. Grimshaw was there: a grand time was had by all, she says. In the bar afterwards, “Miranda July – a size zero, Joan Didion-style character – refused champagne and even fizzy water (too exciting for her system) and celebrated with still water.”
For further exclusive behind-the-scenes revelations, see next week’s Listener for Grimshaw’s Cork Report.

Plus there are all the usual excellent columns from Jane Clifton, Joanne Black, Diana Wichtel, Martin Bosley and others.

AND an interview with chef of the hour, Jamie Oliver.

Don't miss this issue.