BORDERS & BARNES & NOBLE TO MERGE?

The following report from the Detroit News:

The chances of a merger between Ann Arbor-based Borders Group Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. -- the nation's two largest book sellers -- is more possible than ever in light of a federal antitrust ruling last week, some analysts said this week.

Borders' continuing struggles to make money -- the company lost another $25.1 million in the second-quarter -- also increases the possibility of a future merger, they said.
Last week, a federal court ruled that a combination of the nation's largest organic grocers didn't violate antitrust rules. U.S. regulators had argued that the merger could reduce competition and inflate prices for organic grocery shoppers.

The combination of Whole Foods Market Inc. and Wild Oats Markets closely mirrors a potential deal between Borders and Barnes & Noble and "could be perceived as a potential new precedent and open up meaningful discussions," David Schick, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. in New York, wrote in a report to investors earlier this week.

The talk of a potential merger of Borders and Barnes & Noble comes as both firms struggle against online rivals such as Amazon.com and big-box retailers such as Target. Online stores often offer lower prices, and big-box stores are offering a much wider selection than they have in the past.
Those struggles have led many industry analysts to speculate that by combining forces, the two companies might be able to better tackle the competition.
In the face of such difficulties, Borders announced a major corporate restructuring plan in March meant to streamline operations, boost sales and return the company to profitability. So far, the changes haven't yet reversed Borders' losses, though officials note the turnaround plan hasn't been fully implemented.

Spokesmen for both booksellers on Thursday declined to comment on any hypothetical deal between the two companies. Their silence, however, hasn't stopped market speculation.
Matthew Fassler, an analyst at Goldman Sachs in New York, wrote in an Aug. 17 report that Borders stock traded above $20 earlier in the year only because of the potential for acquisition by Barnes & Noble, not on the company's own financial merits.
Since hitting a peak of $22.29 per share on May 31, Borders stock has plummeted 34.2 percent, to a close of $14.66 at the end of trading Thursday.
Barnes & Noble also is struggling on Wall Street. Its shares closed at $35.54 Thursday, down 17 percent since its high of $42.82 on May 24.

There is more at here............

Twice a month the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington puts out an entertaining newsletter on matters literary.

To visit the newsletter online go to http://www.vuw.ac.nz/modernletters/activities/newsletter.aspx

JAMIE PRICE WARS START EARLY

This from The Bookseller today:

Christmas has kicked off in August this year with Jamie Oliver's latest title already available for less than half price. Jamie at Home (£25) is published on 6th September—a month earlier than last year's Christmas bestseller Cook with Jamie in order to tie in to Oliver's new television series on Channel 4. The earlier release date means vicious discounting of the hardback has already begun, with booksellers slashing their prices in the anticipation that the cookbook will be one of the key performers this Christmas.

Waterstones.com is selling the cookbook, out next week, for £12.49 with free postage; the book is already number two in its online chart. W H Smith is also offering the book for less than half price, selling it online for £12.49 excluding delivery. It was number one in the retailer's non-fiction chart at the time of going to press.

Tesco.com is offering the book for £12.45 excluding postage; it was number one in the supermarket's pre-order chart on Wednesday. The book is at number three on Amazon.co.uk's chart, where it is on sale for £12.49. Play.com is selling the book for £14.99 including free delivery. Play does not include pre-orders on its books chart, but books category manager Georgina Stoaling said it is already selling very well. "For such a high-profile title, it's not surprising that such competitive pricing has kicked off so early," she said.

Independent booksellers hit out at the discounting, saying it is devaluing the worth of hardbacks. Stephen Poulter, co-owner of Books@Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, said the levels of discounting were "ludicrous". "It's incredibly dangerous that this is going on," he said. "People buy hardback books because of their worth. They are perceived as a gift. This is not going to continue for much longer if this keeps happening." Anna Dreda, owner of Wenlock Books in Much Wenlock, added: "It feels like money is being thrown away, from the industry's point of view."
Amazon said its half-price offer on Jamie Oliver fits with its strategy of "offering the best price possible on all titles". A spokesman predicted that its strong sales of the title would continue throughout the Christmas period: "There is a good chance that it will replicate the success of Cook with Jamie, which was one of our bestsellers for Christmas 2006."

Footnote for NZ readers:

Penguin Books NZ advise that publication here is 5 October and that the RRP is $75.00.

For Bookman Beattie, who claims to be Jamie's greatest NZ fan, 5 October cannot come soon enough. I have seen some adavance pages from this new title and I can tell you it is going to be an absolute knockout!

McNALLY ROBINSON IN NEW ZEALAND

Following my posting of The Little Indie That Could earlier in the week those nice folks at McNally Robisnon have posted the following on their website.

Amber Thody, who used to manage McNally Robinson for Kids in Saskatoon, points us to a great book blog out of New Zealand:

I was very happy to see the familiar logo as I called up Beattie's blog this morning. it's the source for everything one ought to know about the English language book industry down here; everybody in the industry reads it religiously; so now Australia and New Zealand will know about the wonders of McNally Robinson Booksellers!

Graham Beattie is a consultant within the New Zealand publishing industry, a book reviewer, book blogger and a former Managing Director/Publisher of Penguin Books NZ Ltd., and Scholastic NZ Ltd. Former Books & Poetry Editor, Citymix Magazine.

You can read his post about McNally Robinson here and his main blog page here.
Thanks Amber!

Yes Amber, Bookman Beattie adds his thanks too and you'll be pleased to know that as a result my blog has had more than 100 Canadian visitors today.

McNally Robinson has a superb website by the way, use this link to check it out.

OPRAH TO INTERVIEW BILL CLINTON

This from Associated Press via Yahoo News.Pic from there too.

Former President Clinton will appear on Oprah Winfrey's TV talk show next Tuesday, Sept. 4, his first interview to promote "Giving," a book on philanthropy and civic action coming out the same day.

Clinton's appearance was announced Monday in an e-mail — "The first interview about his new passion!" — sent to members of Winfrey's book club.

Winfrey, who interviewed Clinton in 2004 for his memoir "My Life," has good reason to think highly of the new book. "Giving" praises Winfrey's "Angel Network," which has donated millions of dollars around the world, from money for schools in Africa to relief aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
The book also includes comments from Winfrey, who was asked why she started the Angel Network, and another charitable organization, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls.
"I wanted to give back what I was given, a sense of worth," she replied. "Everyone wants to matter."

Clinton has other interviews planned next week, including one with Larry King on CNN and with David Letterman on CBS television's "Late Show."

READING'S RACIAL DISPARITY

By Tim Grant, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Rebecca Droke/Post-Gazette

Seven members of the monthly reading group Sisters That Are Readers (STARS) gather at the Homewood Library. Clockwise from bottom left, are Nichole Jordan, M. Gayle Moss, Mercedes Taylor, Velma Harris, Denice Coker, Vivian Shelton and Donna Stilo.

When it comes to reading, race can matter.
A young black male has a better chance of getting teased for reading books instead of playing sports. Black children are less likely to have parents who read to them at an early age and expose them to books.

Until recently, black adults were largely ignored by some book publishers who believed black people don't read books. And many black people had not been reading books because there were fewer books on the market that appealed to them.
"The racial disparity in reading is a reflection of the differences in the kinds of backgrounds that children enjoy," said Helen Faison, director of the Pittsburgh Teachers Institute at Chatham University.
"We have to surround children early on with reading," Ms. Faison said. "You have to create an environment where books are everywhere."

The audience for black readers has grown, but it seems black women represent the larger reading population among blacks.
As an African-American novelist, Brandon Massey is part of a small cadre of writers who earn a livelihood spinning suspense thrillers that appeal to black people who enjoy fiction.
While the main characters in his novels are black men, his audience, for the most part, is black women.

For the full story go to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from where the above pic was taken.

ORDERS FORF SIMPSON BOOK SOAR

From the New York Times.............

Beaufort Books, the publisher of “If I Did It,” the recently revived book in which O. J. Simpson hypothesizes about how he might have murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in 1994, announced yesterday that it would print 125,000 copies and would likely go back to press before the book is released around Sept 13. Eric Kampmann, owner and president of Beaufort, said the company already had orders for 116,000 copies from chain bookstores, independents and online retailers. Although Barnes & Noble announced that it would not sell the book in its stores, advance orders online at bn.com propelled it to No. 1 on its best-seller list on Monday, and it hovered between No. 2 and 5 yesterday. Last fall, after a public outcry, HarperCollins scuttled plans for a 400,000-copy print run by its Regan Books imprint. Since then, the Goldman family won the rights in bankruptcy court to publish the book. Separately, Denise Brown, sister of Ms. Brown Simpson, said yesterday in a statement that she was withdrawing from a planned Sept. 13 appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” alongside members of the Goldman family. “At the time of accepting this proposition from Oprah, a publisher was not yet established, and publication was still pending,” Ms. Brown said, adding: “Since then, the Goldmans have retained a publisher who is rushing the book to market as we speak. And thus, has made the show a moot point for me.”

Footnote from Bookman Beattie- Barnes & Noble has announced it is reversing its earlier decision not to stock the book and I suspect this has a lot to do with the increased print run.

WHEN THE MAN IN BLACK WAS JUST JOHNNY

Of all the music-related memoirs due this fall, Vivian Cash’s is liable to be the most surprising. With abundant evidence to make her case, Ms. Cash, the first wife of Johnny Cash, explains how her role in his life was expunged by the mythology that sprung up around him. Her book, put together with the help of Ann Sharpsteen, vehemently corrects the impression created by “people of the Nashville mind-set, who prefer that I be written out of Johnny’s history altogether.”

I WALKED THE LINE
My Life With Johnny
By Vivian Cash with Ann Sharpsteen
Illustrated. 326 pages. Scribner. $27.

Most of this unusual book was actually written by Mr. Cash. After a brief introduction it becomes a string of the near-daily letters he wrote to his sweetheart, Vivian Liberto of San Antonio, during the three years he spent in the Air Force. They met at a skating rink in July 1951, when Ms. Cash was a petite, exotically beautiful 17-year-old schoolgirl. Soon afterward Mr. Cash, then a 19-year-old serviceman, was on his way to Germany. He did not see Ms. Cash again until the summer of 1954.
Ms. Cash died in 2005, after spending much of her life avoiding revisionist versions of Mr. Cash’s life story. With any luck she never saw “Walk the Line,” the 2005 hit movie that presented her as a nagging, ever-pregnant obstacle to his storybook romance with June Carter, who became his musical partner and second wife. The film’s Vivian could not be less like the one described by Mr. Cash in the feverish, obsessive love letters presented here.



This is an excerpt from a longer review that appears in the New York Times today. Use this link..........
Both pics from the New York Times.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOLLOWING MY TRIP TO THE US LAST WEEK



Los Angeles International Airport - LAX





Avoid this airport at all costs. If you are flying with Air New Zealand to other parts of the US then fly to San Francisco rather than LA. It is a smaller, less insane place and the ground staff are much nicer than their southern counterparts.


But if you are flying to Europe then my advice is to avoid the US all together and fly via Asia.

The security measures at US airports are totally over the top and they seem to select especially unpleasant people to administer them.

WI-FI INTERNET




As in Europe earlier in the year I found that WiFi is everywhere.

Unfortunately both US hotels we stayed in charged for the service (US$10 per 24 hours) as did the Red Carpet Club (United Airlines lounge) whereas Air NZ provide the service free in their lounges.

For a blogger WiFi is crucial if one is going to keep blogging while on the move.
In this regard I was interested to learn that airlines are investigating making WiFi available on flights.
Apparently the technology is not the problem, rather it is the cost which is around US$100,000 per plane. The report I read (Time Aug 20) suggested they would charge pasengers $10 per flight to use the service. Bring it on I say!

I understand Qantas have "converted" one plane to WiFi and are monitoring demand for the service. I'm sure Air New Zealand will be watching the situation.

AIR NEW ZEALAND

We flew Business Class with Air New Zealand to and from the US and what a joy it was.

Terrific staff who without exception were friendly and efficient and most helpful.

AND those lie-flat beds are something else. My daughter had recently flown with Virgin Atlantic Upper Class and said Air NZ business class left them for dead when it came to beds and value.

It is not generally known that Air NZ's seat pitch is greater than in those of almost all of its competitors. In business class for example it beats British Airways, Singapore, Cathay hands down. Virgin Atlantic is the same and no one is better.

NEWSWEEK - ISSUE SEPTEMBER 3

Good plane reading and nice to see the Arts got 8 pages, one of which was devoted to books including an enthusiastic review for GIVING by Bill Clinton.

TWO NEW BOOKS ABOUT AUTISM

In the NZ Listener issue dated 25-31 August there are reviews by Philip Matthews of A Perfect World by David Cohen, Random House $35 and At Home in the Land of Oz by Anne Clinard Barnhill, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, $45, both on the subject of autism.

Matthews has two pages devoted to his detailed and thoughtful reviews. He has a four year old daughter with high functioning autism so he knows his subject. I am sure anyone with an interest in autism will find his comments well worth reading.

If you missed that issue of the Listener use this link.

David Cohen also has a website on this subject. Find him at http://humans.org.nz

WARWICK ROGER, NEW ZEALAND'S OWN GRUMPY OLD MAN

Warwick Roger has always been something of a cynical contrarian and I guess when you are a journalist that is not necessarily a bad thing but my goodness he has morphed into a truly grumpy old man. And what is worse he seems to now regard himself as the New Zealand authority on all matters journalistic and literary.

This is a great pity as he has a fine record as a journalist having won many awards particularly for sports writing and feature articles.
And although we Aucklanders perhaps owe him some gratitude for founding METRO magazine back in the 80's I have long grown tired of the pomposity and bombast and sweeping generalities of his writing in recent years.

Until now I have kept my views on his writing to myself, because of respect for his journalistic record, but I'm afraid his most recent outburst in the August issue of NORTH & SOUTH magazine is the final straw and I must speak out.

Here is part of what he has to say on page 98 as part of his column, The Best of New Zealand Books:

I usually bridle when a new book of New Zealand fiction lands on my desk for review. Most New Zealand fiction is crap. There are certainly no more than 10 honourable exceptions among authors currently writing.

What an absolutely ridiculous and insulting comment to make. I suggest to Warwick Roger he wouldn't know a good work of fiction if it bit him on the bum!

I'm not in my office as I write this so do not have access to my library but here are a few names of "honourable exceptions" just off the top of my head:

Maurice Gee, Owen Marshall, C.K.Stead, Lloyd Jones, Witi Ihimaera, Alan Duff, Patriacia Grace, Jenny Patrick, Kevin Ireland, Shona Koea, Kapka Kassabova, Chad Taylor, Catherine Chidgey, Charlotte Grimshaw, Graeme Lay, Marilyn Duckworth, Elizabeth Smither, Albert Wendt, Barbara Else, Chris Else, Joy Cowley, Fiona Kidman, Vincent O'Sullivan, Stephanie Johnson, Elizabeth Knox, Emily Perkins, Keri Hulme, Rosie Scott, Peter Wells, Sarah-Kate Lynch, Sarah Quigely, and among the newcomers Paula Morris, Rachael King, Carl Nixon, Paul Shannon, and James George.
There are 36 authors whose work I admire (and I'm sure I'll think of more) so presumably Warwick Roger would remove at least 26 of these as he regards their writing as crap?

I would remind you that he was the Chair of the Goodman Fielder Book Awards (now Montana NZ Book Awards) back in 1984 when famously the judges did not award a prize to The Bone People which of course went on to become one of the most significant novels ever published in New Zealand and to win the Booker Prize the following year.
So much for his judgement.

To have someone with his attitude to local writing being responsible for the book review pages of a major national magazine is shameful. It is time he was put out to pasture.

BOOKS MOST OFTEN LEFT BEHIND

The Telegraph reports on the books most frequently left behind by guests staying at Travelodge Hotels.

Alistair Campbell, the former Downing Street communications chief, received an unwelcome literary accolade today.
His book The Blair Years topped the charts of a list of the latest literary works most often left behind in hotel rooms, compiled by hotel chain Travelodge.
Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Daily Mirror, was runner-up with his book Don't You Know Who I Am?
Katie Price (Jordan) was in third place with her book A Whole New World.

Jason Cotta, Travelodge operations director, said: "This review always gives us a good idea of what is going on in consumers' minds during the summer holidays.
"Clearly celebrity is what we all want to know about and Alistair Campbell's diaries were bound to intrigue."

The top 10 most discarded books in hotel rooms were:

1. The Blair Years - Alistair Campbell
2. Don't You Know Who I Am? - Piers Morgan
3. A Whole New World - Jordan
4. Wicked - Jilly Cooper
5. Dr Who Creatures & Demons - Justin Richard
6. The Diana Chronicles - Tina Brown
7. I Can Make You Thin - Paul McKenna
8. Humble Pie - Gordon Ramsay
9. The Story Of A Man And His Mouth - Chris Moyles
10. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling

PENGUIN BOSS HIGHEST PAID WOMAN DIRECTOR IN UK

This piece from The Daily Star

EDINBURGH BOOK FESTIVAL SIGNS OFF WITH RECORD NUMBERS

More than half the events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) sold out completely, and 80 per cent of tickets were sold across 700 sessions, staff said yesterday.
They claimed another record for the Edinburgh festivals, with 54 per cent of events sold out and more than 200,000 people visiting the Charlotte Square Gardens during the 17 days of the book festival.

The highlights from some 650 authors from 40 countries included Alan Bennett reading from a new satirical novel in which the Queen discovers literature, and Ian Rankin launching Exit Music, the 20th and final Rebus novel. Seven of this year's 13 Man Booker Prize nominees also appeared at the festival.

Read the full story from The Scotsman here..........

John Gardner, Who Continued the James Bond Series, Dies at 80

John Gardner, a prolific British thriller writer who wrote more novels about Bond — James Bond — than Ian Fleming did, died on Aug. 3 after collapsing near his home in Basingstoke, England. He was 80.

Read the full story from the New York Times.

£3m BOOK TARGETS RUSSIAN TYCOONS

This story from the BBC.

Author Roger Shashoua made a fortune in post-Soviet Russia
Russian tycoons are the target readers for a diamond-encrusted book with an estimated value of £3m.
British entrepreneur Roger Shashoua is offering a made-to-order edition of his new book Dancing With The Bear.

The cover of each of the special "oligarch" copies, said to be the most expensive book in the world, features more than 600 flawless diamonds.
The book is an account of how the author made £100m through business in post-Soviet Russia.
Mr Shashoua expects interest from wealthy Russian ex-pats based in the UK.

He said: "There is so much money floating around in Russia that it seemed entirely logical to produce a book designed for the Russian market.
"I am just happy that conspicuous displays of consumption can now be associated with writing, rather than fashion accessories.
"I can only hope that oligarchs will read the book, rather than just keeping it locked away."
For the special edition, the cover has been switched from the standard white to black to show up the diamonds.

Mr Shashoua co-founded exhibitions business ITE, which now trades on the London Stock Exchange with a market value of more than £500m.
Russia boasts 53 billionaires including Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich, mainly in oil, steel, mining and metals, according to Forbes magazine.

CLIVE JAMES MIFFED AT NOT BEING INVITED TO SYDNEY FESTIVAL

Who knew? Clive James wants to be invited to the Sydney Writers' Festival.

At the Melbourne Writers' Festival at the weekend James made plain his feelings regarding this oversight.

On Saturday the poet Craig Sherborne interviewed him about his poetry. The subject turned to whether James, a winner of Australian poetry's great honour, the Philip Hodgins medal, might still be considered by some as primarily an "entertainer". He agreed, before turning to the audience and saying good humouredly but incredulously: "I still haven't been invited to the Sydney Writers' Festival. Not once."

Not that he thought Sydney did not recognise his merits. "It's not ideological, it's because I was born there," he said. "I'm from Sydney so they don't want me."

Rosemary Cameron, in her second year as the Melbourne Writers' Festival director, suggested that "sometimes, as a director, you don't invite someone because you don't expect they will be able to. No one ever sends an invite to J.K. Rowling, for example. Maybe one of us will one day, and she will come. It's the same with James. And it has to do with timing with his publishers as well. I don't think there's been a plot against him."

Read the full story from the Sydney Morning Herald

POETS PONTIFICATE ON VANITY, SPRITUALITY AND WAR

Loved this headline in The Age on Monday. Hers is the dfirst part of the story:

THERE were poets galore at the writers' festival at the weekend. Many in person, some in reputation.
The biggest name was W. H. Auden, the centenary of whose birth is this year.
Two polished and packed craniums in the shape of Clive James and John Clarke traded their enthusiasm for the great wrinkled face of 20th-century poetry and dazzled with the amount of stuff they knew by heart.
Auden was the giant, said James, his poetry torrential, "he wrote to breathe". His influence was huge. The great Australian poet A. D. Hope claimed to despise him, but Auden's influence was everywhere in Hope's poetry, said James.
The sad thing was that after Auden left Britain for the United States in 1939, the quality of his work gradually declined.
But he still produced masterpieces such as September 1, 1939, which Clarke read. ("I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street/ Uncertain and afraid/ As the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade.")

There is more ands its worth reading.

Cecil Beaton pic of Auden taken in 1953 from Wikipedia website.

LUNCHTIME READING TODAY

I normally read magazines over lunch and today I faced a real conundrum. In the mail this morning were the latest issues of both THE NEW YORKER and MONOCLE.

Which am I to read first? I decided in the end that as The New Yorker is a weekly and Monocle a monthly I would start with the latter for today's lunchtime reading.

I'm pleased I did because there on page 72 under the heading SLOW ZONE was a piece on New Zealand. In fact a piece on Matakana a place where I spend most Saturday mornings at the Farmer's Market followed by a couple of coffees and the NZ Herald at the Black Dog Cafe .

Here is how the Monocle story starts:

With an eye on the big opportunity, ambitious New Zealanders are discovering that what once was seen as a national handicap - the country's old laid-back pace of life - is now a marketing tool with international appeal.

To read the full piece you will have to buy the magazine.

The appealing pic above is also from the story in the September 07 issue of Monocle.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a great fan of Monocle magazine and have been posting stories about it, and from it, since the first issue back in March this year.

If you don't know the magazine do check it at your local bookseller or newsagency or visit their website at http://www.monoclemagazine.com/

I cannot recommend it too strongly, there is about a week's reading in each issue.

Also in the issue today is an interesting story about independent bookseller Fact & Fiction Booksellers in New Delhi.

I READ THIS STORY IN THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH WHICH I PICKED UP IN THE AIR NEW ZEALAND LOUNGE AT LAX:

IAN McEWAN LAMBASTS THE "LOTTERY" OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Brave is the man who bites the hand that feeds him, but Ian McEwan, the favourite to win this year's Man Booker Prize, has ridiculed the annual literary award ceremony as "a sort of posh man's bingo".
McEwan, whose On Chesil Beach is among the 13 novels published over the past 12 months to be "long-listed" for the award, says it is a "wholly arbitrary matter if your number comes up or not and depends entirely on getting the right jury in the right year".

The winner of the 1998 award for his novel Amsterdam - generally agreed by critics not to be one of his greatest works - adds, for good measure, that he wished the judges would announce the winner at the start of the annual awards dinner.
"That way the winner and the runners-up, all dressed up in their penguin suits or dresses, at least have a chance of enjoying themselves."

McEwan, who is attending the Edinburgh International Book Festival, will scarcely have done himself any favours with the judges of this year's award, who will announce the winner at a dinner at Guildhall in London on October 16.

McEwan, who will learn next week if he has made the shortlist, has had a long and complicated relationship with the award. He was disappointed when Atonement - often regarded as his most accomplished work - failed to win in 2001 after being a shortlist favourite and Saturday was snubbed in 2005 even though it was lauded by the critics.

Even his inclusion this year isn't without controversy, as many think that On Chesil Beach is too short to be considered a novel. Set in 1962, it tells the story of Edward and Florence who, on their wedding night, are both suppressing anxieties about their immediate and long-term future.

The story continues and can be read in full from The Sunday Telegraph August 26, 2007. Use this link.

And in the Sunday Times of the same date McEwan was featured for another reason, he has written an opera!

To read about this - Use this link.

THE LITTLE INDIE THAT COULD

How did a couple from WINNIPEG end up with the best bookstore in NYC?

These days, it ain't easy being a book superstore. Amazon.com and supermarket chains like Wal-Mart and Costco have put the squeeze on the giants. In May, New York-based Barnes & Noble Inc. reported first-quarter losses totalling $1.6 million, a distressing turnaround from the $10-million profit it posted a year earlier. Borders, which operates 1,200 stores worldwide, posted a $151-million loss for 2006. Its new CEO, George Jones, is shifting course, off-loading nearly half of its 564 Waldenbooks mall shops and its entire British fleet -- a move the Wall Street Journal dubbed a "stunning about-face," coming, as it does, on the heels of six years of aggressive overseas expansion.

True, Indigo Books & Music looks relatively healthy. Because it has the dominant share of the Canadian market, it has not had to offer bestsellers at deep discounts or the rewards programs that are putting U.S. retailers on the financial skids. Its fourth-quarter revenue climbed six per cent and it has cut its losses from 2005's $7.4 million. But its fourth-quarter losses still stand at $4.2 million.

And then there's Winnipeg-based McNally Robinson Booksellers. With stores in Saskatoon, Calgary and Manhattan, McNally Robinson, named bookstore of the year a record five times by the Canadian Booksellers Association, has become one of Canada's largest independent book chains. It has doubled its $30-million revenue since 2000 and will grow again in 2008, adding two new stores, including its first in Ontario, in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills. Two months ago, the Times of London's literary editor, Erica Wagner, named McNally Robinson as her favourite bookstore in New York City on the Charlie Rose show, drawing a knowing nod from the esteemed PBS host.

This is an excerpt, read the full encouraging story here

Also visit the website of the little indie that could - http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/

PETER JACKSON & THE LOVELY BONES

This story tonight from NewstalkZB & TV One News.......

Pic shows NZ actors Carolyn Dando, left, and Rose MvIver who have landed roles in The Lovely Bones.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

Louis de Bernieres Cover design by Jeff Fisher

Vintage 1998

Books change their covers with alarming regularity these days, as publishers target new markets. It is, however, sometimes possible for bestsellers, due to their huge popularity and the publisher’s fear of losing the “recognition factor”, to become synonymous with the first-edition cover, a phenomenon perhaps more typical of the relationship between pop music and its packaging.

Jeff Fisher’s lyrical, illustrative 1998 design for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin falls into that category, despite the availability of a film tie-in version three years later.

Another most interesting piece from the weekend edition of the FT this by Phil Baines, Professor of typography at Central St.Martins, London.

Read Phil's full coments and also have a look at the other book reviews and comment on www.ft.com/arts/books It is a site well worth a look. And for me it was great reading on the long flight across the Pacific from the US west coast.

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

Through the Children’s Gate By Adam Gopnik Quercus £17.99, Knopf $25

There is the New York that every tourist knows – Fifth Avenue, Central Park, Brooklyn Bridge – and then there is the belief system that every resident of the city instinctively signs up to.

If you imagine this New York as a psychological grid, then the big avenues stand for the positive ideas the city revolves around: meritocracy and multiculturalism, ambition and intelligence.

The smaller cross-streets represent the neuroses that have now been exported to the rest of the world’s big cities, from parental obsessiveness to our fixation with home redesign and gentrification.

I am a huge admirer of Gopnik's writing and so wanted to buy this book last week while in NYC but alas already I had bought eight books and had no room or weight allowance left! However we are going back at Christmas and by then it will be available in paperback so I'll get it then.

Although I have to say the hardback is a beautiful object so I may still buy that edition.

I recommend reading the full review by Rahul Jacob that appeared in the Financial Times on Saturday. Jacob is the FT's travel editor.

The Muse Who Made the Guitars Gently Weep

Pattie Boyd calls herself a muse, and she has the ravishing love songs George Harrison's “Something,” Eric Clapton’s “Layla” and “Bell Bottom Blues”) to prove it. But in Ms. Boyd’s case, being a muse also means never having paid a light bill until she was 45, jobless and suddenly unplugged from the world of rock ’n’ roll royalty.

WONDERFUL TONIGHT
George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me
By Pattie Boyd with Penny Junor
Illustrated. 321 pages. Harmony Books. $25.95

Pattie Boyd with her husbands: George Harrison, above, and Eric Clapton. The two men were friends who collaborated on records.
Now, in a spotty but scrumptious memoir that sounds more like the handiwork of Ms. Boyd’s collaborator, Penny Junor, she is ready to take stock of her amorous adventures. “Wonderful Tonight,” which takes its title from another of Mr. Clapton’s sublime, love-struck songs about her, devotes mercifully brief time to her formative years (“My earliest memory is of sitting in a high chair spitting out spinach”; “My only comfort was Teddy, my beloved bear”) and cuts quickly to the chase.

It meets the Beatles. And it meets them at the point where most of the world met Ms. Boyd: when she appeared briefly in the film “A Hard Day’s Night,” riding on a train and looking fetching in a schoolgirl’s uniform. Mr. Harrison immediately asked her to marry him, in a fit of prescience and snappish Beatle humor.

Ms. Boyd had been a successful London model in her dollybird days. She appeared on the cover of a book called “Birds of Britain,” prompting the writer Anthony Haden-Guest, in the introduction, to rhapsodize about “a swirl of miniskirt, beneath which limbs flicker like jackknives and glimmer like trout.”

There is much more in this story from the New York Times. Use this link.

Pics of Pattie Boyd with her two husbands also from the New York Times.

THE BOSTON GLOBE ON THE NEW YORKER'S NEW LITERARY CRITIC.

THE BLOOD PRESSURE of some of America's leading novelists no doubt just shot up: James Wood, The New Republic's famously stringent book critic -- scourge of John Updike, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo -- has jumped to The New Yorker, giving him a much wider audience for his coolly incendiary literary sermons.

For a hiring that followed a familiar pattern -- small, good magazine to big, good magazine -- Wood's move caused an extraordinary stir in literary circles. At The New Republic, his immensely learned, barbed essays, utterly unbowed by conventional wisdom, earned him an ardent following and the ire of novelists who failed to meet his standards.
Wood is controversial partly for his unusually clear (his detractors say crabbed) ideas about what a great novel is -- or, rather, isn't. He is especially set against "hysterical realism," his coinage for books that attempt to convey the raucousness of contemporary life through outlandish proliferating plots, allegory, bizarre coincidence, and high irony. In other words: Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, much of David Foster Wallace, the first two Zadie Smith books, and half of "The Corrections," by Jonathan Franzen.
He is not indirect in his criticisms. The Nobel Laureate Morrison's novel "Paradise," Wood pronounced a few years back, "is a novel babyishly cradled in magic. It is sentimental, evasive, and cloudy." DeLillo's "Underworld," he has written, "proves, once and for all, or so I must hope, the incompatibility of the political paranoid vision with great fiction."
Even his detractors concede that such takedowns are the fruits of a love for the novel -- of a certain sort. But what does it mean that the most storied magazine in American history has aligned itself with a critic who essentially rejects the premises of a broad swath of contemporary American fiction?

For the full story use this link.

CORMAC McARTHY SCOOPS BOOK PRIZE.

Pulitzer Prize-winning US author Cormac McCarthy has won the UK's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

The Road, McCarthy's tale of a father and son in a post-apocalyptic America, was named the best novel of the year.
He wins £10,000, as does Byron Rogers, who won in the biography category for his book about Welsh poet RS Thomas.
The University of Edinburgh has awarded the two prizes since 1919. Past winners include DH Lawrence and EM Forster.
McCarthy, 74, was not at the ceremony at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to collect the award.

The honour comes four months after Road, his 10th novel, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The other James Tait Black fiction nominees were Sarah Waters, Ray Robinson, James Lasdun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Alice Munro.

Judge Professor Colin Nicholson, of the University of Edinburgh, said: "Each of the shortlisted authors is prize-worthy.
"But my fellow judge Roger Savage agrees with me that for imaginative impact and page-turning readability, the two winning books are both destined to become classics in their respective genres."

Report from BBC News.

BOOKMAN BEATTIE TRAVELLING BACK TO NEW ZEALAND FROM NYC SUNDAY/ MONDAY,
NEXT POSTINGS TUESDAY.

If you haven't read these by Christmas ...
From Fidel Castro to Germaine Greer, Philip Roth to Alice Sebold,

The Observer's literary team pick this autumn's top 10 must-reads Robert McCrum, Alex Clark and Emily Stokes

Sunday August 26, 2007The Observer

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost, Jonathan Cape £16.99, 6 October
The haunting title, a stage direction from Hamlet, seems to say it all. Philip Roth's first Nathan Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer, was published in 1979; now, almost three decades later and after a series that has encompassed such breathtaking works as American Pastoral and The Human Stain, Roth's alter ego makes what sounds very much like his final appearance. This time, Zuckerman returns to New York after 10 years' seclusion on an isolated mountainside and, almost immediately, finds himself sucked into the worldliness from which he has been in flight. Revolving around encounters with a beautiful but fading woman, once the muse of Roth's mentor, the now dead EI Lonoff, a young couple keen to escape post-9/11 Manhattan and a rapacious literary biographer, Exit Ghost conjures a man raging against the dying of the light, in a characteristically Rothian meditation on the nature of artistic endeavour, creative rivalry, inspiration and, naturally, the imminence of the end.

The full story from The Observer here.........

DUTCHESS COUNTY FAIR

We are spending Friday & Saturday at Rhinebeck a gorgeous small town 95 miles north of New York City. It is on the Hudson River an area greatly favoured by NY'ers for summer & weekend holidays.

Rhinebeck is in Dutchess County and today we attended the Dutchess County Fair which was great great fun. For New Zealanders a County Fair is very similar to the NZ A&P Show. Rides of every kind for the kids and games with soft toys as prizes, junk food stalls everywhere and of course loads of animals ,(loved the goats), hens and ducks, horticultural exhibitions etc etc.

Enormous crowds,perhaps 50,000 people, and very hot - max.95F but felt 105F (according to then local radio which was broadcasting from the Fair) - so lots of water, and home-made lemonade were the order of the day.

http://www.dutchessfair.com/

OBLONG BOOKS & MUSIC

Rhinebeck, although a small town, has an excellent independent bookstore called

Oblong Books & Music, where I spent a very happy couple of hours on Friday afternoon.They also have a branch at Millerton, about 25 minutes drive away.If you are in this area be sure to call in, they have a huge range of books, excellent fiction selection, a great children's area, and of course CD's.

They belong to an group of independent booksellers called whose name & motto is:

BOOK SENSE - Independent Bookstores for Independent Minds

In their August newsletter I was interested to read the following:

KEEP A GOOD THING GOOD

It matters that you spend money in your local indpenedent bookstore. Why?

Local businesses support each other. Booksellers typically purchase goods from otjer local businesses, services from a local accountant, and hire residents.

Sales taxes come home to work. The taxes collected by a local independent bookstore support your schools, social services, and public agancies.

Did you know that for every $100 spent by a consumer, a local business would give back $68 while a chain will only give back $43?

Shopping at an independent bookstore helps to sustain healthy and vibrant community for all.

Shop local. Buy local.

A message from your indpenedent bookstore with Book Sense.

Book isman Beattie thrilled to see indepenedent booksellers getting together in this fashion to ensure their survival.

One of the titles they are currently promoting is:

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Gilbert, Elizabeth

This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom "Booklist" calls Anne Lamotts hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister) is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.

The above from their website - http://www.oblongbooks.com/

My daughter read this title recently and says it is a must read so I have added it to my list.

Because of the luggage space and weight problem with so many books already bought in NYC I confined myself to one book purchase and half a dozen greetings cards!

The book purchased is:

HUDSON RIVER VALLEY Nikki Goth Itoi Avalon Travel

Link to this website for full details of this and other Moon Handbooks.

The author was born and bred on the Hudson river and her firsthand expereince and honest insight makes this book a must for all interested in exploring this beautiful area so cose to New York City.

We will be back!

FROM DUTTON'S BRENTWOOD BOOKS

I had hoped to visit the wonderful Dutton's this past week during a brief stopover in LA en route NY but sadly time ran out..............

this from their latest newsletter:

Odds and ends

Grace Paley, R.I.P............The literary world lost a star this last week when Grace Paley passed away at her Vermont home. She was 84 and was in ill health, suffering from breast cancer. She will be remembered for her precise prose chronicling the daily life of ordinary people, often mothers. Though some complained that not happened in her stories, most readers agree that it was the very ordinariness of her characters' lives, and the poignant style in which she described them, that was the true strength of her fiction. In addition to her stories - one collection of which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 - she wrote poetry and was a political activist for many liberal causes.

Who needs Amazon..........when you've got the new Dutton's web site? One of the new features we are proud to present is a fully searchable database with secure online ordering. Ordering is a snap: find the book you're looking for and click on the order button to add it to your virtual shopping cart. When you're ready to go, follow the checkout instructions. You'll receive an email confirming your order, and another one when the order is ready to go. You can either pick your order up from the store, or we can send it to you.

Most orders take two to five business day. If we've got the book in stock, even better - we'll notify you as soon as we pull it off the shelf. So, if you'd like to keep your business local, but prefer the ease of online ordering, we've now got the best of both worlds. Visit http://www.duttonsbrentwood.com/ to see how easy it can be - or, if you just can't wait, use the search box at the top of this email and be taken directly to the site. (And, of course, for traditionalists we always welcome telephone and fax orders as well).

Is there life after Harry?...........That's the question facing J.K. Rowling, whose modern day cultural icon, Harry Potter, has been retired with the seventh and final book in the series. Luckily for her fans, there are reports that she is already at work on a new book - this time an adult detective story. She has been spotted in Scottish cafes working on the project. As of yet, no official confirmation. But if these rumors are correct it means that children who grew up with Harry, Ron and Hermoine will now have new J.K. Rowling creations to greet them in adulthood.
Is there life after Harry?, Part II..........What about all the young children who have only just recently come to Harry Potter and are too young to wait out Rowling's rumored mystery novel? (see above). For them, fortunately, there are plenty of other exciting series to jump into with both feet.

We've displayed a number of them in the East Room for your perusal; but here's a sample: Warriors by Erin Hunter, the Pendragon series by D.J. McHale, The Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, The Lord of the Rings by Tolkein, and, of course, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.

We should note that it is probably not by coincidence that a number of these series have recently been, or are about to become, Hollywood movie franchises.

DELUXE
How Luxury Lost Its Luster.
By Dana Thomas.
Illustrated. 375 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

I will have to buy this book for Annie but meantime here is the New York Times on the subject.

In the midst of my consumerist crisis, the question I should have been asking was: Dana Thomas, where have you been all my life? In “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Thomas investigates the business of designer clothing, leather goods and cosmetics, and finds it wanting. Hijacked, over the past two or three decades, by corporate profiteers with a “single-minded focus on profitability,” the luxury industry has “sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers.” Hoodwinked? The truth hurts. After I read “Deluxe,” suddenly my new sundress no longer looked like such a steal. Au contraire, the book’s line of argument suggested, it was I who’d been robbed.
For Thomas, a cultural and fashion writer for Newsweek in Paris and the Paris correspondent for the Australian Harper’s Bazaar, the luxury industry is a sham because its offerings in no way merit the high price tags they command. Yet once upon a time, they most certainly did. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, when many of luxury’s founding fathers first set up shop, paying more money meant getting something truly exceptional. Dresses from Christian Dior, luggage from Louis Vuitton, jewelry from Cartier: in the golden period of luxury, these items carried prestige because of their superior craftsmanship and design. True, only the very privileged could afford them, but it was this exclusivity that gave them their cachet. Although they may have “cared about making a profit,” the merchants who served this pampered class aimed chiefly “to produce the finest products possible.”
All that changed, however, in the last decades of the 20th century, when a new breed of luxury purveyor, epitomized by Bernard Arnault, now the chairman and chief executive of the multibillion-dollar LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton conglomerate, first came on the scene. “A businessman, not a fashion person,” Arnault realized that the mystique of the great brand names represented an invaluable — and historically underexploited — asset. Identifying the luxury sector as “the only area in which it is possible to make luxury margins,” Arnault snapped up Dior, Vuitton and a clutch of other star brands. Then, by spending hundreds of millions on advertising, dressing celebrities for the red carpet, “splashing the logo on everything from handbags to bikinis,” and pushing product in duty-free stores and flagship boutiques all around the world, he turned these brands into objects of global consumer desire. In so doing, Arnault changed “the course of luxury forever.”

For the full review use this link...... And for the review from the LA Times go here......

FROM BUSINESS WEEK MAGAZINE - report on SONY READER

Making Digital Books Into Page Turners .

Despite tepid response to its Reader, Sony sees potential in the market--and Amazon may agree Nearly 10 Months After its debut, the Sony Reader is hardly a game changer. Reviews of the tiny handheld book-reading device have been tepid at best, and Sony Corp. (SNE ) has consistently declined to release sales figures, which just might tell you something. But Sony isn't backing away. In fact, as speculation continues in publishing circles that book e-tailing giant Amazon.com (AMZN ) is planning to come out with its own portable reader, Sony is launching a number of initiatives to give its Reader more sizzle.

For the full story.......http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_36/b4048065.htm

GUARDIAN BOOK AWARD HIGHLIGHTS GOOD YEAR FOR FIRST TIME AUTHORS

Ten "ambitious, resonant" titles are named today to fight the first round of the £10,000 Guardian First Book Award, which is dedicated to spotting and advancing new writing talent.
Authors on this year's longlist range from Catherine O'Flynn, brought up in her parents' Birmingham sweet shop, to Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu.Themes range from the politically revelatory to the wildly surrealist. The 10 include two of the year's most intriguing titles - St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, and A Guinea Pig's History of Biology.

Full story from The Guardian overnight..........

THREE LIVES & COMPANY

154 West 10 Street, New York, NY 10 014

Great joy this afternoon when we stumbled upon this "small but perfectly formed" bookstore in the West Village. Established in 1978 the store was bought from the founder by its present owner, Toby Cox, 6 years ago.

Although tiny Three Lives & Company has a very extensive range of literary fiction, and literary journals, and a wonderfully eclectic range of non-fiction.

When I expressed to Toby my surprise and delight at the range he generously gave credit to "our neighbourhood here and the folks who live in it who support the store so well."

He thought he was fortunate to have such a great clientele. Well I think the neighbourhood is fortunate in having such a great bookstore in its midst.

Congratulations Toby, I was so impressed!

Pic shows Bookman Beattie browsing before buying the following, all quarterly literary magazines:

Tin House

A Public Space

The Paris Review

Several novels and Adam Gopnik's latest would have been bought were we not already seriously overweight with our luggage for the flight home.

Next time you are in New York you MUST visit Three Lives & Company.

Meantime visit their fabulous website - http://www.threelives.com/

Poetry-only shop well-versed in success

But for Open Books' owners, the most valuable rewards are not financial

Delightful story about a tiny specialist independent bookseller from The Seattle Post. I especially LOVE the final paragraph.............

The sales floor is just 480 square feet, the stock is just 9,000 titles, but somehow married poets J.W. Marshall and Christine Deavel actually make a living in Seattle running one of the country's two poetry-only bookstores.

Those seeking an encouraging antidote to the gloomy Associated Press national survey on reading can find it at Open Books: A Poem Emporium. This specialty bookstore is located in a small Wallingford bungalow on North 45th Street, where the air is often thick with the smell of frying food wafting over from the nearby Dick's Drive-In.
For a dozen years, the two proprietors have operated their verse house with steady sales that bring in what the 55-year-old Marshall describes as "low six figures." Open Books has always made a profit.

"It pays for itself and then some," he said Tuesday afternoon when the store had sold 16 books in four hours. "It has to. If it operates at a loss, it goes away."
Open Books seems a throwback to another era, maybe another century. All of the ledgers are still hand-written, one of the personable co-owners is always stationed at the front desk. The one concession to modernity is the store's rudimentary Web site (openpoetrybooks.com) that lists store information and events and some featured titles. But it can't take orders.
The couple is currently remodeling their bungalow, where the store occupies the basement. They plan to move in soon. "It is part of our home life," Deavel, 49, said. "It's about to be our home."
She concedes that stories like the AP report are disheartening, although not surprising to those who love books, as she and her husband do.

"Most people in the book business know they will not make a lot of money," Deavel says. "There's never been a bubble burst here -- we never had a bubble. We find other rewards. There are still poetry lovers. Just a few minutes ago, I had a conversation with someone about Robinson Jeffers and Emily Dickinson. That is a form of payment for me."

BORDERS LOOKS FOR EARLY SALE

From The Bookseller 23 August:

Borders is believed to be keen to clarify the future of its UK and Ireland business before the main autumn selling season begins. The summer lull has seen suitors scrutinise the finances of the company, with W H Smith gaining increasing currency as a potential buyer if the price drops below £25m.
"I can't see it operating as a standalone business," said influential City analyst Richard Ratner from Seymour Pierce. "W H Smith will only take them over for a decent price—and they will strip out the underperforming stores to cut costs."
But there is still confidence within Borders about the likelihood of a private equity funded management buyout led by Borders UK c.e.o. David Roche. Despite the speculation surrounding its future, the retailer has held on to its senior staff.

RAY BRADBURY TURNS 87

Though slowed by age, Ray Bradbury still speaks with exuberance. Hobbled by a stroke in 1999, he now dictates his work over the phone to his daughter in Arizona, who records and transcribes it before faxing edits back. Mr. Bradbury works in an overstuffed leather chair in a den lined by shelves of VHS tapes of classic movies and history texts. The room is crowded with models of dinosaurs, rocket ships and Jules Verne’s Nautilus submarine, his own dusty Emmy, a friend’s tarnished Oscar and a 52-inch flat-screen television not unlike the ones he presaged in “Fahrenheit 451.”

Full story from The New York Times

Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies

Pic shows Grace Paley in her home in Thetford, Vt., April 9, 2003.

Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose acclaimed short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84 and lived most of her life in Manhattan before moving to Vermont in 1988.

Her husband, Robert Nichols, told the Associated Press that she had battled breast cancer. The agency did not say whether her death was directly connected to that illness.

Ms. Paley’s output was modest, just 45 stories in three volumes: “The Little Disturbances of Man” (Doubleday, 1959); “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974); and “Later the Same Day” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985). But she attracted a devoted following and was widely praised by critics for her pitch-perfect dialogue, which managed to be surgically spare and unimaginably rich at the same time.

Her “Collected Stories,” published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. From 1986 to 1988, Ms. Paley was New York’s first official state author.
Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailyness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.

Read the full story which appeared in the New York Times August 23 via this link.

Electronic books with musty book smell launched
2:40PM Thursday August 23, 2007

NEW YORK - An electronic textbook website is launching a smelly e-book after finding college students like to be able to smell their books.

A survey of 600 college students conducted by pollster Zogby International found that 43 per cent of students identified smell, either a new or old smell, as the quality they most liked about books as physical objects.

Six out of 10 students also preferred buying used textbooks over new or electronic textbooks even though e-books are generally a third less expensive. E-books sales have been slow to take off.

In an attempt to persuade college students to try e-textbooks, website CafeScribe.com said it was launching "the world's first smelly e-book."

CafeScribe Chief Executive Bryce Johnson said that from September the company will send every e-textbook purchaser a scratch and sniff sticker with a musty "old book" smell.

The survey, conducted between August 15 and 21, found three out of 10 of students associated "mustiness" with the books they most loved, although 16 per cent associated best-loved books with the smell of "freshly-ground coffee."


"By placing these stickers on their computers they can give their e-books the same musty book smell they know and love from used textbooks -- without any of the residual DNA you often find stuck to the pages of used textbooks," Johnson said in a statement.

- REUTERS

WINNERS ANNOUNCED IN ANNUAL LITERATURE AWARDS-

Auckland and Christchurch writers have won this year’s Ashton Wylie Unpublished Manuscript and Book Awards-

National Party Member for Parliament and Spokesman for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Christopher Finlayson, presented Auckland writer, Keith Hill with the $10,000 Ashton Wylie Charitable Trust Unpublished Manuscript Award at a ceremony at Auckland’s historic Hopetoun Alpha building this evening.

Brian Broom from Christchurch received the $10,000 Ashton Wylie Charitable Trust Book Award.

The awards, run in association with the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA), recognise excellence in writing in the mind, body, spirit genre.

New Zealand Society of Authors Programme Manager, Tina Shaw, says they received a high number of quality entries for both the unpublished manuscript and book categories of the Awards.

“The Ashton Wylie Charitable Trust Unpublished Manuscript and Book Awards have become a key event on the New Zealand literary calendar. This year we received a total of 58 manuscripts and 35 books which emphasises how awareness of the mind, body and spirit literature genre is growing, and how many talented authors we have here in New Zealand,” says Ms Shaw.

The judges for the awards were Jennifer Eddington, owner of Pathfinder Bookshop, New Zealand’s pre-eminent specialist retailer of books for the mind, body and spirit; Ashton Wylie Charitable Trust trustee Adonia Wylie; author and editor Stephen Stratford; and convenor of judges, Auckland author Richard Webster.

Keith Hill’s work, “Striving to be human: How can We Act Morally in Today’s Complex World?” was described by judges as a fascinating discussion of morality in today’s world.

The judges described Dr Broom’s winning book, “MEANING-full DISEASE. How personal experience and meanings cause and maintain physical illness”, as “a timely and professional treatise on holistic healing, which will greatly assist the conventional biomedical model and the way people diagnose and attempt to heal the human body.”

“The Trust would like to congratulate Keith and Brian on winning the 2007 awards. The calibre of entries in both the Unpublished Manuscript and Book categories was very high, so being named a winner is a fantastic achievement,” says Judge and Ashton Wylie Charitable Trust trustee Adonia Wylie.

Brian Broom’s book can be ordered through any bookshop, at $NZ88 RRP and for $US26 at www.amazon.com

The Ashton Wylie Charitable Trust is the owner of Auckland’s Hopetoun Alpha venue and the legacy of the late Ashton Wylie. The Trust was established in 2001 with the main intent of promoting more loving relationships. The Trust’s Unpublished Manuscript and Book Awards were established in 2004, in association with the New Zealand Society of Authors, to encourage the expansion of the mind, body, spirit literature genre in New Zealand.

THIS FROM VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON:

WRITER IN RESIDENCE 2008 (A318-07Z)

International Institute of Modern Letters, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
We invite applications for the Victoria University of Wellington Writer in Residence 2008.

Location
Kelburn Campus
Term of Contract
Fixed Term of 12 Months
Closing Date 15 October 2007

Position Overview
We invite applications for the Victoria University of Wellington Writer in Residence 2008. Writers in all areas of literary activity, including drama, fiction and poetry, New Zealand art, biography, history, music, society and culture, are eligible to apply. Applicants should be writers of proven merit normally resident in New Zealand or New Zealanders currently resident overseas. The appointment will be for twelve months from 1 February 2008 to 31 January 2009, with a salary of NZ$50,000.
Additional Information
RD-Writer in Residence 08.doc

Job Description
Purpose Statement
The appointment is jointly funded by Victoria University of Wellington and Creative New Zealand (subject to annual confirmation). It has been created to foster New Zealand writing by providing the appointee with the opportunity to write full-time within an academic environment for the period of tenure.
Responsible To
Director of the Institute of Modern Letters
Key Accountability Areas
While there is no obligation of formal teaching, some contribution is expected to be made to the University’s cultural and academic life, in a manner appropriate to the personal strengths and preferences of the appointee, in agreement with the Director or Head of School.
Person Specification
Qualifications
There is no restriction on the occupation of applicants, but they should not be employees of Creative New Zealand or Victoria University, or have been employed by Victoria University in the twelve months prior to the closing date. Full-time university staff members wishing to work in their specialist academic field, or (in the year of the residency) students working towards the completion of a tertiary qualification are also ineligible. Individuals who have been writer in residence in a Creative New Zealand financially supported residency within the previous twelve months are not eligible (this does not include recipients of grants).

GREETINGS FROM MANHATTAN

Bookman Beattie pays flying visit to one of his favourite cities for a surprise birthday party for his daughter.

We arrived at our hotel in Manhattan at 6.00pm Wednesday evening and after a quick shower and change of clothes walked two hundred metres to the Bubble Lounge where we walked in on my daughter and her husband (he was in the know) and four of their friends who were all enjoying a glass of champagne. Huge surprise for my daughter who let out a scream that briefly silenced the bar! Then on to Landmarc restaurant for the birthday dinner.

I spent this morning at one of the New York's finest, and oldest (established 1927) bookstores - Strand Books - http://www.strandbooks.com/ - they have two branches, one at 828 Broadway and the other, Stand Annex at 85 Fulton St which is the branch I was at - it is between the Fiancial District and South St Seaport. Their byline is "18 miles of books". I love this place and could happily spend several days browsing and buying. Today I had to be satisfied with three hours, one book and one baseball cap!

The book is McSWEENEY'S 23, a quarterly publication in hardcover.

Issue 23 includes ten stories from ten excellent writers, including Wells Tower, Chris Bachelder, Ann Beattie, and other agile talents bringing visions of the Dallas/Fort Worth fake-watch trade and Papua New Guinea in the 1960s. Every story gets its own front and back cover, drawn, collaged, or embroidered by the polymathic Andrea Dezsö. The whole thing is wrapped in a jacket that unfolds into five square feet of double-sided glory--spread it out one way for dozens of very short stories by Dave Eggers, arranged in what we're pretty sure is a volvelle; flip it over and witness all those Dezsö illustrations stitched into one unbroken expanse.

A most impressive piece of literarypublishing. I will do some research on McSweeney's and write about them in a later posting.

Now it is time to get out on the streets. Greetings to you all from the city that never sleeps! We leave to return home Sunday so only the briefest of visits.

WHICH NEW ZEALAND SPIDER

Andrew Crowe $25 Penguin


This is the ninth title in Andrew Crowe’s superb WHICH series from Penguin Books.
Others include WHICH NEW ZEALAND BIRD, WHICH NEW ZEALAND INSECT, WHICH NATIVE PLANT and WHICH SEASHELL.

In this new title the author continues in his typically entertaining style showcasing New Zealand spiders with practical details on how, when and where to find them. The book is packed with detail and includes the author’s trademark features of easy, accurate indentification; profusely illustrated with full-colour photos.

This book is a gem and deserves to be in every home and bach in New Zealand.

CLAUDIA: Daughter of Rome Antoinette May

Orion * $37

I like fiction set in Roman times but sadly I am so far behind in my reading right now that I am going to have to put this one aside. It is a handsome large format novel of almost 400 pages and this is how the publisher describes it:

Claudia has a privileged life. Niece of Rome's favoured warrior, she lives in luxury, surrounded by her family and tended by slaves. Gifted with second sight, her dreams tell her many things, from which gladiator will win in the Coliseum to the secret enemies who plot against the Emperor.
When Claudia falls deeply in love with a charismatic soldier known as Pilate, she determines to win his heart, whatever the cost. Ignoring the warnings, she enchants Pilate and the pair are swiftly, blissfully, married.
As wife to one of Rome's rising stars, Claudia is determined to shine. Wearing the finest Indian silks, bedecked in jewles, she is admired for her beauty, her lavish parties and her gift of the sight. Yet Claudia's dreams begin to trouble her, and the enchantment she used on Pilate comes with a price. Rome is built on powerful, treacherous alliances, and while Pilate's star continues to rise, shame and tragedy stalk Claudia's family. As a circle of betrayal and despair threatens to encompass her, Claudia realises her fate and future happiness is inextricably bound with a man who appears in her dreams, a man who wears a crown of thorns, a man she knows her husband must not condemn to death …This wonderful, sweeping story brings to life Claudia, wife of Pontius Pilate, as never before. Alive with gorgeous detail, it gives an enthralling new perspective on one of the most well-known stories of all time.

THE GREAT GATSBY
A graphic adaptation by Nicki Greenberg
of the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published by Allen & Unwin
Publication date: 31 August 2007

RRP $49.95 Hardback


F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby has captured the hearts and minds of readers for generations. Set in the glitter and decadence of 1920s New York, Max Perkins, in a letter to Fitzgerald on reading the original draft, said: ‘The novel is a wonder... it has vitality to an extraordinary degree and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality... it is astonishing.’

Nicki Greenberg’s graphic adaptation, born out of a passion developed for the novel in high school and taking over six years to complete, is breathtaking and innovative. It is a wonderful homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz-age classic that brings to life the glitter, the melancholy and the grand and crumpled dreams of Fitzgerald’s unforgettable characters. Her throng of fantastical creatures play out the drama, the wry humour and the tragedy of the novel, faithful to Fitzgerald’s plot, mood and characterisation.

The graphic novel is a growing genre. No longer just encompassing comic books, modern comic art has taken on a more sophisticated edge and encompasses graphic novels such as The Great Gatsby, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (made into a Hollywood film featuring Johnny Depp) and Jimmy Corrigan, or The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware, which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001; self-published zines; and a return to the ‘adult comic’ made popular in the 1960s by artists such as Robert Crumb.

‘Bizarre, absorbing and very funny...
a bold idea that works to great effect.’ - Shaun Tan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicki Greenberg is a Melbourne-based comic artist, illustrator and lawyer. In 1990 she wrote and illustrated The Digits, a series of twelve children's books, selling 400,000 copies in Australia and New Zealand. More recently, in 2005, she wrote and illustrated It's True! Squids Suck.

It was shortlisted for the UK Aventis prize and the Australian Wilderness Society Awards in 2006. An active contributor to the Australian independent comic art scene, Nicki's comics have appeared in Silent Army, Pure Evil, and Tango.

I have the feeling that F.Scott Fitzgerald would be pleased with this interpretation of his work.

BARNES & NOBLE DECLINE TO STOCK O'J''S BOOK - From Yahoo News

NEW YORK - If you're hoping to buy the new edition of O.J. Simpson's "If I Did It," don't expect to find a copy at Barnes & Noble. Citing a perceived lack of customer interest, the chain said the book would only be available by special order or for purchase online through Barnes & Noble.com.

Full report here.

AUCKLAND TO HONOUR C.K.STEAD

Novelist, poet and academic C K (Karl) Stead will be honoured tonight for his contributions to literature.
Auckland City mayor Dick Hubbard will honour Professor Stead with a distinguished citizen award.
Prof Stead was a Professor of English at the University of Auckland for 20 years before retiring to write full-time in 1986. His work includes novels, poetry, short stories and literary criticism.
He received a CBE in 1985 and was admitted to the country's highest honour, the Order of New Zealand, in 2007. The award is Auckland City Council's highest honour. Past recipients have included Sir Hugh Kawharu, Professor Peter Gluckman and Jenny Gibbs.

Above report from the New Zealand Herald.

Bookman Beattie offers C.K.Stead warmest congratulations on this honour. Well deserved Karl.

Compare and contrast, that favourite exam question formula, could well be applied to the two films about Capote. Capote of a couple of years ago and, currently screening, the equally absorbing Infamous.

Roger Hall has been to see the movie, INFAMOUS.

If you’ve seen Amazing Grace, and noted the short and repellent Duke, played by Toby Jones, well here is the actor again, being equally short and almost as repellant in what must be the role of his life. His bad luck is that Philip Seymour Hoffman go there first and got an Oscar for it.
Infamous is made with a smaller budget, but has a lot of cameo performances from many fine actors, notably Juliet Stevenson and Sigourney Weaver, but poor Sandra Bullock, as Harper Lee, gets little chance to shine with the script she is given. (And why, in this version isn’t Harper Lee’s success with To Kill a Mocking Bird even mentioned? In Capote, Hoffman, consumed with envy and having to stand by and watch a friend get all the attention, growls “I don’t know what all the fuss is about.”)
Big bonus in this is Daniel Craig as one of the killers, presumably on a pre-Bond salary.
There is a lovely scene in which a farmer stands in a field and talks about the murder victims and how life can so quickly change and undo us.
Am I wrong, or is it mainly gay writers get films made about them? Nearly fifty years ago, there were two movies made about Oscar Wilde at the same time (Peter Finch and Robert Morley both played Oscar if memory serves). Maybe gay writers simply produce the best lines…?

RH

WRITING TOPS POLL OF IDEAL JOBS

More Britons dream about becoming an author than any other job, according to a new survey. A YouGov poll has found that almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an author, followed by sports personality, pilot, astronaut and event organiser on the list of most coveted jobs

This story from The Guardian overnight.............

DIGBY LAW’S SOUP COOKBOOK Hodder Moa $30

I remember when this title was first published way back in 1982 !!
Bert Hingley was the publisher at Hodder & Stoughton and he published this book, and the other five Digby Law titles published in the 1980’s, in hardcover.

In those days I was the M.D./Publisher at Penguin Books and I knew Digby quite well from having attended cooking classes at his Freemans Bay home. One night I suggested to him that I should publish the books in paperback under the Penguin imprint. He liked the idea very much and suggested I have a chat to Bert. I subsequently did that, Hodder & Penguin were neighbours on Auckland’s North Shore back then, and Bert thought it was such a good idea that he immediately published them himself in paperback under the Hodder imprint.

Up until the 1980’s there had been a fairly clear line between hardback publishers and paperback publishers. The hardback publisher traditionally sold the paperback rights to his titles to a paperback publisher. All that was about to change and Bert Hingley’s decision to keep the paperback rights soon became the industry norm.

As the publisher’s blurb claims - Every soup you've ever heard of and many that you've only dreamt of are contained in this timeless cookbook.Digby Law's recipes are culled from all over the world and many of his own creations are included. All the classical soups are here - vichyssoise, borsch, bouillabaisse, etc - together with more exotic soups such as Turkish wedding soup, and curried cauliflower. The book has clear and simple instructions, an emphasis on using only the very best ingredients, and the imagination and flair that the author brings to all his cooking. With recipes for stocks, garnishes and soup accompaniments, as well as for over 300 soups,

Sadly Digby died in 1987 aged 51 but his books live on and it is great to see this gem back in print after 10 years of being unavailable. R.I.P. Digby.

EDWIN AND MATILDA
An unlikely love story

Laurence Fearnley Penguin Books $28

This beautifully written new novel by Laurence Fearnley is about finding love in the most unlikely of places. Set in the southern South Island, it describes the unusual friendship formed between 62-year-old photographer Edwin and 22-year-old Matilda, whom he meets when shooting photographs for her wedding.

Brought together, Edwin and Matilda embark on a search for Edwin's mother, a woman he has long believed dead. The journey involves a series of agonising discoveries by Edwin, about his parents and what really happened years before. Their search takes them to a former TB sanatorium, where Edwin recalls childhood days and a mother who one day walked out of his life, to Franz Josef and a sister he never knew he had, and finally to a nursing home and the discovery of his elderly mother, where the novel ends.

Along the journey, Edwin and Matilda develop an intense relationship, which grows in ways neither of them could possibly have predicted. The growing, tentative intimacy between them is touching and compelling.

Note publication is not until 3 September.

Here is an interesting piece about the book, its background & the author from the Southland Times:

Love for Southland inspires
By AMY MILNE - The Southland Times Friday, 17 August 2007

An affinity with Southland and Central Otago's isolated and small communities has been inspiring Dunedin-based writer Laurence Fearnley for the past five years.
The release next month of Fearnley's latest book, Edwin and Matilda, is the second in a trilogy of novels set in Central Otago and Southland.
"I really like the Southland and the Central Otago areas," Fearnley says.
"There's something that I find very appealing about those sort of rural, quite isolated communities," Fearnley says.
Edwin and Matilda is set in two locations.
The main location is the real-life Wapiata tuberculosis sanatorium near Alexandra, and the second is Franz Josef, on the West Coast.
Edwin and Matilda is an unusual and beautiful love story between a 62-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman.
Her first novel in the trilogy, Butlers Ringlet, is set in Mossburn.
The final book is set in Invercargill and Fearnley is using her tenure as the 2007 Robert Burns Fellow in residence to finish it.
Christchurch-born Fearnley says her love of Southland started when she was a child.
"It's an area that we used to come down to a lot when I was a kid, and I've always just really liked just a lot of things about it," Fearnley says.
"I like the landscape in this area and I like ... those small, isolated communities."
She is drawn to towns that are often overlooked, she says. "I like the differences in the communities around Invercargill – you know how Winton seems quite rich and well off, whereas Mataura seems quite poor ... I find it quite intriguing that within such short distances you can get this range of communities." Fearnley visits Southland as often as possible.

Many of her friends who grew up in Invercargill have interesting childhood stories, such as riding H&J Smith's escalator, which really appeals to her.
"There's just so many things that are nice about those kind of stories, and they're not really in places that many other writers write about ...
but it sort of makes more sense to me." The final book, which Fearnley has three-quarters completed, has the working title Mother's Day.
It is about a 40-year-old divorced single mother who lives with her two teenage children and 4-year-old grandson, and works as a caregiver.
Fearnley says memories of a friend's mother inspired some of the ideas behind the main character.
"I just remember how her mother was always working ... it's kind of in the back of my mind when I'm writing the book." She admits putting words to paper requires a lot of discipline, especially when setting herself a 1000 to 1500-word guideline each day.
It is tiring and Fearnley plans to have a break from novel writing after completing the trilogy.
"I obviously feel quite tired with writing novels, I feel like I've been working quite hard." However, it does not mean the end of her writing career.
"I think I will be writing forever, because it's something that makes me feel good," she said.

JAMIE OLIVER BECOMES CARTOON CHEF

This report from the BBC:

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has been turned into an animated character for a children's TV cartoon series made by the company behind Wallace and Gromit.
The show, Little J, will follow Oliver as a 10-year-old trying to find the secret to becoming a great chef.
Oliver said: "I really want to pass on a little knowledge in a fun way, to really connect to the younger kids."

Each of the 52 episodes made by Aardman Animations will be 11 minutes long and will be aimed at seven to 11-year-olds.
"I can't tell you how passionate I am about kids and food," Oliver added.
'Inspiring comedy'
Little J will be accompanied by several bizarre characters such as a depressed ham and a mad scientist called Eggs Benedict, who sports a chicken on his head.
A "spiritual-cum-culinary guru" called Nonna will guide him on his journey.

Miles Bullough from Aardman Animations said: "We were thrilled when Jamie approached us to collaborate on an animated project.
"We quickly agreed that we needed to make a show that was first and foremost a comedy, which would hopefully inspire kids to think positively about good food, even brussel sprouts."
No broadcaster has yet signed up to show the series.
Jamie Oliver
Aardman Animations

ROWLING'S CRIME NOVEL A RED HERRING

From The Guardian this morning

JK ROWLING TO WRITE MURDER MYSTERY?

From The Times................

NEW ZEALAND WRITER WINS TOP BOOK PRIZE

This story from The Scotsman:

A NEW Zealand-born academic has won one of Scotland's most prestigious literary prizes.
Kirsty Gunn was last night announced as the inaugural winner of the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year award.
The professor of creative writing at Dundee University was awarded the honour for her acclaimed novella The Boy And The Sea.
The announcement was made at a high-profile ceremony at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Gunn was presented with a cheque for £25,000 by William Gray Muir, managing director of Sundial Properties.
He said: "I am delighted that the award has gone to Kirsty Gunn. The Boy And The Sea is a truly remarkable book, with its poignant story drifting effortlessly between poetry and prose.
"The original aim of this book of the year award was to recognise works of the highest quality across the full range of contemporary literature.
"It is truly gratifying to have such a worthy winner in the first year of the prize."

A spokeswoman for the judging panel, which included author Elizabeth Laird, Dr Robyn Marsack, director of the Scottish Poetry Library, and Dr Gavin Wallace, head of literature at the Scottish Arts Council, said: "The Boy And The Sea is perfectly realised, with an economy where every word is beautifully weighted, and internal patterns of imagery and metaphor delicately and deftly woven.
"It is a novella of consummate subtlety, imaginative daring and emotional intensity, capturing the anguish of adolescent sensitivity and mystery in an intimate yet elemental story, rendered in a poetic prose of dazzling lyricism. The tension builds towards a climax for which the reader has been perfectly prepared, but which is nonetheless overwhelming, like the sea itself."
The other books that were short-listed for the award were A Lie About My Father by John Burnside, George Mackay Brown: The Life by Maggie Fergusson and Swithering by Robin Robertson.
Each short-listed contender received a prize of £5,000 and attended the Charlotte Square ceremony to read an extract from their work.
Posters featuring the winning book and all category winners will be distributed to libraries across Scotland.

Gunn was born in New Zealand and educated at Wellington's Victoria University and Oxford.
After moving to London, she worked as a freelance journalist. Her fiction includes the acclaimed Rain, the story of an adolescent girl and the break-up of her family, for which she won a London Arts Board Literature Award in 1994; The Keepsake, a fragmented narrative of a young woman recalling painful memories; and Featherstone, a story concerned with love in all its variety.
Her short stories have been included in many anthologies, including The Junky's Christmas And Other Yuletide Stories and The Faber Book Of Contemporary Stories About Childhood. Gunn is also the author of This Place You Return To Is Home, a collection of short stories. Her latest books are The Boy And The Sea and 44 Things, a book of personal reflections over the course of one year.

This article: http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1312132007

Comments
1. Dragonhead, China / 3:05am 19 Aug 2007
Another Kiwi with obvious Scots ancestors! The Kiwis have just opened an Exhibition on things Scottish at their National Museum 'Te Papa', in Wellington. 50% of New Zealanders have some claim to Scots forebearers! Is that where all the good ones went?heh heh heh
2. Lynn, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
"A NEW Zealand-born academic has won one of Scotland's most prestigious literary prizes.
Kirsty Gunn was last night announced as the inaugural winner of the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year award. "
One of Scotland's most prestigious literary prizes? She's the inaugural winner, which, according to my dictionary, means the first one. How does that make it "one of Scotland's most prestigious literary prizes."?
Doesn't make too much sense to me, unless by prestigious, you're only looking at the monetary award.
3. Rankbadyin, Palmerston North, NZ
Och Lynn, ye arnae jeelous, ur ye? Whit's wrang wi' prestige an' a few bawbees?

4. Bookseller, Edinburgh
Congratulations Kirsty!
Lynn - it's one of Scotland's most prestigious literary prizes because it's the Scottish Arts Council who award it - the SAC are the main funding body for all artistic endeavours in Scotland, so an award from them recognising your book as the best Scottish novel of the year is about as prestigious an honour as can be received within our small borders. And yes, I bet that 25 grand will help to fund the next novel!

5. Nectar, Edinburgh

It's inaugural in that the awards have a new sponsor (Sundial)this year. The SAC have been running them since

SIX TITLES I WOULD LIKE TO READ BUT CANNOT FIT INTO MY SCHEDULE. BUGGER !!


THE SECRET OF LOST THINGS Sheridan Hay 4th Estate $37

I bought this on the recommendation of a bookseller friend so I hope she doesn’t read this particular blog! Because of the subject matter I am going make it in the first book in my “to be read over the Christmas holidays” pile!

Here is part of the cover blurb which will make you realize why I am keen to read it, eventually:
A stunning debut from a new Australian writer – the story of a treasure hunt through the bookshops of New York...
At eighteen, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little more than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city she's read so much about. The moment she steps into the Arcade bookstore, she knows she has found a home. The gruff owner, Mr. Pike, gives her a job sorting through huge piles of books and helping the rest of the staff – a group as odd and idiosyncratic as the characters in a Dickens novel.
Based on actual documents the author found while doing research on Melville, 'The Secret of Lost Things' is at once a literary adventure that captures the excitement of discovering a long–lost manuscript, and an evocative portrait of life in a bookshop.

THE RIVER BAPTISTS Belinda Castles

Allen & Unwin $28

Another Australian author new to me although I see this is her second novel her first, Falling Woman, having been published in 2000. The author lived for a time on an island in the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales and has used this area as the basis for the fictional setting of the novel.

The River Baptists won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2006. AHere are some of the judges’ comments:
'Captivating. This book engages the heart, mind and the senses... This is a writer who knows what she's doing ... the result is fresh and sparkling.' - Marele Day
'Castles has something here … an eye for the telling detail, a sense for the small dramas and betrayals and joys of life that make up the bigger picture.' - Murray Waldren
'Great sense of place and fluid prose…it captures the river life … the characterisation is vivid, the writing is accomplished … this is someone who can write.' - John Dale

PRISONERS – A MUSLIM & A JEW ACROSS THE MIDDLE EAST DIVIDE
Jeffrey Goldberg Macmillan $38

Here is what the publishers have to say about it, you will understand why I should read it!

They met in 1990 during the first Palestinian uprising—one was an American Jew who served as a prison guard in the largest prison in Israel, the other, his prisoner, Rafiq, a rising leader in the PLO. Despite their fears and prejudices, they began a dialogue there that grew into a remarkable friendship—and now a remarkable book. It is a book that confronts head-on the issues dividing the Middle East, but one that also shines a ray of hope on that dark, embattled region.Jeffrey Goldberg, now an award-winning correspondent for The New Yorker, moved to Israel while still a college student. When he arrived, there was already a war in his heart—a war between the magnetic pull of tribe and the equally determined pull of the universalist ideal. He saw the conflict between the Jews and Arabs as the essence of tragedy, because tragedy is born not in the collision of right and wrong, but of right and right.Soon, as a military policeman in the Israeli army, he was sent to the Ketziot military prison camp, a barbed-wire city of tents and machine gun towers buried deep in the Negev Desert. Ketziot held six thousand Arabs, the flower of the Intifada: its rock-throwers, knifemen, bomb-makers, and propagandists. He realized that this was an extraordinary opportunity to learn from them about themselves, especially because among the prisoners may have been the future leaders of Palestine. Prisoners is an account of life in that harsh desert prison—mean, overcrowded, and violent — and of Goldberg's extraordinary dialogue with Rafiq, which continues to this day.

See what I mean? Everybody should read it!

THE SHADOW WORLD P.C. Laird Fraser Books $35

This is part of a review I read in the Howick & Pakuranga Times back in March and which I cut out and popped inside the book for later reference:

IN February 2003 a young Japanese student was murdered by his colleagues at an unregistered Auckland academy for overseas students.Thirteen men were accused of murder and granted bail. Most of the witnesses left the country, including students, staff and the murdered student’s parents.They refused to give evidence so murder charges were replaced by manslaughter.The four who were finally sentenced took responsibility for all of the 13 involved, all of whom had blood on their clothes.The Columbus Academy was closed down three months after the killing.Apparently schools like this exist all over the world and are used as dumping grounds for kids who do not fit into Japan’s and similar countries very conformist societies.The young man who was killed was a pain to his fellow students. He groped girls, stole underwear and money and started fires. It was suggested at the time that he suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism.The Shadow World is a fictionalised account of this event. The killing is still fresh in many minds and the story largely remains true to the facts.

I remember clearly the event on which the book was based and have always intended to read the novel, a handsome piece of publishing by the way, but…………….

ME AND MR.DARCY Alexandra Potter Ballantine Books US$12.95

My daughter read this when we were on holiday earlier in the year and suggested that although it was a light read, because of the subject matter and the connection to Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice then I should perhaps have a read.

I dutifully carried it back to New Zealand in my bulging over-weight suitcase but have finally decided there isn’t time……..If my daughter should read this, sorry darling!

AS FAR AS WE KNOW- Conversations about science, life & the universe
Penguin $30

The authors of this book ,published this week, are Paul Callaghan and Kim Hill and it grew out of their series of 10-15 minute discussions each month on Radio New Zealand National from 2004 to 2007 in a slot intended for a non-specialist, but intelligent, audience.
Hill is, of course a wonderful broadcast journalist, while Callaghan is physicist and Professor of Physical Science at Victoria University .
The book covers momentous matters like radiation, climate change, quantum mechanics, what colour is and how it gets transmitted on TV, nanotechnology and a whole lot more.
I am sure it would prove most interesting but I’m going to give it to my brother-in-law Steve to read as he is fascinated by this sort of stuff.

Sorry Kim!

Footnote:

In the NZ Listener August 25-31 there is a four page essay by Joanne Black with photos by Jane Ussher about this book and the authors. (There are also seven other pages of book reviews and plenty else too for booklovers).

THE LAND OF DOING WITHOUT
Davey Gunn of the Hollyford

Julia Bradshaw Canterbury University Press $29.50

This is the story of the remarkable Davey Gunn who against the almost insuperable odds of difficult country, isolation, the Depression, the depredations of a burgeoning deer population and the constant threat of losing his short-term leases, wrestled to make a living from his largely wild cattle.

He was also keen to open up and share the land he loved, and in the mid-1930s pioneered guided walking and riding trips in the Hollyford and Pyke Valleys. Hollyford Camp, also known to this day as Gunns Camp, is testament to the efforts of this true No. 8 wire man, who did more than any other individual to alert travellers throughout New Zealand and the world to the unparalleled beauty of this part of Fiordland.

The Land of Doing Without brings to life the memories of many of Davey’s contemporaries, and explores the man behind the legend: his quirks, his fortitude and his legacy.
Author JULIA BRADSHAW has been researching and writing local history for 16 years. A summer job as a guide on the Hollyford Track in Fiordland ignited Julia’s research interests, which include the social history of Fiordland, the West Coast, the South Island’s goldfields and early Chinese immigrants to New Zealand.
She lives on the West Coast, near Kokatahi, with her partner, Eddie Newman, who shares her passion for exploring New Zealand’s remote places.

Julia has written three other books: Miners in the Clouds: A hundred years of scheelite mining at Glenorchy (Lakes District Museum, 1997), The Far Downers: The people and history of Haast and Jackson Bay (Otago University Press, 2001), and Arrowtown History and Walks (Otago University Press, 2001).

HAIRY MACLARY’S HAT TRICKS Lynley Dodd
Mallinson Rendel Hardcover $25

Hairy Maclary is a worldwide favourite with kids from tiny tots to seven year olds and this new, as always delightful story, must be about number eleven in the series. The first title, Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy was published in 1983

To date, Hairy Maclary has his own theatre company (Maclary Theatre Productions), a video has been released, and there is extensive merchandising, including four soft toys. The Hairy Maclary series already enjoys classic status and includes several foreign language editions. They are published in hardcover by Mallinson Rendel and in paperback under the Puffin imprint.

Lynley Dodd is one of New Zealand’s best known and most highly respected author and illustrator of children's picture books whose work has sold over two million copies world-wide.

Born and educated in New Zealand, Lynley is a graduate of the Elam School of Art in Auckland.

Since winning the prestigious Esther Glen Award with Eve Sutton in 1975 for My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes, Lynley has written 24 picture books. Four of these have won the New Zealand Picture Book of the Year Award, and many more have made the Award shortlist.

Lynley has won numerous prizes for her work, received the Margaret Mahy Award in 1999 and in 2002 was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year Honours for services to children's literature.

Read more about Lynley on the NZ Book Coucil website.

LINES WRITTEN IN DETENTION AND A LYRICAL PACT TAKE
TOP NEW ZEALAND POETRY AWARDS

Chloë Nannestad of Epsom Girls Grammar and Shannyn Boyd of Hutt Valley High School are the winners in this year’s New Zealand Post National Schools Poetry Award, judged by poet Andrew Johnston.

Year 12 student Chloë, winner of the overall award for best poem with Mosaic, admitted at the award ceremony held in Wellington on Friday night that she had written the poem while on detention. This is most likely the first time lines written in detention have been rewarded with a $500 cash prize and a $500 grant for her school library, along with a brand new i-Pod loaded with New Zealand poetry, the recently released anthology Contemporary New Zealand Poets Read, and a package of Booksellers Tokens, a year’s membership of the New Zealand Society of Authors and the New Zealand Book Council, and subscriptions to the literary journals Sport and Landfall. Chloë was surprised and thrilled to receive the i-Pod, which was a last-minute addition to the previously announced package of prizes.

Shannyn’s poem The Pact has been turned into a song and recorded by The Black Seeds and Fly My Pretties performer Barnaby Weir, who selected it from the shortlist for its lyrical potential. The song was given its first public airing at Friday’s award ceremony in a video directed by Rob Appierdo, who later wrapped up the evening in the role of VJ from DNation with a multi-media show that also featured leading Wellington electronic musician Rhian Sheehan.

The Pact will be distributed to radio stations and made available for free download on iTunes and Digirama (www.digirama.co.nz).

On Saturday all the finalists attended a masterclass with poets James Brown, Dora Malech, Andrew Johnston and Bill Manhire at the International Institute of Modern Letters. A day of poetry was followed by a great night out at Circa Theatre where they attended a performance of The Cape, the new play by Victoria University creative writing graduate Vivienne Plumb. The nine runners-up also received $100 cash, a package of Booksellers Tokens, a year’s membership of the New Zealand Book Council, and a subscription to the literary journal Sport.

The competition was open to all Year 12 and 13 students attending New Zealand secondary schools. This is the first year New Zealand Post has supported the award, which is run by the International Institute of Modern Letters. To read the finalists’ poems, and find out more about the awards, visit www.nzpost.co.nz/poetryawards

We are grateful to the New Zealand Book Council, Booksellers New Zealand, the New Zealand Society of Authors, and Sport and Landfall for their ongoing support of the New Zealand Post National Schools Poetry Award

SO YOU WANT TO BE AN AUTHOR

The following article, written by Stephen Stratford, was originally published in UNLIMITED and is now reproduced with their kind permission. It was also reproduced in New Zealand Author, the journal of the NZ Society of Authors. It was originally titled, So You Want to Be a Paperback Writer.

Where the ideas come from

There is a herd instinct in publishing. After the success of Bridget Jones publishers rushed to publish chick lit, hoping to discover another Helen Fielding. They haven’t yet, although Sarah-Kate Lynch has done very nicely and sells internationally. For years no local publisher would touch popular historical fiction, but Jenny Pattrick’s 2003 breakthrough with The Denniston Rose has been sincerely flattered by several other writers’ attempts. And while most publishers are looking for a hot new crime author, they regard local attempts at other genres like science fiction and fantasy as impossible to sell.A few children’s authors have done spectacularly well but there are many who sell poorly. It’s a highly competitive field: there sometimes seem to be more producers of teenage fiction than there are consumers. With non-fiction, books are usually originated by the publishers. They need writers — though they’d really rather they didn’t — but the idea most often comes from the publisher, who is, or should be, in touch with what the market wants. The idea then has to be approved by the retailers, the key buyer being Whitcoulls. Estimates of Whitcoulls’ market share range from 35% to 45%. Either way, it is crucial that it stocks a book, so publishers will very early on show it some material, even just an outline and a sample chapter. If Whitcoulls says it isn’t interested, the book almost certainly won’t be published.

The really clever publishers, like PQ’s Geoff Blackwell (the brains behind the internationally mega-successful MILK series), aim at the overseas market. Before setting up on his own, Blackwell was at Hodder Headline where he began the Anne Geddes range, which sold more than 15 million books in 50 countries. He thinks big: currently his products are published and marketed in 30 countries.

To read the rest of this article click here to go to the Unlimited website.

For more on Stephen Stratford, pictured right, and how he can help you to become an author use this link.

ROCKING HORSE ROAD Carl Nixon Vintage $28

Christchurch-based Carl Nixon has been best known as a playwright but all that is changing with his publication in 2006 of his first book, Fish’n’Chip Shop Song, a splendid collection of short stories, and now this year with his first novel, Rocking Horse Road which has also been well received.

In Rocking Horse Road Nixon skillfully captures life as it was in provincial New Zealand in the 1980’s with beach scenes, the long wait for school cert results, the wretched Springbok Tour of 1981, all tie in well with the shock experienced in the small coastal community near Christchurch when the body of a strangled teenage girl is found on the beach.Compelling.

I am sure we are going to read a lot more by this writer. I notice Owen Marshall quoted in yesterday’s Sunday Star Times saying he “found Nixon’s work strong, clear and original.”

Author pic from NZ Book Council website.

HEINZ BAKED BEANZ – Recipes, History, Trivia and More Hamlyn

When you are as keen on baked beans as I am then this is a book you have to own.
Baked beans on well done Vogels toast with a poached egg on top – now that is a breakfast to die for!

This entertaining small volume is well described by its subtitle as it is indeed full of recipes, history and trvia.

Canned baked beans as we know them today wre invented by Henry Heinz in Pittsburgh in 1869. In 1886 Fortnum & Mason introduced them to Britain and by 1919 they were being sold worldwide.
Today a can of Heinz baked beans (sold under the Watties label in NZ) is eaten every 14 seconds somewhere in the world, that’s 420 million cans a year.
To make all these beans Heinz uses enough tomatoes to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every day.

Great fun.

RIGHT BOOK RIGHT TIME – 500 great reads for teenagers

Agnes Nieuwenhuizen Allen & Unwin NZ$40

AGNES NIEUWENHUIZEN is Australia’s leading expert in teenage literature. By the age of 10, Agnes read in three languages and spoke another two. She studied French and German at the University of Melbourne and, after having 3 children, returned to university to study English Literature and then graduate studies in children’s literature.
As a teacher of French, English and English as a Second Language, Agnes learned that even reluctant students responded to story, so she read aloud to students of all ages and abilities and encouraged them to choose what to read.
In 1991 Agnes established the Youth Literature Project to promote reading to teenagers. Agnes has coordinated the Youth Literature Days of the Melbourne Writers Festival and was awarded the Dromkeen Medal for services to youth literature.
Agnes retired in 2005 and lives near Melbourne with her husband John, an award-winning book translator. They have six book-loving grandsons, and books are a favourite feature in their family dinner table discussions.

And for my money she has done more to foster literature and literacy than anyone else in this part of the world. She is, and has been much of her adult life, a tireless campaigner for the cause and I will take this opportunity to salute her and express my wonder and admiration at her huge contribution to the cause of children’s literacy particularly during the years when she established and ran the Youth Literature Project.

Here is her creed:

“Read! Read! Read! Read for pleasure, for thrills, for escape, for ideas.
Read books that make you laugh and cry and wonder and think.
Read for yourself and not for others.”

And now in her so-called retirement she brings us this wonderful new book
with 500 books to satisfy every type of reader, whatever their tastes, interests or mood,
The lively and accessible Right Book Right Time is broken into broad categories including Action, Adventure & Crime, Extreme & Edgy, When you want to Laugh, War and Conflicts and Not Such Ordinary Lives.
Many international titles, as well as favourite classics, are included, along with breakout sections of fascinating articles and helpful lists like Grand Love Stories, More books like…, and Earlier books about….

With easy to use stepping stones, links and detours, Right Book Right Time will provide a satisfying reading trail for teenagers and I have no doubt will prove to be an indispensable guide for their parents, librarians and teachers..

One of my teacher friends told me yesterday the book was worth its weight in gold to her.

This is a book blog but from time to time I feature stories from other parts of the art world, especially opera which is one of my great passions.

Here then is John Daly-Peoples writing in the National Business Review Friday 17 August about FIDELIO performed in the Auckland Town Hall a week ago.

It is my last word on Fidelio.

Fidelio by Beethoven
Auckland Philharmonia & Chapman Tripp Chorus of the NBR New Zealand Opera
Auckland Twin Hall
August 19th

Beethoven’s Fidelio is probably one of the first modern operas dealing with political and social issues in a very obvious and direct manner. This is no allegory condemning the excesses of power; it is an obvious recounting of events which happened routinely both before and after the French Revolution, even though the opera is supposedly set in Spain.
Beethoven and his librettists attempted to celebrate the political and social changes which were transforming Europe
The opera threads a love story into a tale of political machinations. The personal quest of Leonora entering the prison to find her wrongly incarcerated husband becomes a metaphor for the wider search for truth and liberation
Much of the opera then has a political dimension so the recitatives and arias are at times more like lectures than drama events.
Fidelio more than many operas is well suited to a concert performance. Even the Wellington International Festival of the Arts version of five years was not a lot more than a concert version apart from the costuming and lighting.
The Auckland Philharmonia’s staging of the work although severely edited was a triumph. The orchestra was at its best, the singers provided a truly international quality performances and the Chapman Tripp chorus was inspiring
The seven singers managed to integrate the mixture of the personal and political making both the emotional reach of the opera as well as its polemic real and vibrant.
As the young love sick Marzeline Madeleine Pierard brought a beautifully nuanced voice which contrasted well with that of Erika Sunnergardh’s Leonora
With her gestures and deportment she gave the part an effervescent energy and vivacity
In the role of Leonora (Fidelio) Erika Sunnergardh gave a commanding presentation. In the first act she was relatively undemonstrative, her slight head movement, taut body and simple gestures helped convey the stress and anguish of the character. In the second act she displayed more passion and drama as the character moved from the depressed wife to dynamic rescuer.
Her voice was full of colour and expressed the fear, love, courage, anger and sadness which the part requires. She gave an insight into the character in a way that the libretto often fails to convey.
Peteris Eglitis as the Governor Don Pizarro sang with an urgency and forcefulness conveying a totalitarian malevolence.
Andrew Greenan as Rocco, the jailer was impressive in his role as the jailer expressing his conflicting views on the fate of Florestan with a voice tinged with sadness.
Simon O’Neill gave a electrifying as the heroic Florestan. His rich tenor voice expressed the weary fortitude of the condemned man as well as the anguish of meeting Leonora in an engaging and poignant performance.
In some ways he is a metaphor for the composer himself. In his opening aria he sings of”The terrifying silence”, acknowledgment of Beethoven’s deafness
For the most part in this opera it is the music which carries the drama and the Auckland Philharmonia under the control Jonas Alber provided that drama as he coaxed a superb richness of sound out of them.
Albers became one of the major performers on the stage as he conducted. At times he was like a frenetic piston engine forcing out the dramatic passages while at others he lightly danced on the podium serenading the players.
use of a narrator to take the audience through the story is a new international trend particularly with Fidelio. It seems to be an unnecessary inclusion which detracted from the drama of the music as well as the flow of the opera and anyway the words of the singers are projected as sur-titles for all to see.
Beryl Te Wiata read superbly but it seemed odd to have an eighty year old reading the words of Leonora who is supposed to be at leats half that age.

SUCH ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS – A Memoir Ian Cross

David Ling Publishers $30

I have long admired Ian Cross from afar, I guess because of his 1957 novel The God Boy, now widely regarded as a modern classic, because of his editorship of the Listener, for the work he did on the establishment of the New Zealand authors’ fund and for his TV programme Column Comment all those years ago.

He has been a significant contributor to our cultural life.

And so I was delighted to come across his just-published memoir.

Especially interesting for me was the background he provides about the writing of The God Boy and also how the book came to be first published by Harcourt Brace in the US and Andre Deutsch in the UK. Remember these were in the days when very few NZ writers were ever published outside their home country. Later (1973) it was published by Whitcomb & Tombs and these days it is in the Penguin Modern Classics series. It has also been made into a play and an opera. Quite a story.

There is a lot more in this memoir than The God Boy story of course especially about his early life and his international ramblings,(some of these quite remarkable), his involvement in that great TV programme Column Comment and later about his time as Chairman of Broadcasting and the 1981 Springbok Tour.
But there is precious little about his life over the past 25 years. What has he been doing? Another volume please Ian!

Pic at left - A media critic and the television camera, and above right the Harcourt Brace cover of The God Boy . Both from the interesting photographs

within Such Absolute Beginners.

EXTRA VIRGIN?

Last Thursday I enthused about Carol Drinkwater's latest title in her Olive series,The Olive Route.

Still on the subject of olive oil but on a rather sinister note, the trading in adulterated oilve oils, I came across this story today in The New Yorker of August 13.

AUCKLAND AND WELLINGTON SCHOOLS TAKE TOP POETRY AWARDS

Chloë Nannestad of Epsom Girls Grammar and Shannyn Boyd of Hutt Valley High School are the winners of this year’s New Zealand Post Schools National Poetry Competition.

Year 12 student Chloë, winner of the overall award for best poem with Mosaic, receives a $500 cash prize and a $500 grant for her school library, along with a new i-Pod loaded with New Zealand poetry. She says the win was totally unexpected.

“Winning is thrilling - it's wonderful to have my writing validated by such a prestigious competition, and the award greatly supports my application to the Dramatic Writing Program at New York's Tisch School of the Arts 2008 intake. The masterclass weekend is a great opportunity to connect with other young writers and to learn from some of New Zealand's best poets."

Shannyn’s poem The Pact is being turned into a song and recorded by The Black Seeds performer Barnaby Weir. The song will be distributed to radio stations and made available for free download on iTunes and Digirama.

The Year 12 student says the whole experience has been a real buzz.

"I can’t believe my poem was chosen as the song to be recorded. It's such an amazing opportunity to meet Barnaby and work with him. This is fantastic."

New Zealand Post chief executive John Allen says it’s great to see young people enthused by the power of poetry.

“I’m so pleased that young people are seeing the potential poetry has to offer in their personal, and hopefully, professional lives. Congratulations to all finalists — they are all winners.”

International Institute of Modern Letters director Bill Manhire agrees.

“This competition is going from strength to strength – and that means more and more young New Zealanders are taking pleasure in words and writing.”

Themed ‘Liberate your Words,’ this year’s competition has been judged by award-winning New Zealand poet Andrew Johnston, and the winners were announced at an award ceremony held in Wellington on 17 August. All ten finalists will have their expenses paid to attend a poetry masterclass at Victoria University in Wellington, and receive a package of book tokens and subscriptions to literary organisations and journals.

The competition was open to all Year 12 and 13 students attending New Zealand secondary schools.

This is the first year New Zealand Post has supported the competition, which is run by Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters.

STEFAN PRESTON - BENDON MAN

Many of us in the NZ book trade wil remember Stefan Preston who strutted about Whitcoulls head office in the days when the company was owned by Eric Watson, and then his later disaster with online retailer Flying Pig.

It seems things are going better for him these days.

Story and photo from NZ Herald's The Business August 17, 2007.

RECENT TITLES FROM HUIA PUBLISHERS

LUMINOUS Alice Tawhai $35

This is the author's second collection of short stories and like the first, Festival of Miracles, (published way back in 1995), it is dominated by raw-edged, bittersweet stories of love and sex and realtionships and race and abandonment and hope.

TIROHIA KIMIHIA - A Maori Learner Dictionary

This title marks a landmark in New Zealand book publishing as it is the first Maori monolingual dictionary and it is the first dictionary written completely in Maori for children.
Montana NZ Book Award finalist this year.

Congratulations to Huia Publishers.



The dictionary was compiled by the Huia dictionary team led by Brian Morris and comprised Mary Boyce, Jennifer Garlick, Maraea Hunia, Tamati Morris, Kararaina Uatuku, and Paranihia Walker. They were supported by Maori language advisors Te Ohorere and Wiremu Kaa.

The title means look and seek and you will find.





TE KETE KUPU - 300 Essential Words in Maori


The 300 essential words in this book and the examples of common uses have been selected from published texts in Maori for young readers.
Apparently in Maori around 300 words make up three quarters of the words used.

The Huia dictionary team mentioned above were also involved with this title which was published for the Ministry of Education by Huia Publishers. It was developed by Maraea Hunia with illustrations by Brian Gunson.
This title won the Educational section of the Spectrum Print Book Design Awards this year.

THE TREADMILL TAPES – Confessions of a compulsive pop picker

David McGill Silver Owl Press $34.95

Here is the author’s own take on the book:

Everybody has a continuously updated Top 20 or so favourite songs. Here is a one-man Top 20 band that may answer Cilla’s plaintive enquiry: ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ Launched on Ringo’s birthday, this personal history of popular music was 50 years in the making. It starts with the first liberation of hopscotching down a Bay of Plenty footpath humming ‘Jambalaya’, finds teenage release with Elvis and Johnny Devlin, student sixties with Ringo and friends, OE flowerpower journalism with Jools in Jesus Field, Mick and his mates in the studio, Jimi’s tragic last gig. Back home reconciliation relies on Van Morrison and Tina Turner, finds closure with Split Enz and Don McGlashan.

From diaries and cassette tape collections, the author has recreated the sounds and social changes of each decade, the tapes serving to soften the daily treadmill grind, presented here as a meditation on popular music and its impact at the time and retrospectively. This pop odyssey charts the development of rock’n’roll and the infiltrations of Cajun Music, Irish and Pacific sounds, ponders the way songs, often as misheard mondegreens, trigger memories.

Each chapter ends with a Top 20, at the end a Final Top 20. The one-man band is balanced by Top 20s from Carmen, Max Cryer, friends and family.

If popular music is your thing then this chunky, handsome new book from one of New Zealand’s most active social historians demands a place on your bookshelf.

David McGill has an excellent website too. And here is his entry on the NZ Book Council website

He is a versatile character, often on National Radio on Sunday afternoon, writes biography and fiction (his last title was “From my cold dead hands” featuring cantankerous geologist Ben Duffie in a timely thriller about the oil exploration industry, published earlier this year) and on top of all that he is also a publisher!

Here is what noted music historian and author Chris Bourke had to say about The Treadmill Tapes in the Sunday Star Times.

THE PUPPET BOX by Moira Wairama

illustrations by Bruce Potter

Scholastic $17

Congratulations to Scholastic for publishing this most appealing picture book simultaneously in both English and Maori languages. The Maori title is Te Pouaka Karetao.

Author Moira Wairama is a Wellington born New Zealand storyteller, playwright, poet, teacher and children's writer.

As a storyteller, Moira specialises in bilingual tellings of Maori legends and in creating stories around New Zealand events, artworks and life experiences. Moira works part-time at Te Ara Whanui Kura Kaupapa where she runs a literacy support programme. Moira's picture book 'The Puppet Box' was launched at the Storylines Festival in June.

Author pic and bio material from Storylines Festival.

POSTHUMOUS PUBLISHERS WHO REFUSE TO LIVE AND LET DIE

Ian Fleming Publications' decision to reanimate the late author's most famous creation, James Bond, in a novel by Sebastian Faulks to mark Fleming's centenary next year is the latest in a resurrection trade that has made literary estates some of the most powerful in the media.

As well as the 14 original Bond books and posthumous adult novels by other authors (including Kingsley Amis), IFP has reaped rewards with the launch in 2004 of the Young Bond series. These books, by Charlie Higson, have topped children's bestseller lists across the world and tapped into a new generation of 007 fans.

For the full story from Friday's Financial Times click here.

Viking Penguin Book Club Launches Online

Viking Press and Penguin Books US have launched an online resource for reading groups at vpbookclub.com, which includes the ability to personalize the site's homepage; regular posts from authors, editors and sales and marketing people at Viking and Penguin; a forthcoming blog where readers can post comments and reviews; a monthly newsletter; weekly news, awards, author tour updates and contests/giveaways.

In addition, the site allows users to buy from the retailer of their choice, several of which link to each title's page.Viking and Penguin plan regularly to feature one new Viking hardcover, one new Penguin paperback and one Penguin Classic.

The first such titles are Deirdre McNamer's Red Rover (Viking), Meg Mullins's The Rug Merchant (Penguin), and Barbara Pym's Excellent Women (Penguin Classics).

The site's archive, which currently consists of more than 100 titles, is being expanded and includes titles by a range of authors picked to appeal to reading groups. It's designed to allow users to flip through titles as though browsing the shelves of a bookstore or library.

Clare Ferraro, president of Viking, said in a statement that the book club "is designed to give readers a home online where they know they will find beautifully written, high quality fiction and nonfiction."

Note from Bookman Beattie - this is a very impressive, sophisticated website, do be sure to have a look at it,(link above). I guess though this initiative will be seen by many booksellers as a further effort by a publisher to supply direct?

And now this comment from mediabistro.com:

"How is this possibly a book club?" asks a GalleyCat reader of the Viking Penguin Book Club, which launched earlier this week. Each month, the website—"designed to simulate the experience of browsing the shelves of a bookstore or library, while offering the speed and flexibility of a digital environment"—will feature one Viking hardcover, one Penguin paperback, and a Penguin Classics paperback, with links to author bios, reading group guides, and an assortment of links to online bookstores. (There's also a baseline archive of about 100 titles already installed.)

"This smells like a a fancy feature rather than a real book club," our reader continues. "Where is the community? Author involvement? Why is this in Flash?"

Penguin Group's press release promises "community" will be an added feature to the site, in the form of "a forthcoming blog where readers can post comments and reviews," along with messages from the authors and Viking/Penguin staffers. The publishers are confident the new site "will help fill the needs of the modern reader by offering the interactive digital content that readers crave today," but our reader isn't impressed yet. "I don't see a blog or anything other than a very clear BUY THE BOOK message," she says.

"If you're going to launch with all the features you're touting about in your press release, why not wait until then?"

From Publishing News Online:

EX-WHS MAN BEHIND AUSTRALIAN BOOK TRADE ROW

CHARLIE RIMMER, THE Group Commercial Manager of Australian booksellers Angus & Robertson, whose letter asking for payment if a supplier's net profit generated for the chain falls below a minimum earnings ratio has so angered Australian publishers, held numerous field management positions with WHSmith - and a regional management position with Borders UK - before moving to Australia in 2005.

Since joining A&R he has intensified the commercial focus within the business, with responsibility for driving sales through new and existing channels and improving profitability.

Since receiving Rimmer's letter, some publishers have stopped supplying books in protest. A&R is owned by private equity firm, Pacific Equity Partners, which is bidding to acquire the Australia and New Zealand Borders stores.

For more on this subject go to The Australian Index - Culture Blogs.

This from The Press, Christchurch today:

'Boys' brilliant, forceful

Opera with the stars, presented by Southern Opera, with Dorothee Jansen, Suzanne Prain, Simon O'Neill, Teddy Tahu Rhodes and the Christchurch Symphony conducted by Tecwyn Evans, Christchurch Town Hall, August 16, 8pm. Reviewed by Timothy Jones.

When a singer knows maestro Ricardo Muti as Ricky, you know he has reached the top.
So it was with Simon O'Neill whose cheerful familiarity with the renowned conductor seemed not at all out of place, so superlative was his performance last night.
Ombra Mai Fu, and duets from Carmen and Otello, were immaculate. Here is a true, natural tenor, clean and true throughout the range, with a strong top and so much horsepower in reserve you can hardly believe your ears.

Line that up against Teddy Tahu Rhodes who opened the concert with the Toreador's Song, prowling the stage with his whole six feet of alpha male authority, and you had a heady mix indeed.

To say that Dorothee Jansen, who sang third, had a hard act to follow is a gross understatement. She and Suzanne Prain are very fine singers but the boys from Canterbury cast a mighty long shadow, singing brilliantly and engaging the audience with their forceful personalities.

Southern Opera's list of sponsors looks impressive and Christopher Doig's contacts are obviously good if he can bring opera's Roger Federer and Tiger Woods to Christchurch on the same night.

Things look good for Carmen in October, and if the magnificent O'Neill can possibly be persuaded to perform a season here, then Southern Opera will have the hottest ticket in town.

DISTRIBUTION OF HUIA BOOKS

Huia Publishers and Random House are delighted to announce that as from 1 October 2007 the sales and distribution of Huia books within New Zealand will be undertaken by Random House.

‘We are very grateful to Reed Publishing for the work undertaken on our behalf and the enjoyable relationship we have built over the last seven years, said Huia Managing Director Robyn Bargh.
Any purchases of Huia books made, or queries about these, before 28 September should be addressed to Reed Publishing. Random House will take over sales of Huia books from 1 October.

For further information please contact:
John Girvan at Reed Publishing at 09-441-2970 or jgirvan@reed.co.nz
Brian Bargh at Huia Publishers at 04-473 9262 or brian.b@huia.co.nz

I am not a science fiction reader but even I know the name of this author!

He is one of the best-known names in science fiction is coming to Christchurch and Auckland.

KEVIN J ANDERSON!

Kevin J Anderson has sold over 20 million books in 30 languages worldwide and has won or been nominated for numerous prestigious awards, including the Nebula Award, Bram Stoker Award, the SFX Reader's Choice Award, the American Physics Society's Forum Award, and New York Times Notable Book.

Kevin is also the author of more than 90 novels including X-Files and Star Wars books and eight Dune prequels and sequels, which
he co-wrote with Brian Herbert.

Kevin’s latest work is Metal Swarm which is the sixth momentous novel in the bestselling Saga of Seven Suns series.

Kevin will be in Christchurch on
Sunday 9 September,
5pm
Scorpio Books, 79 Hereford Street, Christchurch
Please RSVP to Scorpio Books
Email: scorpbk@ihug.co.nz
Ph: 03 379 2882

Kevin will be in Auckland on
Tuesday 11 September,
6pm
Dymocks Bookseller, 246 Queen Street, Auckland
Please RSVP to Sam West, Dymocks Bookseller
Email: auckland@dymocks.co.nz
Ph: 09 379 9919

WRITERS ON MONDAYS

A reminder from the IIML to those in Wellington of the next event:

20 August: Degrees of clarity - Geoff Cochrane

Geoff Cochrane has released two novels and five books of poetry with Victoria University Press since 1992, the latest of which is titled 84-484 (his grandparents’ phone number in the 50s).

Over that time he has built a following of discerning readers, but has made few public appearances. We thought it was time for an encounter with the man whose writing is ‘both stubbornly austere and wonderfully witty’, and whose conversation ‘has the range of a voracious reader and the depth of some voracious living’ (Damien Wilkins).

Poet James Brown chairs the event.

All Writers on Mondays events are open to the public and take place at City Gallery Wellington, Civic Square, at 1-2pm.
Admission is free.

For further information please see http://www.vuw.ac.nz/modernletters,

or email modernletters@vuw.ac.nz,

or call 04 463 6854.

GLADYS BEMBO'S OBSERVATIONS ON THE BOOK TRADE

Veteran commentator (she's been around longer than me even!) muses on the foibles, eccentricities & scandals of the book industry.
Gladys writes a regular column for the Bookseller & Publisher magazine, the journal of the Australasian book industries.

Do yourself a favour, get a cup of coffee and have a read of this................

THE REVENGE OF THE BLOODTHIRSTY LESBIANS

There is no mystery to solve: Ian Rankin did it, in an interview, with the word “lesbian”.

Britain’s bestselling crime writer found himself condemned as “offensive” by a leading female rival yesterday after suggesting that women authors, and gay ones in particular, are more bloodthirsty than men. The acclaimed writer of the Inspector Rebus novels said in an interview last year: “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.”

Speaking to an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Val McDermid quoted the remark almost word for word, attributing it to “a very prominent Scottish male writer”. She then dismissed it as “arrant rubbish”.

The author, who is a lesbian, added: “I find that statement so offensive, I can’t even begin to start — apart from the fact that a lot of what is being written by the very talented young Scottish male writers is not shying away from depicting violence very directly. But there are certain kinds of books in which the only way in which you can be honest is to write about violence in a very direct way, to say, ‘This is what it is’.

“It’s not something that is amusing, it’s not something that is a cheap thrill, it’s not something that is a groovy pornography to get off on. It hurts, it damages the lives of everyone it touches.”
McDermid is the author of The Wire in the Blood, which has been adapted for television. She has received a clutch of awards for her books. A miner’s daughter from Fife who was admitted to Oxford University when she was 16, she was a crime reporter for many years before turning to fiction.

She worked in tough, allegedly sexist newsrooms in Manchester and Glasgow and believes that the world of crime fiction is no better.
“I’ll tell you what pisses me off more than almost anything: when people say, ‘As a woman, how do you feel about writing on violence?’ Have you ever heard a male crime writer being asked, ‘As a man, how do you feel about writing about violence?’

To read the rest of the story from The Times use this link.

TREMBLING, SHE SAT DOWN AT HER COMPUTER

Great headline from the Sydney Morning Herald, the story follows:

Chick lit's older sister - romance - will never win critical respect, but its authors know all about happy endings, writes Larissa Dubecki.
ANNE GRACIE had a serious case of cold feet. The fledgling romance writer had been invited to a lunch in Melbourne with half a dozen writers already established in the genre. With little background to go on but the stereotypical "type", she expected her peers to be fluffy, Barbara Cartland clones wearing too much make-up and carrying small dogs. And pink. There would be a lot of pink.
"I turned up and found some very forthright, feminist, intelligent women who included a marine biologist, a statistics lecturer, a librarian and a cancer research scientist," says Gracie, a former teacher, now a published author and president of the Romance Writers of Australia.

"People have such a barrier about romance - I know, I had one - but once you get through it you discover what a great area it is. I'm never going back to my dreary old Great Australian Novel. Romance is escapist, it's uplifting, it's a really positive and fun genre."
Romance isn't dead. Quite the opposite; its vital signs show it's in rude health. It is the biggest genre in publishing; in the US it accounts for 53 per cent of paperback fiction sales and one in four of all book sales. Romance titles now occupy five of the top 10 on the New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list.

Australian statistics aren't readily available, but consider this: more than one in five paperbacks sold in Australia are published by Harlequin, the owner of Mills & Boon, which pumps out an incredible 48 titles a month.

To the 650-strong Romance Writers of Australia, who are gathering in Sydney this weekend for their annual conference, this is old news. They are only too aware of their status as the tip of a vast subterranean clique that is all but ignored by mainstream critics and local publishers, despite their ranks including several international superstars.

"It's a deep human need we have to relax over a story that has a positive ending," says Bronwyn Clarke, a PhD student at the University of New England who was last month awarded the Romance Writers of America's Golden Heart for best romantic suspense for her manuscript, Falling Into Darkness.

It's also an unwitting articulation of why, despite its ubiquity, romance fiction is not likely to get a mention in Australian Book Review. Because the genre's parameters demand the development of a relationship and an optimistic ending, certain things are a given when picking up a romance novel. It will involve lust, and awkwardness in the presence of the lust object. It will involve trembling, breathlessness, and varying degrees of sexual activity, from a single kiss to sex infused with techniques plucked from The Karma Sutra. There will be heroines with names such as Damask, Serena and Hope, and heroes called Dane, Sebastian and Hunter.

To writers like Clarke, however, that provides its own challenges: "I sometimes look at literary fiction and think, that's a good cop-out — they can leave everything hanging, or simply kill off a character," she says. "We have to develop believable characters, emotionally believable scenarios, and tie it all up nicely at the end."
She also points out that, beyond the prerequisite story arc, it's literary anarchy, albeit with a good snog along the way.
One need only visit Melbourne's specialist romance bookshop, Rendezvous, to witness first-hand the expansion of the rubric of romance. Its ever-widening roster of sub-genres spans everything from historical, inspirational and sweet (in which there is typically no action below the shoulders), to erotic (in which there is plenty), to suspense, gothic, sexy (millionaires and Arabian princes), paranormal (vampires and werewolves) and time travel.
"Because romance is popular fiction it reflects changes in society as much as any form of entertainment," Clarke says.

While titles such as The Rancher and the Amnesiac Bride might do nothing for the genre's credibility, rejecting romance fiction as a whole over only one or two samples is as short-sighted as rejecting ice-cream because of a dislike for chocolate ripple, its adherents argue.
Then there are its feminist credentials - "written by professional women for professional women", says Gracie. "You won't find a heroine these days who's an innocent girl who wants to get married and be a housewife."

The problem for Australian writers of romantic fiction is that it is largely ignored by Australian publishers, save for the odd outbreak of its younger sibling, chick lit. The global centres for romance publishing are New York, London and Toronto.
Yet Australians are among the romantic fiction elite, who, rare for writers of fiction, can actually make a good living from their work. Take Marion Lennox, the former University of Ballarat statistics lecturer who has sold more than 15 million books, or Stephanie Laurens, a former cancer research scientist whose historical novels have topped the New York Times bestseller list more than a dozen times.

Gracie, whose 11 historical titles have been translated for markets as diverse as Norway, Russia, Japan, Korea, the Czech Republic and Portugal, says, "My writing supports me. I'm not rich, but I'm independent."

The Harlequin managing director, Michelle Laforest, says she expects the romance market to continue broadening its appeal. "One thing that's happening at the moment is
that there's a much more contemporary slant, with second marriages, working mothers and the like."

Nor is the evolution confined to the subject matter. While the typical reader is aged 42 and upwards, at Australian Fashion Week in May the Fleur Wood runway show featured a tie-in with Harlequin, resulting in backstage shots of the models with their heads bent over the latest Mills & Boon titles.
"It was very gratifying seeing young people at the fashion show get into the books," says Laforest of the move to shift the public perception of romance readers away from the florid excesses of Dame Barbara to the skinny insouciance of the 18-year-old fashionista.
But the reality of the romance market, Gracie laughs, is far more normal than those two extremes would suggest.
"I might be the only romance writer who actually owns a feather boa, but that's because I used to be a teacher and I used it as a prop in school plays," she says. "Now I sit down to work in my tracky dacks.
"That's one of the fabulous things about being a romance writer - you don't have to get dressed up to go to work."

For more about the quite amazing Harlequin story use this link.

STEPHEN KING "DEFACES" BOOKS IN AUSTRALIA

Nice story from yesterday's Age:

Bookstore manager Bev Ellis would have baked best-selling American author Stephen King a cake had she known he was in town.
Instead, the multi-millionaire was accused of defacing a handful of books when he stopped off at a shop in the desert town of Alice Springs to sign a few copies of his latest offering.

"I was in my office when he came in and started signing books and one of our customers thought he was writing in them," said Dymocks manager Bev Ellis.
Mr King had left the store by the time she came out but when Ms Ellis was told about the man's strange behaviour she assumed it was the writer himself.
"Their books are like children to them and they look to see how they are going.
"Most of the time they came up and ask us if they can sign a few and they thank us for having the book on the shelves."
But Ms Ellis didn't pass the chance to meet the author in person.
"I saw him go to Woolworths and he was in the fruit and vege section. I was very polite and I asked him how long he had been in town ...
"He just smiled, I don't think he wanted people to know he was here but I told him that if I knew he was coming I would have baked him a cake."

Ms Ellis said she assumed the author was on a holiday and had come into the shop to check to see that Lisey's Story, his most recent book, had been stocked.
Asked if it was the first time an author had simply come in a started signing, Ms Ellis replied: "They don't normally just open the books and go for it."
But she said the high-profile writer was polite and well spoken.
"He introduced me to his friends and we had a talk and then I said 'Well I'll leave you to the tomatoes."

The six copies of the book signed by Mr King will be donated to various charities concerned with literature.

New Publisher Of OJ Simpson Book Offers Details

The following story in this morning from mediabistro.com

Eric Kampmann, president and owner of Beaufort Books, the imprint that will be publishing the once thwarted OJ Simpson book, If I Did It on October 3 gave us exclusive new details about the book: Fred and Kim Goldman have already written their commentary.
The book will also include two yet-to-be announced "important chapters written by "non family member" contributors. A disgruntled cop from the case? A cable news talking head looking for some well timed publicity?

There are plenty of suspects but for now Kampmann is staying mum. He and his imprint, which by his own admission, has been "largely dormant" since the nineties, is now in the middle of a media maelstrom. "I guess my anonymity is gone," he says.

After sparring with Denise Brown on the Today show on Wednesday (he swears he had "a pleasant conversation" with her after the on air dust up), Kampmann reports — only half jokingly — that "all the people who have hated me in the last eighteen years have come out of the woodwork. I'm enjoying their hate filled rants. I'm glad they're well."
He better get used to it because Denise Brown isn't going away and is trying to mobile a public campaign against the book on her blog says Kampmann: "I'll never be able to change Denise's mind about the book. I understand her point of view but sympathize with the Goldmans."

RELATED:
· BREAKING: Beaufort Lands The OJ Book
· Beaufort Snaps Up If I Did It
· Lunch At Michael's: Denise Brown, A Trio Of Trumps & Star Jones (FBNY)
— Diane Clehane

LONELY PLANET ALLOWS CONSUMERS TO

MAKE UP OWN BOOKS

This story, with huge implications for booksellers it seems to Bookman Beattie, from Publishers Weekly overnight :

Lonely Planet is testing a program in which consumers can pick chapters from its guidebooks to download on any device that accepts PDF files and mix chapters from different books to create the guidebook they want. “One of the most common requests is for us is to find ways to use our content in more flexible ways,” said Tom Hall, product manager of Pick & Mix.

LP is testing the program on its website using its Latin American guidebooks and providing some free chapters and charging nominal fees ranging from $2-$5 per chapter to download depending on the length of the chapter. LP did a soft launch in June, and since going live in July, Hall said there have been 13,000 downloads. Is the company worried Pick & Mix will eat into book sales?

“Obviously, there was a lot of conversation about that before we launched,” said Hall. “We believe it is complementary rather than a substitute.” For a company that works hard at creating and maintaining brand loyalty, Hall said, “it’s about getting travelers what they want, when they want it and how they want it.” LP envisioned three types of users for Pick & Mix: those travelers who only need one part of a book, such as the person with a one-night layover in a foreign city while en route to their final destination; someone on a multi-destination trip; and travelers whose plans change in midtrip.

The chapters available for download are exactly the same as in the book and the cost structure is such that if a consumer downloaded all the chapters of the book it costs the same as buying the book.

“We can’t predict where it is going to go, so we figured we’d start out simple and see where it goes,” said Hall. The product manager has some personal experience with this kind of Pick & Mix product: It is the kind of thing he could have used when he went on an around-the-world trip in 2001, a couple of years before he started working for LP.

CALL FOR BOYCOTT OF OJ TITLE

I'm not surprised at the outrage.......

.

NEWLY RELEASED

A clutch of reviews from the New York Times today............

including the latest from the late, and great, Michael Dibdin, which I mentioned on my blog earlier in the year. and which I have just received so will read and review in next couple of weeks.

HAMLET.DOC? LITERATURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

With the Royal Shakespeare Company performing King Lear in NZ at present this pieice from the Chronicle of Higher Education is timely........

We may never know if Shakespeare had a sister, but we can be certain he didn't have a hard drive. What if he had? Details of his writing process and his life currently a mystery might be pitilessly exposed.

As scholars will tell you, there are no manuscripts of the plays surviving in the Bard's own hand. The text of King Lear, for example, comes to us from two published quartos and the First Folio (1623), with hundreds of lines and thousands of words differing between them.

In the so-called "bad quarto" of Hamlet, a certain soliloquy begins: "To be or not to be. Aye, there's the point, /To Die, to sleep, is that all, aye all." The speech is also placed differently, in Act II, Scene 2, rather than its accustomed place in Act III, Scene 1.

Today it is typically thought that the bad quarto is a memorial reconstruction of the play by an actor or spectator, but we can't be sure. In any case, the texts are rife with ambiguities. Which versions are right? What was closest to Shakespeare's own original (or final) intentions?If Shakespeare had had a hard drive, if the plays had been written with a word processor on a computer that had somehow survived, we still might not know anything definitive about Shakespeare's original or final intentions — these are human, not technological, questions — but we might be able to know some rather different things.

We might be able to know, for example, the precise date on which he began composing Hamlet indeed the precise minute and hour, time-stamped to the second. We would be able to know how long he had spent working on it, or at least how long the file containing the play had remained open on his desktop.

We would very likely have access to multiple versions and states of the file, and if Shakespeare had "track changes" turned on while he wrote, we would be able to follow the composition of a soliloquy keystroke by keystroke, each revision also date- and time-stamped to the second.

We might discover the play had originally been called GreatDane.doc instead of Hamlet.doc. We might also be able to know what else he had been working on that same day, or what Internet content he had browsed the night before (since we'll assume Shakespeare had Web access too). While he was online, he might have updated his blog or tagged some images in his Flickr account, or perhaps edited a Wikipedia entry or two.

He might even have spent some time interacting with others by performing with an avatar in Second Life, an online place where all the world is truly a shared virtual stage.

For the full story use this link........

GET ON THE WAKA - Best recent Maori fiction

Edited with an introduction by Witi Ihimaera

Reed Publishing $35

It seems to me to be somewhat ironic that in the year that Reed Publishing has been sold they are enjoying a royal year of enormously impressive New Zealand publishing. The goodies just seem to keep coming.

My congratulations to Peter Dowling, Sam Hill and the publishing team for this list. I guess at this stage as the company prepares to be merged into Penguin Books they must wonder what the future holds for them?

This is the third in a series of anthologies all of which have been edited by Witi Ihimaera and what a fine collection these titles make. The earlier titles were Into the World of Light (1982) and Te Ao Marama (1992) which I am delighted to have on my bookshelves.

In this latest volume Ihimaera has showcased 17 of NZ's most established Maori writers including Alan Duff, Keri Hume, Phil Kanawa, Briar Grace-Smith, Patricia Grace, Kingi McKinnon, and Paula Morris.

Also included is a thoughtful introduction from Ihimaera in which he takes stock of the present place that Maori writing holds in New Zealand, and useful potted biographies of the authors.

THE OLIVE ROUTE

Carol Drinkwater Phoenix $30

This is the fourth book in a series from this author who really has a theme going. Her three previous titles were:

The Olive Farm

The Olive Season

The Olive Harvest

They are of course her memoirs and have sold hugely around the world.

Like the Silk Road and the Spice Route, the Olive Route – stretching 2,200 miles from Gibraltar to northern Syria – encompasses not just a journey, but an epic adventure involving the age-old transportation of a precious commodity.

The author travelled along this beautiful and sometimes dangerous route, uncovering ancient stories, meeting striking and courageous people and tracing its venerable olive culture. Tracking the Cretans, Phoenicians, Greeks and the Romans, amongst others, she eventually finds her way back to her olive farm in the sun-baked hills of southern France.
The Olive Route recounts a thrilling, heroic, sensual and entertaining journey and nicely concludes the much loved Olive series.

Carol Drinkwater's current project is working with UNESCO to help found an Olive Heritage Trail around the Mediterranean. Their lofty aim is to create peace within the region and honour the heritage of thiss acred tree. Bookman Beattie wishes UNESCO and Carol every sucess, what a great aim ,if anything can bring peace to that region then it is probably the olive.

You can read more about the author and her books on her attractive website.

As an aside I should mention that the author is probably best known for her role as Helen Herriot in the BBC TV series All Creatures Great & Small. but she has had a long & distinguished career as both actor & writer and she is high on my list of people with whom I would like to have dinner!

MAEVE BINCHY , HUMAN PHENOMENON

Believe it ot not but it is 25 years since this delightful Irish writer had her first novel published. And what a novel it was, Light A Penny Candle. It went on to sell millions of copies and assured her of a place in the hearts of book readers around the world.

Since then there have been another dozen or so novels and a couple of short story collections and without exceeption they have all been bestsellers. No wonder; warmth & humour and compassion and fun and mischief and optimism, shine out of them and you always feel good when you finish them. Thank you Maeve.

And now there is another to enjoy now out in paperback, Whitethorn Woods, 450 pages of vintage Binchy. Perfect for taking on the plane or for just curling up with in front of the fire.

THE ISLAND OF THE LOST Joan Druett

Allen & Unwin $33.00 Publication 31 August.

As I have said before I favour subtitles for works of non-fiction as they often offer the browser an insight into the subject of the book which isn't otherwise apparent.

This title is an example and it has one of the longer subtitles I have come across:

The Island of the Lost:

A Harrowing True Story of Shipwreck, Death and Survival on a Godforsaken Island at the Edge of the World

See what I mean?!

I guess Auckland Island which lies more than 450 kilometres to the south of New Zealand, and where icy winds howl at ferocious speeds, can fairly be called a godforsaken place?

Certainly it must have semed that way to the crews of two ships that were wrecked there in 1864 on opposite sides of the island.

Using the men's journals, nautical records and newspapers of the time, New Zealand nautical issues author Joan Druett, tells of the very different expereinces of the two groups and their fight for survival. It is an amazing tale and says much about leadership, endurance and the fine line between order and chaos.

Even though she has nearly 20 books to her credit I had not heard of the author before and was interested to read that she literally fell into maritime history when she stumbled into the 140-year-old grave of a whaling wife on the island of Raratonga in 1984.

Her instant fascination in seafarers led to a Fulbright Award which was taken up in 1986 with a four-month research stint at the great maritime museums of New England and Hawaii, and was followed by three spells of delving in the archives of the Mitchell and Dixson Libraries in Sydney.

Eight books about seafaring women resulted.

In 1993, Joan began a two-year residency in New York, where she was intimately involved with an award-winning museum exhibit on seafaring women.

Returning to New Zealand, Joan became intensely interested in the maritime history of New Zealand and the wider Pacific. Island of the Lost is one result.

The first two titles in Joan’s Wiki Coffin adventure series, A Watery Grave and Shark Island, were released in New Zealand in paperback in July. She lives in Wellington with her husband Ron, a maritime artist.

Druett has won a number of book awards including a New York Public Library Book to Remember Citation and the John Lyman Award for Best Book of American Maritime History.

See her fine homepage for more.

You are invited to be SHIPWRECKED WITH JOAN DRUETT -

at 7.00pm on Tuesday 4 September.
Edmiston Gallery
Maritime History Museum
Cnr Quay and Hobson Streets, Auckland.
$5 per person
RSVP 373 0800 or bookings@nzmaritime.org

BRIEF TAKES ON RECENT NEW & NOTABLE TITLES

THE BLUE Mary McCallum

Penguin Books $28

This is former broadcaster Mary McCallum’s first novel and what a great debut.
Set on Arapawa Island in Tory Channel in 1938 it is the story of the people who live there in the small whaling community. Well researched and stylishly written. I was pleased to read that McCallum is now working on her second novel.


Lynley Dodd’s Slinki Malinki adventures now in miniature

Slinki Malinki is Lynley Dodd’s mischievous cat that has young fans around the world.
Now three of the most popular adventures have been published in new pocket sized hardback editions. At NZ$12 these will be popular.

MISS ME A LOT OF Louise Wareham Leonard

Victoria University Press $30

The author grew up in Wellington, Sydney and New York, was educated at Columbia College in New York and Victoria University of Wellington. This is her second novel, and like the first Since You Ask, is a well written rather bleak literary tale.
Holly is 21, a student, with a powerful & controlling businessman father and a socially anxious New Zealand mother.. The story is set in the U.S. initially at the lake where the family have their summer holidays and has much to do with their neighbours and their relationships with them,. The story then moves to New York.

LESSONS TO LEARN Natasha Judd

Cape Catley $28

Natasha Judd won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award in 2003 and that was the starting point for this novel. It tells the story of Charlotte who, haunted by tragedy, wants to flee New Zealand and so moves to Korea to teach English. A delightful story, or as a librarian friend of mine put it so well- Lessons to Learn is funny, tender and evocative.

See the author's website.

MAORI – A VISITORS GUIDE Paora Walker Reed Publishing $20

The author says in his introduction that the inspiration for this book came from the publisher who felt that visitors to Aotearoa/New Zealand would be exposed to things Maori, and that it would be good for all concerned if those visitors could learn a little prior to their exposure – which is where I have entered the picture.
Then he quotes his friend Nick Theobald – We are all tourists when it comes to the world of the Maori.
So this book is not only for overseas visitors, your genuine tourists, it is for all of us. Tatou.

This is a wonderful little book, (96 pages), well illustrated with colour pics by James Heremaia, that deals with all aspects of Maori life from myth and religion and including language, the Treaty of Waitangi, the marae, the hangi and Maori arts.
There should be one in every home.

HARPOON – INTO THE HEART OF WHALING
Andrew Darby Allen & Unwin $35

This is a timely book from a man who holds a masters degree in Antarctic politics. It reveals the deception and manipulation at the highest levels of international politics that have allowed countries such as Japan to continue whaling against the wishes of the world. How can it be that 20 years after whaling was banned that whales continue to be harpooned. Highly readable, deserves a wide audience. Let’s hope it is translated into Japanese, and Norwegian!

THINK BEFORE YOU SWALLOW Noel O’Hare Penguin $30

We are bombarded with dubious health information and made to feel anxious by scare stories in the media. Now experienced health journalist Noel O’Hare casts his skeptical eye over many of the ‘facts’ we’ve been encouraged to believe – from the dangers of cholesterol to the value of supplementary vitamins. Informative and entertaining.

See http://www.noelohare.com/

comma dot dogma Tom Kreisler Umbrella Design NZ$60 AU$65

This remarkable art book was published in March this year to coincide with the Tom Kreisler exhibition at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery but it has only just come to my notice so I hasten to bring it to the attention of others.

It displays wonderfully the creativity of an inspiring artist and includes a chronology of his life illustrated with b&w pics, along with words from John Maynard, Cheryll Sotheran, John Hurrell, Wystan Curnow, Deborah Cain, and Aaron Kreisler.

Pic shows opening of exhibition. A tour of the exhibition is being planned and details will be available shortly.

One of the major aspects of this project was setting up a searchable website of the artists work -http://www.tomkreisler.com/ where visitors can order the book (including booksellers who will receive trade discount). Pic below from the website home page.

The publisher, Jessica Gommers, of Umbrella Design, can be reached at P.O.Box 6701, Marion Square, Wellington.

HELLBENT FOR THE POLE Geoffrey Lee Martin
Random House $45

With over 120 full-colour, glorious photographs all taken in Antarctica this book assures itself a ready market but then you add the author’s expertly told “insider’s” account of the ‘race to the South Pole’ and you have the makings of a best-seller.

Born in Christchurch, Geoffrey Lee Martin is a journalist who worked at the NZ Herald and the Daily Telegraph in London and now lives in semi-retirement in Sydney.

Pic at right shows Ed Hillary and author 50 years on.

Late in 1957 two parties set off from different sides of the Antarctica continent, both headed for the South Pole. One party was led by Britain’s Dr.Vivian Fuchs and the other by NZ’s Edmund Hillary.Geoffrey Lee Martin was in Antarctica covering the story for the NZ Herald & The Daily Telegraph and this is his account of the great adventure.

The book will be published on7 September to mark the 50th anniversary of the expedition.

The author has created a website for the book which is well worth viewing.

Three pics below from Hellbent For the Pole.

BEING JUBILADA

When I discovered that the Spanish term for retired people was los jubilados, I knew that we two oldies were going to enjoy our trip. Friends for nigh on 60 years, we had been talking about a trip to Spain for a couple of years. Mary - because her travels had included Spanish-speaking South America, but never Spain. Me - to add another chapter to my love affair with Spain that spanned half a century.

So begins TEA WITH MY TAPAS by Judith Doyle to be published by Renaissance Publishing on 10 September.

The author had developed a fascination with Cervantes' tale of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and so she and her companion took up Sancho's statement as their motto - "...it's a fine thing to be out looking for things to happen, crossing mountains, searching forests, climbing peaks, visiting castles, and staying in inns wherever you please....".

So off they set following their wacky footseps in La Mancha and thus begins an entertaining and delightful account of their adventures.

Doyle is an experienced travel writer and this frank and absorbing look at Spain today is a must-read for those heading to Spain on holiday. particularly if you are jubilada.

The book includes colour photos, balck & white art reproductions and several useful maps.

Remember publication 10 September.

Author pic from the Fourcorners website.

REVEALED: SYLVIA PLATH'S UNSEEN ART, DISCOVERED IN ATTIC

Paintings and drawings by Sylvia Plath, many of which have never been seen before, are to be published in October to mark the 75th anniversary of the birth of the American poet and novelist.

In the book Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual, editor Kathleen Connors reveals illustrated childhood letters that Plath wrote when she was seven, which were found in the Plath family attic in 1996.

There are also schoolbook sketches, portraits and a series of photographs and paintings from when Plath was an art student at Smith College, Massachusetts, including this self-portrait.

The works were all completed by the time Plath was 20, at which point she decided to concentrate on her writing.

Full story in the Guardian Unlimited overnight.

Sylvia Plath pic from this website.

KITE RUNNER FAVOURITE FOR SECOND YEAR RUNNING

Khaled Hosseini's bestselling story of a boy growing up in 1970s Kabul, The Kite Runner, has been voted the Reading Group Book of the Year for the second year running.
Published three years ago and lacking the marketing hype provided by the official literary awards, the book has been a slow-burning word-of-mouth success, spending two years in the New York Times bestseller list after an initial sluggish start, eventually selling over 8m copies worldwide

Link here to full story from Guardian Unlimited.

And here for a book club suggestions.

And here for eight reviews................

DUTTON'S BRENTWOOD BOOKS - my favourite California bookstore

They have a new e-zine and website, here is an excerpt.

Odds and ends

Dutton's is proud to unveil..........our new website.
Visitors to http://www.duttonsbrentwood.com/ may have recently noticed small but intriguing changes to our site. Thanks to a recent switch of internet providers, we are now able to offer many new features to our online customers, including: a new book search (with millions of titles); online ordering capability directly from our pages (no more linking to BookSense); new and improved newsletter subscriptions (you can now sign up for this and other book-related newsletters online); online book guides for many popular titles (perfect for book groups); browsable author, award and bestseller lists to help you find the perfect book; BookPage reviews of current titles; and even a database of current and classic films on DVD.

Of course, all the old favorites are up there as well: the interactive events calendar, our favorite literary links, a page of photos from recent events, and our list of staff picks. We've tried to keep the look of the site the same, but if you look carefully you'll spot the changes.

Booker longlist announced..........On Tuesday, August 7, the judges for the Man-Booker Prize announced its "longlist" of contenders.
The award, for fiction by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland, is among the most prestigious book prizes and boasts of such past winners as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, J.M. Coetzee, and Nadine Gordimer.

Last year's winner was Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss. Among this year's contenders are A.N. Wilson, Ian McEwan (again), Indra Sinha, and Edward Docx.
For the complete list, please visit http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/thisyear/longlist. For a list of past winners, we invite you to check out our new Bestsellers and Awards page.
The shortlist for the Man-Booker will be announced September 6 and the winner on October 16.

FOX NEWS - BOOKS EXCERPTS TO BE VIEW ON I-PHONE

The publishing world is linking up to the iPhone.

HarperCollins announced Wednesday that it had set up a special link, http://mobile.harpercollins.com/, that will allow browsers to view excerpts from more than a dozen new releases, including Michael C. White's "Soul Catcher" and Michael Korda's "Ike," a biography of President Eisenhower.

"Reaching consumers on mobile devices and the Internet is increasingly important for publishers," Brian Murray, president of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, said in a statement that noted the publisher has some 10,000 titles already digitized.

"Our digital warehouse gives us the unique opportunity to quickly offer access to our titles on the newest technology, and we encourage people to provide feedback about their experiences."

Several publishers have been offering content for cell phone use and the iPhone, which already allows consumers to watch videos, take pictures, listen to music and surf the Web, is an obvious outlet for an industry anxious to boost sales and keep up with the latest technology.

Other titles being excerpted on the iPhone include Faye Kellerman's "The Burnt House" and Ray Bradbury's "Now and Forever." Browsers can view up to 10 pages of a given book's first two chapters and can quickly shrink or enlarge the print size.

The Harper Web site was adapted for the iPhone by LibreDigital, a division of NewsStand, Inc. that has been working with the publisher on digitizing its books and making them available worldwide.

"The `Browse Inside' feature for the iPhone is part of the ongoing effort to advance technology and allows mobile consumers to tap into the power and convenience of online book discovery," Craig A. Miller, general manager

O.J.SIMPSON BOOK PUBLISHER NAMED

New Thai Literary Puzzler Raises Questions, and Ire

“Thaksin: Where Are You?”

by Yvan Cohen/On Asia, for The International Herald Tribune

Sunisa Lertpakawat said she wheedled and wept until Thaksin Shinawatra gave her seven hours of interviews for a seemingly inoffensive portrait of a mild-mannered political retiree.
It is Thailand’s latest political puzzler: a strange little book about the former prime minister that may or may not be what it seems.
Thaksin Shinawatra lives in London, his home since he was ousted in a coup last September, watching and perhaps waiting for his moment as the generals in power led the country through an exhausting series of watershed moments. On Sunday, in the latest of these, Thailand will vote on a new Constitution that would pave the way for an election later this year.

Full story from the New York Times

STILL VITAL, ON THE ROAD TURNS 50

On the Road,” celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, still has a vibrant life on college English course syllabuses and high school summer reading lists, and in young travelers’ backpacks. This story overnight from the New York Times. Pic shows Kerouac, right, with friend & road companion, Neal Cassady in 1952.

CRIME FICTION WRITERS ABOUND

Earlier today I wrote about three top crime fiction writers coming our way over the next few weeks.

Now I realise there is a fourth!

Karin Slaughter, author of the successful Grant County series will be here promoting her latest title, Skin Privilege, for Random House on 6-7 September.

More information from Rebecca Simpson - 09 444 7197

Apologies Karin.
Author pic by Jerry Bauer.

See Karin's website here.

A YEAR IN MY KITCHEN by Skye Gyngell

Quadrille (Southern Publishers Group) NZ $65

"The more I read Skye Gyngell’s book A Year in My Kitchen, the more I fall in love with her food. It is easy to see why it won the 2007 Cookery Book of the Year award given by the British Guild of Food Writers.
This book, with its beautiful illustrations, is not about fine dining. Each chapter follows the seasons, providing recipes with a comforting familiarity and writing that’s full of warmth, generosity and opinion. At the core of Gyngell’s food is an abundance of spirit and the desire to share that with others.

It is reassuring, too, that along with her appreciation and understanding of great produce, she truly loves eating."

The above is how Martin Bosley begins his enthusiastic review on his beautifully designed double page spread in the NZ Listener August 18-24 which along with his name, (his eponymous Wellington restaurant has just been named by Cuisine as NZ's finest), and his comments about A Year in My Kitchen had me positively drooling and wanting to own the book, instantly!

Well today my want has been satisfied and I have just lost two hours, (which were mean to to have been used for reading a batch of crime fiction), reading this stunning volume and I have to tell you it is a must for any serious home chef/foodie.

Gorgeous, practical, built around seasonality I want to cook everything in it but I think I'll start with Slow-cooked pork belly with cinammon, cloves, ginger and star anise. This will be a first for me, I always order pork belly when I find it on a restaurant menu but I have never cooked it before.

We learn from Martin Bosley's Listener story that Skye Gyngell is a London-based 43 year old Australian and is chef at the very hot Petersham Nurseries Cafe where the waitresses wear gumboots beacuse of the dirt floors.

And use this link to read a most interesting piece about her in The Times last October.What an amazing life she has lead.

And here is a piece from The Observer describing Petersham Nurseries and their development.

And here is how The Australian sees a favourite daughter whose pic by Vanessa Hunter is taken from that newspaper.

I'm picking A YEAR IN MY KITCHEN, which has been something of a sleeper up until now, will prove very very popular in the run up to Christmas. Already I am wondering how I ever lived with out it!

Half of Web time spent viewing content: study

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Content online is king.

Internet users spend nearly half their time online viewing news or entertainment content, surpassing activities such as sending e-mails, shopping or searching for information, according to a study released by the Online Publishers Association on Monday.

The four-year study, conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings, tracked a 37 percent increase in amount of time spent viewing content such as online videos or news, surpassing a 35 percent rise in using search engines like Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile , Research).

The abundance of content and faster online speeds accounted for the spike, the study said. A proliferation of social networks such as News Corps'(NWSa.N: Quote, Profile , Research) MySpace and Facebook have helped boost content viewing as well.

Overall, viewing content accounts for 47 percent of time spent online in 2007, up from 34 percent in 2003. Web search accounted for 5 percent of time spent online in 2007 from 3 percent in 2003.

Time spent on commerce sites such as Amazon.com (AMZN.O: Quote, Profile , Research) fell 5 percent and accounted for 15 percent of time spent in 2007.
Time spent on communications such as e-mail fell 28 percent to 33 percent of time spent online in 2007, down from 46 percent in 2003.

The popularity of instant messaging such as AOL Instant Messenger, which lets users send quick messages rather than e-mails, accounted for the drop in the amount of time spent corresponding, the study said.

Snowbooks provides 'showcase' for authors

This story from The Bookseller today.

Snowbooks is calling on new and unpublished writers to submit work to its blog as a showcase to agents and publishers.

The writers' 'Snowcase' was launched on 11th August and Snowbooks has already blogged three submissions.Submissions can be up to 500 words of a book or short story and must be accompanied by the author's name and a valid email address.

Emma Barnes, Snowbooks m.d., said: "I was a little nervous, because I was expecting a lot of dross. But so far I've been very pleased with the stories. We get about 50 print manuscripts a week. Of them, about ten percent are terrible, a few really sing and the rest are perfectly publishable.

As a small publisher, we can't publish them all, but I thought this was a great way to use our blog to support writers and let others see their work." Barnes said the Snowcase will last "forever or until I get sick of it."

Log on to http://www.snowbooks.com/weblog%20for more information.

BORDERS LOOKING TO PUBLISH MEMBER OF THEIR STAFF

Read about this idea via this link...........interesting idea, they have 30,000 staff so chances are there will be a writer among them.

CRIME FICTION FANS IN FOR A TREAT

Three big name crime fiction/thriller writers are visiting New Zealand in coming weeks.

Jeffery Deaver will be here to promote his latest title, The Sleeping Doll, while Kathy Reichs (right) is touring in support of her new title, Bones to Ashes. And from the UK comes David Hewson promoting his 10th novel, The Promised Land.

They are all big author names and should attract a lot of attention.

I haven't read The Sleeping Doll yet, it is in the pile for early attention though, but the cover blurb describes it as a dark & multi-layered psychological thriller about a viscious killer's escape from a high security Cailfornia prison & the deadly task he embarks on once he's free. Typical Deaver stuff.

He has more than 20 novels published, and two collections of short stories. He has won or been shortlisted for many crime fiction awards over the years, and his books always appear on best-seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic.

Kathy Reichs is in real life a world-class forensic anthropologist and the protagonist in this the 10th in the series, Dr.Temperance Brennan, is also a forensic anthropologist working in Montreal. She has a reputation for her uncanny ability to read clues left behind in victim's bones.

I started reading Bones to Ashes last night in bed and got to page 110 before falling asleep. As soon as I finish writing this I'm getting back to it as it is totally compelling and I'm hooked.

People often compare Reichs with Patricia Cornwell but for my money she is street's ahead of Cornwell.

Here are the deatils of her events:

Monday, 17 September (Christchurch)
Event: The Press Literary Liaison
Time: 7pm
Venue: Christchurch Art Gallery, Worcester Boulevard & Montreal Street cnr
Bookings: The Press, 03 379 0940

Tuesday, 18 September (Wellington)
Event: Good Bones NZ Book Council
Time: 7pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre One, Rutherford House, Bunny Street, Thorndon
Bookings: NZ Book Council, (04) 499 1569

Wednesday, 19 September (Auckland)
Event: New Zealand Herald/Dymocks Literary Lunch
Time: 12pm - 2pm

Venue: Hyatt Hotel, Cnr Waterloo Quadrant & Princes Street

Bookings: Dymocks, 09 5208805 or newmarket@dymocks.co.nz

Event: NORTH SHORE LIBRARIES FOUNDATION/WHITCOULLS
Time: 7pm
Venue: Rosmini College, 36 Dominion St, Takapuna
Bookings: Ticketek, 09 307 5000 or http://www.ticketek.com/

David Hewson I know because of his series of five Rome-based crime fiction novels featuring Nic Costa. This new title, The Promised Land, is a stand-alone title and is also in my pile for early reading. He has spoken at many Festivals and before becoming a fulltime author was an arts journalist with The Times & The Independent.


Hewson is speaking at a NZ Book Council event in Auckland:

Tuesday 4 September
Location:
Hobson Room, Jubilee Conference Centre, 545 Parnell Road, Parnell , Auckland.
Tue 4 Sep, 2007 6:30pm - 7:30pm
Book Council members$10.50

Students/unwaged$13.00Non-members$16.00

All three authors have websites - Jeffery Deaver

and Kathy Reichs and David Hewson

ANOTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

Why is it that, while the world fell in love with Indian novelists, Pakistani novelists failed to achieve the same high profile? And is the situation changing? In the second of our series on the legacy of Indian and Pakistani independence, Kamila Shamsie looks at the history of the English-language novel in Pakistan in the seond of a series of articles this week from the Guardian.

Pic shows Mohsin Hamid: Booker longlisted novelist and at the forefront of the new wave of Pakistani writing. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

The story of the Pakistani novel in English starts with tragedy and unrealised potential. In 1948, within a year of partition, 36-year-old Mumtaz Shahnawaz was killed in a plane crash, leaving behind the first draft of her partition novel, A Heart Divided. Her family published it in the 1950s, but the question of what the novel might have been had she worked on it further remains unanswered.

Use this link to the Guardian to read the full story.

Our reverence for books is ludicrous
By Harry Mount

Do you ever start talking to an incredibly boring person at a party and say to yourself, after five minutes: "Well, he's incredibly boring, but I'll talk to him for another 30 hours. He's bound to get better." Or, when you've finished with a newspaper you've enjoyed, do you ever put it on a shelf on prominent display so that you can admire it from a distance and never read it again?

No? Well, why do so many people do the same with books? I've lost count of the number of people I've met on holiday who are 100 pages into a book, still hoping it'll warm up.

Some of these same people are then amazed when they see me dog-earing a book, writing in it or, with a really big one, tearing it up into chunks to read on the beach. They're bored to death by their own reading, but they still think all books should be treated as precious relics.
Use this link to read the full story from The Telegraph.

HOW ABOUT THIS THEN?

Random House US selling Mr.Pip from their website and it comes with a free book too!!

Use this link to get your copy! Or at least to check out the offer.

By the way I tried to buy a copy as did two visitors to this site and we found out that you have to be resident in the U.S.

THE FOLLOWING STORY FROM THE BOOKSELLER HAS NZ BOOKSELLERS WORRIED

Penguin has relaunched its website after a year of qualitative and quantitative research. The publisher worked with readers, watching how they used the site, and quizzing them on what they expected from it.

"Some of it was quite soul-destroying stuff," said online marketing director AnnaRafferty. "We've stopped benchmarking ourselves against other publisher websites. What is really interesting for us is putting ourselves against other online destinations."
The Penguin site, at http://www.penguin.co.uk/, now features a completely new look, a new navigation and search system, and a "look inside" widget allowing readers to see short extracts from certain titles. "Our research told us that readers expect to be able to read a sample of a title," said Rafferty.Podcasts and author features on offer have been made much more prominent, as has the Penguin blog, and a new section looking at which Penguin titles celebrities are reading—"Penguin Favourites"—has been added. "We have been collecting [mentions of Penguin titles] from the media," said Rafferty. "We thought people would be interested—they are going to want to know what Gordon Brown's favourite book is."

The Penguin website gets between 250,000 and 300,000 unique visitors per month with over two million visitors last year. Online sales volumes and revenue were up 46% and 22% respectively in the first half of 2007. Rafferty is interested in introducing more special editions of titles for the website, but added that the site would never discount titles by more than 25%. "This will never be a price point website," she said. "We will discount for certain titles when it is appropriate but this will never be by more than 25%."

The Penguin blog gets about 5000 visits per week, while Penguin's e-newsletter goes out to over 80,000 opt-in subscribers."We are now talking to readers and saying ‘this is what we've done, now what next?'" she said. "The key thing is that this is the birth of the site; now we will grow and develop it."

Seven indie booksellers have already written to Bookman Beattie concerned that this Penguin UK direct selling initiative might be copied by Penguin NZ.

While another put it this way:

I Love this, a publisher who avows that they will never discount titles sold to the public by more than 25%!!
Fantastic.

They say not a price point website..?

Why would booksellers want to list Penguin titles on their own sites in competition to the publisher?

Penguin use a retailers profit margin to beef up their wholesale price and hopefully make more gross profit in the process.
Just as bookshop buyers at present have to guage a book offered as being an option for the chains to discount and factor that into their ordering, they will now have to ask the question as to whether the publisher will discount the retail price of the title offered on their own website.
Amazon will never open a retail store to compete with booksellers as it is another set of business skills.yet retailers and publishers see the need to compete with Amazon with their own 'token' websites.
A publisher such as Penguin is better able to compete with 'exclusive' books on their own website, and measure the success of sales.

Retail booksellers will rarely have 'exclusive' books to sell but feel they must compete with special discount offers to satisfy the expectations of consumers.
It is a dangerous trend to increase expectations of web consumers that they will always get it cheaper on the web rather than in a book store.

THE AGE BOOK AWARDS

Fifteen books have been shortlisted for Melbourne's Age Book of the Year Awards.

Unusually for book awards the judges comment on the shortlisted titles when the list is announced.

Here are their comments.

Pic. of authors Deborah Robertson (left) and Alexis Wright from The Age.

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS

Mohsin Hamid vanquished literary giants to win his place on the Booker prize longlist. He tells Decca Aitkenhead how his novel was shaped by 9/11 and Martin Luther King
'As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say' ... Mohsin Hamid.

Author pic by Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian.

Had September 11 2001 been just another ordinary day, Mohsin Hamid's second novel would have turned out very differently. Hamid began working on it in 2000, as a parable about a young Pakistani man uneasy with corporate America. But when his literary agent read the first draft, he found the protagonist unconvincing. Why on earth would a secular, westernised, successful Muslim feel any hostility towards the US?

The first paragraph of an interesting Man Booker Prize background story from the Weekend Guardian.

Use this link to read the full story.

VOICES OF THE NATIONS

Sixty years ago this week, India and Pakistan celebrated their independence from Britain. In the first of our week-long series of features on the two countries, Siddhartha Deb considers the legacy of empire in Indian literature.

Use this link to read his story in the Guardian.

Associated Press pic.

TOWER BOOKS COMES BACK SWINGING ON CRIKEY

This A&R business just will not go away........................
Here is the latest from Sydney.

WHEN SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS CANT GET PUBLISHED AT HOME

Francesca Simon’s anarchic Horrid Henry is a hit everywhere but America. She is one of many authors snubbed in their native countries, Philip Oltermann says writing in the Times Online.

Douglas Kennedy (pic above) is another, sells in huge numbers in the UK and Commonwealth but doesn't make the grade in the U.S. His plight was recently featured in Time magazine.

And there are plenty of others in the same boat as this story from The Times shows.

It's Back: Infamous O.J. Book Has New Publisher

This from Publishers Weekly, 8/13/2007 6:33:00 AM

Los Angeles-based agent Sharlene Martin has found a publisher for a repackaged version of O.J. Simpson's infamous If I Did It, a spokesman for the agent told PW exclusively.

Martin has not yet revealed the name of the publisher, which she said is based in New York, but promises that Simpson's manuscript will remain intact, supplemented with "key commentary."

A week ago PW broke the story that Martin was shopping the manuscript on behalf of the family of Ron Goldman, which was awarded rights to the book last month in a Miami bankruptcy court. Speaking of the material that will be added to the new version, Martin told PW last week, "But If I Did It was OJ Simpson's narrative, this will be the Goldman's narrative."

The publisher, Martin and the Goldman family will all contribute a portion of their proceeds from the sale to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice, the spokesman said.

The book was originally commissioned by Judith Regan at ReganBooks, whose parent company NewsCorp killed the project and a short time later fired Regan.

Pic of Simpson from Wikipedia website.