Beattie's Book Blog - unofficial homepage of the New Zealand book community

Waitangi Day morning with Kim Hill and Paul Diamond: 6 February 2012

2012-02-03T20:33:00.002+13:00

On Waitangi Day from 8am to midday, Kim Hill and PaulDiamond (Curator, Maori, at the Turnbull Library) will host local guests atPuke Ariki in New Plymouth.

Members of the Taranaki public are invited to be part ofthe audience for the live broadcast, and for the recording of the Korerorero onSunday at Puke Ariki (see below).

Entry is free, but seating is limited.

http://www.pukeariki.com/VisitUs/HowtoFindUs.aspx

Waitangi Day morning

8:10-9:00: Panel discussion with Keri Opai, Kura Denness,and Margaret Smith (This will be recorded on Sunday 5 February at Puke Ariki,between 1.30pm and 2.30pm)

9:05-10:00 Guests will include Tokatumoana Kevin Walden,Derina Turner, and Rachel Stewart

10:05-11:00 Guests will include Glen Bennett and Wayne'Arch' Arthur

11:05-12:00 Guests will include Colleen Tuuta, JuneMoseley, and Michael Lawley

Producer: Sean McKenna

Producer: Mark Cubey

New Plymouth engineers: Kevin Golding, Steve BurridgeWellington engineer: Tony Schwartz Waitangi engineer: Darryl Stack

Guest information and links:

Keri Opai is a kaiako and has taught te reo Maori foralmost 30 years. He has been a lecturer, grammarian, interpreter, academic andlocal iwi radio presenter.

Kura Denness is a director of Te Atiawa Holdings, TeAtiawa Settlements Trust and PHARMAC and is on the Council of MasseyUniversity. She serves on the board of Taranaki District Health Board and TuiOra Ltd, is a trustee with the Midlands Regional Health Network Trust and is onthe committee of the local Institute of Directors in Taranaki.

Margaret Smith is a Treaty educator who has been runningworkshops for 17 years relating to the Treaty of Waitangi and cultural issuessurrounding this. She also works as a counsellor at the Western Institute ofTechnology at Taranaki.

Tokatumoana Kevin Walden is chairperson of Taranaki iwi,director of Parininihi ki Waitotara Incorporation (PKW) and a local rugbycoach. He was formerly regional director with Te Puni Kokiri (Ministry of MaoriDevelopment), a team leader with Child, Youth and Family and a strategicplanner and advisor with the Department of Conservation relating to Treatysettlements.

http://www.taranakiiwi.org.nz/AboutUs/tabid/42282/Default.aspx

http://www.pkw.co.nz/

Dee Turner of Korito Education teaches organichorticulture classes and runs workshops on her property situated at the base ofMount Taranaki. She is also the Organic Farm NZ Taranaki Certification Manager.She will be building a solar oven during the programme.

http://www.korito.co.nz/

http://www.organicfarm.org.nz/regions/taranaki-and-whanganui

Rachel Stewart is a columnist for the Taranaki Daily Newsand the Waikato Daily Times, an avid falconer and formerfarmer-turned-environmentalist, plus she was the first female train driver inNew Zealand.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/opinion/column-riding-shotgun

Glen Bennett is a New Plymouth community worker whoprovides a home for troubled teenage boys. Glen is also involved with runningyouth and cultural events, has his own mobile coffee business and is amusician.

Wayne 'Arch' Arthur is one of New Plymouth’s originalsurfers who has been involved with surfing for 50 years. He’s also a surf shopowner and local surf radio show host.

http://www.lostinthe60s.com/whor.htm

http://mostfm.co.nz/Arch.php

Colleen Tuuta is a self-employed businesswoman and localcommunity leader, with tribal affiliations to Taranaki, Ngati Mutunga, TeAtiawa, Ngati Maniapoto and Ngati Mahuta iwi.

June Moseley is a former teacher at Spotswood College,who runs the local Taranaki Welsh group.

Michael Lawley is a mechanical engineer and director ofEcoInnovation, a local Taranaki business specialising in renewable energysolutions.

http://www.ecoinnovation.co.nz/

Arts on Sunday - Radio NZ National

2012-02-03T20:20:00.001+13:00

2:35pm

We announce the winners of our 'first line of anovel' competition

2:40pm

Madeleine Tobert a Scot now living in New Zealandwho's created a remote Pacific Island on which to set her debut novel, The Seaon Our Skin, published by Hodder and Stoughton.

NZ Book Publishing Godfather Ray Richards announces his retirement

2012-02-03T15:24:00.001+13:00

After 35 years we are relinquishing Richards Literary Agencyon 31 March 2012 – a reality due to our ages.

The current addresses (phone, email, post office and streetaddress) will remain current for Barbara and Ray; and the same for Frances,Judy and Elaine. RLA office hours areunchanged. At the present time Ray’s newrole is consultant.

It has been our great pride and enjoyment.

We will always be glad to hear from old friends.

Barbara and Ray Richards,

Richards Literary Agency/RLA.

RichardsLiterary Agency (RLA) founded 1977. Member New Zealand Association of Literary Agents

Visit us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Richards-Literary-Agency/145501412186509

Postal address: PO Box 31-240, Milford, Auckland 0741, NZ. Tel/Fax: (09) 410 0209

Office Hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday - 9.00am - 2.30pm

Saturday Morning with Kim Hill: 4 February 2012 - Radio NZ National

2012-02-03T12:04:00.001+13:00

8:15 Wael Ghonim: revolution in Egypt

8:45 Fredrick Heffermehl: Nobel Peace Prize

9:05 Anthony McCarten: absent heroes

9:40 Richie Meyer: silent movies

10:05 Playing Favourites with Megan Salole

11:05 Ted Noten: objects and meanings

11:45 Children’s Books with Kate de Goldi

Producer: Mark Cubey

Wellington engineer: Carol Jones

8:15 Wael Ghonim

Wael Ghonim is an Egyptian activist and computer engineerwith an interest in social entrepreneurship. In his memoir, Revolution 2.0(Fourth Estate, ISBN: 978-0-00-745436), he explains how his use of social mediahelped generate the Arab Spring.

https://twitter.com/#!/Ghonim

8:45 Fredrick Heffermehl

Fredrik Heffermehl is a Norwegian lawyer, peaceresearcher, and author of the books Nobel's Will (2008, ISBN:978-82-7990-074-0), and The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted (2010,Praeger, ISBN: 978-0-313-38744-9). He claims that the Nobel committee hasviolated the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will, ignoring the prize’s originalpurpose to diminish the role of military power in international relations.

http://nobelwill.org

9:05 Anthony McCarten

Anthony McCarten has created a number of novels, playsand films, including Ladies Night, Via Satellite, Weed, and Show of Hands. Latelast year, the film adaptation of his 2005 novel Death of a Superhero (Vintage,ISBN: 978-1-86941-696-1) won the Prize of the Public and the Prize of the YouthPublic at the Les Arcs European Film Festival.

His new novel, In the Absence ofHeroes (Vintage, ISBN: 978-1-86979-723-2), is a sequel to that book. Anthonylives in London, but will return to New Zealand for the 2012 Auckland Writers& Readers Festival (9-13 May).

http://www.writersfestival.co.nz/

9:40 Richie Meyer

Dr Richard J Meyer teaches film at Seattle University,Washington, and is President Emeritus of The San Francisco Silent FilmFestival. He has published widely in film and journalism periodicals, andworked in all phases of film and educational television production, and is theauthor of two books about Chinese actors of the 1920s and 1930s: Ruan Ling-Yu:The Goddess of Shanghai (Hong Kong University Press, ISBN: 978-9622093959), andJin Yan: The Rudolph Valentino of Shanghai (Hong Kong University Press, ISBN:9789622095861). Richie is a visiting scholar at the New Zealand Film Archive,where he is researching First World War propaganda.

http://www.seattleu.edu/artsci/film/Default.aspx?id=36242

http://www.silentfilm.org/

http://www.filmarchive.org.nz/

10:05 Playing Favourites with Megan Salole

Megan Saloleis “a bloody dreamer” and proud of it. She likes to imagine better ways ofdoing things, and finding ways to bring it about. Once a designer, she is nowconsidered a social entrepreneur, and has had a hand in creating initiativessuch as the international Frocksonbikes movement and Intersect. She was theNational Campaign Manager for the Green Party in the 2011 election, and is amember of the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra, who are about toembark on a nationwide tour.

https://twitter.com/#!/megarillo

http://frocksonbikes.wordpress.com/

http://intersect.org.nz/

http://www.ukulele.co.nz/

11:05 Ted Noten

Ted Noten is the Dutch Artist of the Year 2012, and“tries to stamp out the spoof of society with objects of shifting meanings”. Hewill be a keynote speaker at JEMposium: Jewellery or What, the internationaljewellery symposium in Wellington from 10-13 February. His video installation,Gold, Sweat and Pearls, will be exhibited at Objectspace in Auckland (7February to 10 March) alongside the work of fellow internationally renownedjewellers Manon van Kouswijk and Fabrizio Tridenti, who will also be speakingat JEMposium.

http://tednoten.com

http://www.jemposium.co.nz/

http://www.objectspace.org.nz/

11:45 Children’s Books with Kate de Goldi

New Zealandwriter Kate De Goldi (left) is the author of a number of books, including themulti-award winning novel, The 10pm Question. She will discuss four books fromthe New York Review Children's Collection:

The Sorely Trying Day, by Russell and Lillian Hoban(NYRB; ISBN: 978-159017-343-5); The Mousewife, by Rumer Godden, illustrated byWilliam Pene du Bois (NYRB; ISBN 978-1-59017-310-7); D'Aulaire's Book ofAnimals, by Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire (NYRB; ISBN 978-1-59017-226-1); andOunce, Dice, Trice, by Alastair Reid, illustrated by Ben Shahn (NYRB; ISBN978-1-59017-320-6).

http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/childrens/

**********

Saturday Morning repeats and previews:

On Saturday 4 February during Great Encounters between6:06pm and 7:00pm on Radio New Zealand National, you can hear a repeatbroadcast of Kim Hill’s interview from 28 January with skin cancer specialistDr Sharad Paul, a finalist for New Zealander of the Year.

On Saturday 11 February, Kim’s guests will include RobertGlennon on water, Patrick and Patsy McGrath on Bali, and Sam Hunt and DickFrizzell on poetry as painting.

Monday 6 February: Waitangi Day Special at Puke Ariki,New Plymouth On Waitangi Day morning from 8.00am to midday, Kim Hill and PaulDiamond (Curator, Maori, at the Turnbull Library) will host a Korerorero atPuke Ariki, with invited guests.

On Sunday 5 February at Puke Ariki between 1.30pm and2.30pm, we will be recording a one-hour panel discussion that will play as partof that programme.

Members of the New Plymouth public are invited to comealong and be part of the audience on both the Sunday and Monday. Entry is free,but seating is limited.

Four Industry Veterans Lay Out Advice at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Winter Conference

2012-02-03T11:52:00.002+13:00

By Diane Roback at PW
Feb 02, 2012

Four longtime children’s publishing experts gave an optimistic but realistic view of the children’s book scene, circa 2012, at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Winter Conference last weekend in New York City. The panel, “Children’s Books, Today and Tomorrow: Four Expert Impressions,” was chaired by SCBWI executive director Lin Oliver, who asked the speakers to first address the many changes in the children’s book industry that have taken place over the last few years.

Barbara Marcus, strategic innovations advisor to Penguin, advisor to Open Road Integrated Media, and former president of Scholastic Children’s Book Publishing and Distribution, said a big change she has seen is that “traditionally, hardcovers sold to the libraries, primarily middle-grade fiction.” But now, she said, “if you look at bestseller lists, we as children’s publishers can establish bestselling hardcover titles that can sell better than adult publishers – a real credit to all of us.” She used the success of John Green’s new YA novel, The Fault in Our Stars, as an example of “it’s all about getting your core readers. Adult [reader]s are your icing and you’ll hit it out of the park.”

Jean Feiwel, svp and publishing director of the Macmillan Children's Book Group, and founder of the Feiwel and Friends imprint, who ran Scholastic’s editorial department for many years, said that without question, “The size of publishers’ lists has come down. Everyone looked at their lists and made their own kind of correction. It has forced everyone to say what can I do well, what can our house do well. We have to know our own core strengths.”

L. to r., panelists Nancy Paulsen, Jean Feiwel, Barbara Marcus, and Ruben Pfeffer.

Feiwel pointed to recent upheavals in the retail landscape. “Borders going out of business has been devastating. We don’t know where those buyers have gone. That was a huge loss, but the whole local market has been very encouraging. Local bookstores have been growing, and they’re responsible for a lot of word of mouth.”

Discussing another aspect of the changes at the retail level, Feiwel stated, “Amazon is a big threat. It’s a huge problem for our bricks and mortar business. They’ve become a huge bully in the room. On the one hand I’m grateful because they made bestsellers for us. But I’m also afraid.”

But the four panelists were bullish about the industry and where it is going. Nancy Paulsen, president and publisher of Nancy Paulsen Books at Penguin, drew cheers from the crowd when she announced, “The picture book form is alive and well.” She said she believes there are still “real opportunities with picture books,” pointing out that parents don’t really want their kids to read picture books on an iPhone.

“Most children’s publishing houses are saying that this has been a good year,” Marcus reported. “Everyone seems to have figured it out. Talk about the importance of going beyond just publishing books you love – you have to go the next five steps, help the sales department sell it, figure out how it’s going to go out of the bookstore.”

Rubin Pfeffer, an agent with the East West Literary Agency, and former publisher of Simon & Schuster Children’s Books, said he was “feeling optimistic” these days. “Remarkable progress has been made in digital publishing becoming a vital part of our industry, if not in the present than in the future,” he said, and cited Apple’s recent digital textbooks announcement as an exciting development.

He also told the crowd that a publisher’s acquisition meetings are not a “death knell” to writers who want to be published. “It’s come to be important because you’re not just publishing a book that an editor is a champion of, but a book that several people are a champion of. We’re publishing fewer titles, we’ve got to publish fewer titles better.”

Marcus conveyed her impressions from the recent Digital Book World conference, saying, “Growth in children’s books is still so small. The devices are expensive, and not very good with children’s books. The people who are in charge of etailers don’t have much of a clue about children’s books.”

She acknowledged the loss of Borders as a sales outlet, though she believes people are finding other places to buy their books. “I worry about the ability to merchandise and have people find books. Discoverability is an issue.”

All of the panelists counseled the audience to help market their books, through social media, through networking, through any means available. Feiwel’s advice: “Build your own communities as you go along. Your publisher needs you to be a partner in that. Be an advocate for your own work. Within a publishing house, it takes a village. The house has to be behind a book.” Pfeffer spoke about how social media entails a new responsibility for writers and illustrators. And Marcus said, “I do think yes, there’s an expectation of being more of a marketer. What organizations might find my story appealing? I do think it’s your role to get the word out.”

With an eye toward where the industry might be heading, Pfeffer talked about “the new kinds of publishers coming to the surface.” Some are rising quickly, he said, citing digital publisher Open Road. “But it’s still content being delivered to an audience.”

Marcus addressed the issue of self-publishing, pointing out that there are pros and cons to taking this approach. “There’s a huge difference between doing it yourself” and having it published for you, she said. “It’s exciting and you do have a lot of options.” But there’s an advantage, she believes, in “having a publisher as an advocate for your book.”

“It is frustrating – not everyone is going to get published,” Feiwel added. “There may come a time when self-publishing is more effective than it is right now.” She gave the example of Nancy Tillman, a self-published illustrator whose books Feiwel discovered and published. “There are success stories,” she said, “and people who end up selling to a traditional house, or not. Nancy said to me, ‘I’m tired of being a distributor. I just want to do my art.’ ” And Pfeffer warned that self-publishing “is not a dumping ground. You still need to have all the same credentials.”

Touching on another reality of the business, Feiwel said that as an author “you have to make money for the company.” She said “the good news and bad news about Harry Potter,” which Feiwel and Marcus published during their long joint tenure at Scholastic, “is that its phenomenal success set the bar very high. If you are a successful publisher, that allows you to do books that are not as successful, but this is a bestseller business.” And “timing is everything,” Marcus pointed out. “If I’ve just acquired three vampire novels and you come in with yours, you’re not going to be the fourth.

All four panelists were asked to give the audience members one piece of advice, in terms of their writing. “Your content should touch the ear, the soul, or the funnybone, however you write it,” Pfeffer said. Marcus advised, “Stick with your network first. Keep getting feedback and keep talking to people. It’s the person that I never expect who gives me the best advice.”

Feiwel and Paulsen were even more succinct. “Stay strong, have fun,” said Feiwel. And Paulsen ended with three words: “Read, read, read.”

e-books enable a small publishers to compete with big publishing houses

2012-02-03T10:33:00.004+13:00

Adventures in e-publishing Part Four – interview with Kate Lyall Grant

From the blog of writer R.N.Morris

KATE LYALL GRANT has worked in mainstream trade publishing for over twenty years. In the past she’s been a senior commissioning editor at Hodder & Stoughton and Simon & Schuster UK, specialising in crime, thrillers and commercial women’s fiction, before joining independent publisher Severn House in 2010. Kate is publisher of Creme de la Crime, a new imprint designed to showcase the best of British crime fiction.
There’s no doubt the advent of e-publishing has shaken things up in the publishing industry. I used an analogy in my interview with Lee Jackson, of conventional publishers being a bit like sail-makers in the age of steam. Playing devil’s advocate, you understand! Of course, people still buy sail boats. But it’s a tiny market and they’re all millionaires or men going through the mid-life crisis. Is this the future for print books? Are conventional publishers worried? Should they be?
This is obviously a time of huge innovation and change within the publishing industry – and I think it’s up to publishers to make the most of the new opportunities available, rather than worry about and shy away from the changed technological landscape. These are certainly exciting and interesting times to be working in publishing: e-books and everything that goes with them have the potential to bring enormous benefits as well as challenges for conventional publishers, who must be ready to adapt, embracing the opportunities to reach new readers while not losing sight of their regular, longstanding customers and core market. There are still a great many people (like me) who prefer to read print books and I think they will be safe for the next generation at least. After that, who knows? Yes, there’s no question that e-books do detract from print sales but, for the next few years at least, it’s a finite market. There is endless discussion within the publishing industry at the moment as to the future of the e-book, but the truth is that no one has the definitive answer at this stage.
I think I’m right in saying that you publish all Severn House books as e-books as well as in hardback and paperback editions. How significant a part of the business are e-book sales?
The Severn House e-book list was launched in June last year, so it’s still very early days for us to ascertain sales patterns etc. As an independent hardcover publisher, our core business remains the libraries and we have no intention of neglecting our key customers who are the wholesalers and library suppliers. Having said that, e-books is where we see our growth area in years to come and we are planning for a future where e-books will eventually make up the majority of our revenue. The great thing is that, for the first time, e-books enable a small publishing company like us to compete on a level playing field with the big publishing houses – and I’m looking forward to doing exactly that!
Read the full interview.

Maggie Stiefvater Inks Deal for 4-Book Epic Fantasy

2012-02-03T10:15:00.002+13:00

By Maryann Yin on Galley Cat, February 2, 2012

Author Maggie Stiefvater has landed a deal with Scholastic for a four-book epic fantasy series.
The first book, The Raven Boys, is slated for release in September. The Raven Boys stars Richard Campbell Gansey, III (a boy who “has it all”) and Blue Sargent (daughter of the town psychic).
Stiefvater (pictured, via) had this statement in the release: “I grew up on a diet of exceptional fantasy series for children— The Dark Is Rising, The Black Cauldron, A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia — and I’ve always wanted to write one of those sprawling epic sagas built from intimate moments. I sat on a draft of The Raven Boys for a decade, but it wasn’t until I had the tools I learned from writing the Shiver trilogy and The Scorpio Races that I knew how to do it.”
Stiefvater finished the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy in July 2011. A few months later, Scholastic released her stand-alone novel The Scorpio Races; it has just been named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book.
Stiefvater is also working on The Merry Fates, an blog-inspired anthology with contributions from authors Tessa Gratton and Brenna Yovanoff. Publication is set for the spring.

The history of American gay writers as they emerged from the literary closet

2012-02-03T10:12:00.001+13:00

How Gossip Became History: Eminent Outlaws by Christopher Bram

The Daily Beast - Brad Gooch

From Gore Vidal to Tony Kushner, a new book, ‘Eminent Outlaws’ by Christopher Bram, traces the history of American gay writers as they emerged from the literary closet. Brad Gooch on how gossip became history. Plus, a gallery of the most famous.

Once a month or so during the 1970s I had dinner at Joe LeSueur’s teeny apartment down where Second Avenue meets Houston. Dinner was all guys, gay guys, crammed into a little box of a living room, around a table. On the walls I remember a big, blue Joan Mitchell abstract oil painting that she had given to Joe; on another wall a Joe Brainard found-object work, “Cigarette Smoked by Willem De Kooning,” with the Dutch master’s actual scrunched cigarette butt, as relic, or homage, and another beautiful enamel painting by Brainard of a 7-Up logo; some medium-size canvases with swathes of abstract paint unruly enough to have been made by the sweep of a broom by maybe Mike Goldberg or Norman Bluhm. For nearly a decade LeSueur had been the roommate of poet and MoMA curator Frank O’Hara, and the room reflected the smash-cut of poetry and painting of the slightly earlier era.

Inevitably, after dinner, out would come a bottle of cognac and a bottle of grappa and real cigarettes, Tareytons, and fancy cigarettes, joints. The poet Allen Ginsberg (living still a few blocks north of LeSueur) had nailed the issue in an elegy for Frank O’Hara when he wrote of the poet’s gift for “deep gossip.” Certainly “deep gossip” was the lingua franca of these after-dinner dish sessions at LeSueur’s apartment, bleary data dumps that were actually history lessons, full of information only passed by word- of mouth, either because the subjects were too marginal or the material too outré. I learned, for instance, the crucial cultural plot point that Joan Mitchell and Samuel Beckett had been lovers in Paris, and that either he climbed over her garden wall for assignations or she over his. Or that the bitchy nickname for Ruth Kligman, surviving girlfriend of Jackson Pollock’s crash, was “death-car girl.”

Yet most of the gossip concerned literary history, or, less grandly, the messy lives and under-the-radar goings-on of gay male poets, novelists, and playwrights.

Gay Writers from Tennessee Williams to Truman Capote (Photos)

Photos clockwise from top left: AP, Bettmann-Corbis;Betmann-Corbis; Bettmann-Corbis

Read the full piece at The Daily Beast.

Digital-only short story trails Fforde novel

2012-02-03T07:26:00.001+13:00

02.02.12 | Charlotte Williams - The Bookseller

Random House has released the first direct-to-digital fiction title by bestselling author Katie Fforde, a short story entitled The Undercover Cook, while simultaneously relaunching her website.
The Undercover Cook will also feature the first chapter of Fforde's new physical book Recipe for Love, which will be published in hardback in March.
The digital short will be available to read across all devices, with prices varying depending on the retailer.
The website, www.katiefforde.com, includes photos, videos and written pieces from Fforde, as well as news, competitions and exclusives around her publications.
Century and Arrow publisher Selina Walker said: "Recipe for Love is set around a TV cookery competition so we're publishing a digital short which also has cooking at its heart, plus a very sexy chef, to whet the appetite of Katie's existing fans and also to entice new ones to sample her work."

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That Vague, Crepuscular Time When Youth Has Passed: What Is It?

2012-02-03T07:22:00.001+13:00

‘In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age,’ by Patricia Cohen

By GAIL SHEEHY - New York Times - Published: February 1, 2012

If middle age is truly the prime of life, as posited by Patricia Cohen (left - Fred.R.Conrad), the author of “In Our Prime,” then why do so many Americans go to such lengths to deny they belong to that club? When Ms. Cohen was doing her research, she tells us, the first question her subjects nervously asked was “When is middle age?”

Ms. Cohen, a reporter for The New York Times, sees it as “floating somewhere between 40 and 64.” Her book is a fascinating biography of the idea of middle age, “a story we tell about ourselves.” Today, more than ever, that story romanticizes the idea that the middle-aged wield enormous power while it also fetishizes the attributes of youth.

She contends that middle age is a “cultural fiction,” an elastic concept reinterpreted by every generation. Academics are already defining the years from 55 to 75 as a distinct category, with labels like “encore generation,” “third age,” or “midcourse.”

Full story at the New York Times .

IN OUR PRIME -The Invention of Middle Age

By Patricia Cohen - Illustrated. 306 pages. Scribner. $25.

Bestselling shortlist of 10 for Blue Peter’s Vote for the ‘Best Children’s Book of the Last 10 Years’

2012-02-03T07:12:00.002+13:00

Blue Peter will today (programme starts 5.45pm, CBBC),commence its search to find the best children’s book of the last decade, withthe launch of an online vote in which its young viewers will be able to choosefrom a shortlist of 10 iconic titles.

From a young James Bond to a reluctant teenagesuperspy, an infamous boy wizard and an underage First World War soldier,miniature action heroes abound in the list which features the bestsellingchildren’s fiction books published in the last 10 years, with only one book perauthor included.

The 10 books competing for the accolade (in titleorder) are:

· Alex Rider Mission 3: Skeleton Key byAnthony Horowitz (Walker Books, 2002)

· Candyfloss byJacqueline Wilson, illustrated by Nick Sharratt (Random House Children’s Books,2006)

· Diary of a Wimpy Kid by JeffKinney (Puffin, 2008)

· Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix byJ K Rowling (Bloomsbury, 2003)

· Horrid Henry and the Football Fiend byFrancesca Simon, illustrated by Tony Ross (Orion Children’s Books, 2006)

· Mr Stink by DavidWalliams, illustrated by Quentin Blake (HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2009)

· Private Peaceful by MichaelMorpurgo (HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2003)

· The Series of Unfortunate Events: Austere Academy byLemony Snicket (Egmont Books, 2002)

· Theodore Boone by JohnGrisham (Hodder & Stoughton, 2010)

· Young Bond: SilverFin ─ A James Bond Adventure byCharlie Higson (Puffin, 2005)

Five of the books included have inspired feature films(Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Harry Potter, Horrid Henry, The Seriesof Unfortunate Events and due this year Private Peaceful); seven arepart of a series (Alex Rider, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, HarryPotter, Horrid Henry, The Series of Unfortunate Events, Theodore Booneand Young Bond); and two deal with social issues such as homelessness, debtand divorce with sensitivity and humour (Candyfloss and Mr Stink).

The list also boasts a litany of high-profile authorswith three former Children’s Laureates (Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Morpurgo andQuentin Blake who illustrates Mr Stink), bestselling adult US crimeauthor John Grisham, comedian David Walliams, and Britain’s richest author J KRowling all up for the Award.

The shortlist for the vote is made up of the 10bestselling (by volume) fiction books of the last 10 years for 5─11year olds with a first publication date between January 2002 and December 2011.Only the top-selling book per individual, named author is included. (Source:Nielsen BookScan TCM Top 5000 Children’s Fiction (Y2) from 200101 to 201152filtered by CMBC Interest Level 5─11 years.)

Tim Levell, Editor of Blue Peter and Chair of Judges for the Blue PeterBook Awards 2012 comments:

‘Childrencare as much about books as adults do ─ ifnot more so. We wanted to capture that by creating a vote to find outwhich book from the last ten years they love the most. This is a fantasticlist: every single book on the shortlist is a corker. Normally I'm all forplayground harmony, but if on this occasion there is the odd playgroundargument about which book is better, then bring it on!’

After the announcement of the list on Blue Peter, the shortlist will befeatured on Blue Peter’s website bbc.co.uk/bluepeterfor three weeks, during which time children under the age of 16 can log on with their BBC iD and vote for theirfavourite. The vote will close at 4pm on Thursday 23 February.

Thewinning book will be announced on Blue Peter on 1 March (5.45pm, CBBC),alongside the winner of the annual Blue Peter Book of the Year Award on aspecial show dedicated to books to tie-in with World Book Day. Blue Peter willinvite the winning author to collect a ‘Best Children’s Book of the Last 10Years’ trophy on the show.

Edinburgh book festival chief wants authors, not celebrities

2012-02-03T07:04:00.001+13:00

Some literature festivals focus on stars first and books second, says Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh international book festival

Edinburgh book festival director Nick Barley says: 'We're incredibly democratic'

A book festival is about books, and should not be driven by stars and celebrities, Scotland's leading literary festival director has said.
Nick Barley, the director of the Edinburgh international book festival, chided the Cheltenham and Hay festivals, saying they're too celebrity-driven, allowing people to appear that don't have new books out and paying large sums for top names.
He won't go down that line: he has no intention of offering inflated rates for star authors or celebrities. He insists that all Edinburgh's speakers must have new books and that each is paid the same flat rate, £150 per event, though he admits that rate may need to rise in future.
Despite the inevitably damp summer days – the city's residents know them as "dreich" - and the sprawling tram roadworks which have caused chaos around the festival's New Town home in Charlotte Square, Barley insists Edinburgh is strong enough to sell itself.
Last week he unveiled some broad themes for the 2012 book festival programme, which is sponsored by the Guardian, to a class of business students at Edinburgh Napier University, where he is a visiting professor.
He also took the opportunity to point out what he won't be doing.
Read the full story here.

Dorothea Tanning, surrealist artist, dies aged 101

2012-02-03T07:01:00.002+13:00

Tanning was the last living member of the surrealist movement, wife of Max Ernst and published her first novel at the age of 94

Alex Needham
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 February 2012

Dorothea Tanning at home circa 1955 in the south of France – the surrealist artist and writer has died aged 101. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The artist Dorothea Tanning has died in New York aged 101. She was the last living member of the surrealist movement, whose circle she joined in 1940s Paris. In 1946, she married Max Ernst in a double wedding with the photographic artist Man Ray and Juliet Browner. Their marriage lasted until Ernst's death in 1976.
From her first picture, aged 15, of a nude woman with leaves for hair, Tanning's paintings, sculptures and drawings almost always depicted the female human form, usually in strange, dreamlike scenarios. By the 50s she had abandoned surrealism in favour of more abstract "prism paintings".
In 2002 she told Salon: "I guess I'll be called a surrealist forever, like a tattoo: D. Loves S. But please don't say I'm carrying the surrealist banner. The movement ended in the 50s and my own work had moved on so far by the 60s that being a called a surrealist today makes me feel like a fossil!"
Her work is in the collections of many galleries around the world including the Tate and MoMA in New York, and influenced artists including Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois.
Tanning found further acclaim late in life through her writing. Her first novel was published when she was 94, while her poetry featured in such eminent publications as the New Republic and the Paris Review. In 2001 she published a memoir of her long and action-packed life.
Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois, moving to New York in 1936, where she saw the MoMA show Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which persuaded her that there was a place for her work. She went to Paris in 1940, where she met Ernst two years later. She said proudly that he never called her "wife", adding "I'm very much against the arrangement of procreation, at least for humans. If I could have designed it, it would be a toss-up who gets pregnant, the man or woman."
As well as painting and sculpture, she designed sets for the legendary choreographer George Balanchine, and a house in the south of France for her and Ernst. Their circle of friends included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marcel Duchamp, Truman Capote and Dylan Thomas.
Though she concentrated on her writing in later years, her work continued to be shown in galleries, and is currently featured in an exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art called In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States.
Tanning would not have enjoyed the title, once describing the term "woman artist" as "disgusting". She also said: "Art has always been the raft on to which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now."
A statement from MoMA said: "We are saddened by the loss of two great artists today: Dorothea Tanning and Mike Kelley."

Happy Birthday, James Joyce

2012-02-03T06:49:00.001+13:00

The Paris Review Daily -February 2, 2012 | by Sarah Funke Butler

Image courtesy Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.; document now part of a private Joyce collection in New York.

There’s so much to celebrate today, February 2, the birthday of James Joyce. On January 1 of this year the published works of Joyce came into the public domain. What does this mean? It means that scholars no longer need to go to his grandson Stephen Joyce, bowl in hand, begging for a ladle full of text. It means that I can translate for you the above illegible bit of manuscript from Ulysses in Joyce’s hand:

By Bachelor’s walk jogjingle
jaunted Blazes Boylan, bachelor.
In sun, in heat, warmseated,
sprawled, mare’s glossy rump
atrot. Horn, Have you the ?
Horn. Have you the ? Haw
haw horn.

Clearer? Good.
Even better, it also means that I can quote you the slightly different published version of this passage:

By Bachelor’s walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun, in heat, mare’s glossy rump atrot with a flick of whip, on bounding tyres: sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the ? Horn. Have you the ? Haw haw horn.

You see the improvement? Excellent.
Full piece at Paris Review Daily

Cairo’s book fair is back

2012-02-03T06:45:00.001+13:00

By JOSEPH MAYTON / THE MEDIA LINE02/01/2012 The Jerusalem Post

Writers and readers alike reflect on revolution in Egypt's first major international cultural event since Mubarak's overthrow.

CAIRO - One-year ago Egypt was embroiled in massive street protests. A Day of Rage occurred as the country rose up after decades of dictatorship to force out its aging dictator, who had promised years earlier to “remain in office until death.” Like much else in the country back then, the Cairo International Book Fair fell victim to the chaos.
Protests and strikes are still the norm in Egypt, where many fear the interim government of generals ruling Egypt threaten the revolution. But something else has returned from last year: the Cairo book fair is back. Some 745 publishers from 29 countries (17 of them Arab) are taking part in the fair, which runs until February 7.

And revolution is in the air. Besides the usual cultural activities, a section this year is dedicated to the testimonies of the revolutionaries. Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, is the guest of honor, with a group of the country’s intellectuals and artists attending in order to share their experience with revolution.
Amnesty International, the London-based human rights movement, is displaying its literature at this year’s fair, a first ever for the organization, which has had a testy relationship with Egypt’s interim military government.
Full story at The Jerusalem Post

Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory

2012-02-03T06:42:00.000+13:00

Authors Guild - Posted January 31, 2012

Subtlety is out. Bloomberg Businessweek’s January 25th cover shows a book engulfed in flames. The book’s title? “Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business.” A towering pile of books dominates the front page of Sunday’s NYT Business Section. The pile starts well below the fold (print edition), breaks through the section header at the top of the page, and leans precariously. Books are starting to tumble off. “The Bookstore’s Last Stand,” reads the headline.
These stories capture pretty well the state of book publishing: this appears to be no ordinary, cyclical crisis that future authors and publishers will shrug off. To understand how the book industry got into this predicament, however, a broader perspective may be needed. The cover story of February’s Harper’s Magazine provides that, discussing a fundamental shift in the federal approach to antitrust law that’s affected bookselling and countless other industries. It’s a story that hasn’t previously been told in a major periodical, to our knowledge.
We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s set the stage with the other two stories.
Burning Down the Houses
Brad Stone’s Businessweek story discusses Amazon’s campaign to prevent other booksellers from securing a foothold in the booming e-book market and the company’s furious reaction to Random House’s decision last March to adopt agency pricing for e-books, just as five of the other “Big Six” trade publishers had the previous year. (Before agency pricing, Amazon could sell e-books from Big Six publishers at deep discounts, taking losses at a rate that Barnes & Noble could never afford to match. See How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble, Probably for more.)

Full piece at The Authors Guild

Poland’s 1996 Nobel winning poet Wislawa Szymborska has died at 88

2012-02-03T06:37:00.005+13:00

By Associated Press (Czarek Sokolowski) , Published: February 2 - Washington Post

WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, whose simple words and playful verse plucked threads of irony and empathy out of life, has died. She was 88.
Szymborska, a heavy smoker, died in her sleep of lung cancer Wednesday evening at her home in the southern city of Krakow, her personal secretary Michal Rusinek said.

She died surrounded by relatives and friends, said Katarzyna Kolenda-Zaleska, a journalist and a friend of the poet.
The Nobel award committee’s citation called her the “Mozart of poetry,” a woman who mixed the elegance of language with “the fury of Beethoven” and tackled serious subjects with humor. While she was arguably the most popular poet in Poland, most of the world had not heard of the shy, soft-spoken Szymborska before she won the Nobel prize.
She has been called both deeply political and playful, a poet who used humor in unforeseen ways. Her verse, seemingly simple, was subtle, deep and often hauntingly beautiful. She used simple objects and detailed observation to reflect on larger truths, often using everyday images — an onion, a cat wandering in an empty apartment, an old fan in a museum — to reflect on grand topics such as love, death and passing time.
Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said on Twitter that her death was an “irreparable loss to Poland’s culture.”
Last year, President Bronislaw Komorowski honored Szymborska with Poland’s highest distinction, The Order of the White Eagle, in recognition of her contribution to her country’s culture.
In reaction to her death, Komorowski wrote that “for decades she infused Poles with optimism and with trust in the power of beauty and the might of the word.”
Szymborska was our “guardian spirit,” Komorowski wrote. “In her poems we could find brilliant advice which made the world easier to understand.”
Rusinek said on TVN24 that as long as her condition allowed, Szymborska was working on new poems, but she had not had time to arrange them in order for a new book, which she had intended. The book will be published this year, he said.
The Nobel Prize brought a “revolution” into the life of the modest poet and she had to struggle to protect her privacy, Rusinek said, but the prize also was a “great joy, a great honor which brought new friendships and changes for the better.”
Despite six decades of writing, Szymborska had less than 400 poems published.
Asked why, she once said: “There is a trash bin in my room. A poem written in the evening is read again in the morning. It does not always survive.”
Culture Minister Bogdan Zdrojewski said in a statement that Szymborska was candid, authentic and hostile to any form of celebrity.
“She had understanding for others, she understood the weaknesses of others and had huge tolerance for them,” the statement said. “On the other hand, she expected to have a modest place for herself.”
Szymborska was born in the village of Bnin, now part of Kornik, near Poznan in western Poland on July 2, 1923. Eight years later she moved with her parents to Krakow, and developed deep ties to the medieval city, with its rich artistic and intellectual milieu. She lived there until her death.

And a tribute in The Guardian to the "Mozart of poetry".

Bernard Schlink Sues The Weinstein Co. Over Movie Profits

2012-02-03T06:30:00.001+13:00

Book2BookWednesday 01 Feb 2012

Bernard Schlink (left), who authored the novel that formed the basis of the acclaimed drama The Reader, has sued distributor The Weinstein Co claiming he has been cheated out of millions in profits from the Oscar-winning film.

deadline.com

hollywoodreporter.com

Guardian

International print sales retreat—but US e-books 'slowing'

2012-02-03T06:23:00.001+13:00

Print sales are in retreat in almost all markets across the world tracked by Nielsen BookScan, with the drop in fiction sales particularly pronounced in markets, such as the UK and US, where e-book sales are growing quickly.

But in the US publishers are facing a potential double blow, with anecdotal evidence suggesting that the growth in e-book sales has also slowed over the past few months, as e-reader adoption has dragged and resistance to e-reading has grown. Publishers were also warned to beware of Amazon's growth.
The global sales figures were given out by president of Nielsen Book Jonathan Nowell at the Italian e-book event IfBookThen this morning (2nd February). Nowell highlighted sales declines in markets such as US, UK and Spain, with Italy the one exception where fiction sales were still growing.
He said the decline in sales in the US had doubled over two years, with fiction showing the clearest decline, down 7.2% in 2010 and in 2011 down 18%. In the UK the print decline accelerated in 2011, while in the first four weeks of 2012 print sales have dropped 12%, with fiction sales down almost 26%. But not all of the drop was attributed to e-book conversion, with Irish print sales also down, despite there being no significant impact from e-books.
Digital consultant and head of The Idea Logical Company Mike Shatzkin said e-book sales had doubled or more for four straight years, from 2007 to 2010, but recently there was evidence that the growth was slowing down, with Shatzkin pointing to research that suggested the resistance to e-readers in some people's minds was growing. He added that the initial growth was fuelled by heavy readers who moved across to e-reading first, with more reluctant adopters slower to change and likely to read less.

Read full piece at The Bookseller

Barcelona’s Blackie Books: Pretty Books for the Apocalypse

2012-02-03T06:16:00.000+13:00

Publishing Perspectives

Named after a beloved but deceased pet, Barcelona's Blackie Books is asurprisingly successful independent publisher of cult fiction, poetry, andillustration.
Read story here.

DISCUSSION:
Whatis the Future of the Slush Pile?
Will authors have the patience to wait for an agent or publisher to discoverthem? Or will they seek the immediate gratification of self-publishing?

Writers & Readers Tickets on sale tomorrow

2012-02-02T17:40:00.000+13:00

Following the launch of the full Writers and Readersprogramme last week, 9am tomorrow marks the next significant milestone for fansof the written word as tickets for all Writers andReaders Week events go on sale to the general public. On from 9-14 March,Writers and Readers Week consists of over 40 events and features some of theworld's finest writers and thinkers. View the full programme on the Festival websitenow and get ready to book your spot at a fascinating session.

Paris vs. New York: Which Is Better?

2012-02-02T17:28:00.000+13:00

Huffington Post: 02/ 1/2012

Is your drink of choice bordeaux or a cosmo? Would you rather rock a quirky Amelie-inspire bob, or the unruly locks of Carrie Bradshow?

Do you indulge in baguettes or bagels when you're on the run?

Vahram Muratyan's new book, "Paris Versus New York" [Penguin, US$20.00] illustrates the idiosyncrasies that make each city unique.
So whether you're reading in a cafe or coffeehouse, a park or a garden, check out these comparisons and vote on which city YOU think is the best!

TO KILL A SNOW DRAGONFLY

2012-02-02T16:06:00.000+13:00

This handsome hard-cover novel by the multi-talented and 2011 New Zealander of the Year nominee, Dr.Sharad Paul was mentioned on the Kim Hill's Saturday radio show last week.

Here is the inside cover blurb:
Even as the snow falls existentially, the portends aren't good for Lobsang's family: A mole has appeared
on his little sister Bhunchung's left cheek, foretelling that her husband will die an untimely death. Can the
mole be removed? After all, Grandfather is a tantric lama with magical powers.
As Bhunchung and Lobsang worry about the distant future, their village in Tibet is swept up in the Chinese
Revolution, with Mao's troops overrunning it and enforcing hard labour. Will they manage to escape from Tibet? And just where has Grandfather disappeared after the Chinese arrived?
Seen though the eyes of Lobsang, To Kill a Snow Dragonfly is an evocative journey through revolutions and disruptions, desires and memories, friendships and exile, as the narrative moves from a tranquil Tibetan village to a boarding school in south India and eventually to Bombay.

Copies can be obtained from the author's bookstore, Baci Lounge at 167/169 Broadway Newmarket, Auckland 1023 - (09) 529 4360 - bacilounge.com

Sharad Paul's debut novel COOL CUT was published in 2007.

Publishing position on Auckland's North Shore

2012-02-02T15:44:00.000+13:00

PRODUCT MANAGER

BOOK PUBLISHING

Are you a book worm? Have you ever dreamt of working in publishing? Doyour friends think your obsession with Excel is sad? We are expanding our Product Management team,and we may just have the job for you.

Hachette New Zealand is part of the Hachette Group, one of the largestpublishing houses in the world. We representa diverse range of authors such as Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham,Diana Gabaldon, Robert Ludlum and Sarah Waters.

The Product Management team is a small, highly efficient department thatplays an integral part in the effective sales and marketing of Hachette titles.A Product Manager maintains title information, produces sales material, andmanages stock levels.

The following skills are required:

Good working knowledge of MS Office with specific Excelskills

· Excellent written and verbal communication

· Accuracy with a high level of attention to detail

· Ability to maintain a calm and positive outlook underpressure

· Market awareness

The position is based in Mairangi Bay, Auckland.

We welcome letters of application and CVs. The closing date is Monday 13^thFebruary. Please send applications to Brenda Ferguson brendaf@hachette.co.nz

John Dybvig writes............

2012-02-02T14:25:00.000+13:00

Thisis my latest project....my book is now available to be downloaded on Appleitunes in the States....you can also listen to it with me reading it....

iTunes - Books - The Two Of Me by John Dybvig

Dec 14, 2011 ... Get a free sample or buy The Two Of Me by John Dybvig on the iTunes Store.

You can read this book with iBooks on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod ...

itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-two-of-me/id489315357?mt=11

DIGITAL CAMERAS THE EASY WAY

2012-02-02T14:17:00.002+13:00

I stumbled on to this pocket-size reference book last week. It costs a mere $15 and explains in simple terms (has to be simple for me when it comes to cameras) all the essentials you need to know to understand your manual, learn to use your digital camera and to improve your photos and images you send to friends and family.
I'm not at all surprised to learn that boutique Dunedin-based publisher Lifelogs has sold over 10,000 copies.
It is simple, sensible and most helpful.

Author - Brian Miller
Publisher - Lifelogs Ltd.
P.O.Box 39,
Dunedin 9054.
mail@lifelogs.co.nz
www.lifelogs.co.nz

The Gun - The Story of the AK-47

2012-02-02T12:58:00.001+13:00

The AK-47, or ‘Kalashnikov’, is the mostabundant and efficient firearm on earth. It is so light, it can be used bychildren and it never jams. It has transformed the way we fight wars, and itsstory is the chilling story of modern warfare. It is the everyman’s gun, usedby guerrilla, terrorists and dictators everywhere. The Gunfeatures villains and idealists, profiteers and killers, superpowers andrevolutionaries and tells the incredible story of how the Kalashnikov hastransformed the way we fight.

C. J. Chivers’s extraordinary and hugely detailed new book, which I found fascinating and frightening in equal measures, tellsan alternative history of the world as seen through these terrible weapons. Hetraces them back to their origins in the early experiments of Gatling andMaxim, and examines the first appearance of the machine-gun – a weapon thatfirst created the ‘asymmetric’ colonial massacres enjoyed by the British inAfrica but which then led to the nightmarish stalemate of the First World War.The quest for ever greater firepower and mobility culminated in the AK-47 at thebeginning of the Cold War, a weapon so remarkable that, over sixty years afterits invention and having broken free of all state control, it has becomecentral to civil wars all over the world.

“They don’t break, they can be used by children, and there are up to 100 million of them. The AK-47 has changed war” – Sunday Times

A book for history buffs (me) and those fascinated by guns (not me).

About the author:

C. J. (ChristopherJohn) Chivers is a seniorwriter for The New York Times. He was an infantry officer in the USMarines from 1988 to 1994 and served in the First Gulf War. He is the recipientof numerous prizes, including a shared Pulitzer for International Reporting in2009 for coverage of the war in Afghanistan.He has reported from many of the major war-torn areas of the world. Hecurrently lives in Rhode Island, United States of America.

The NZ Book Council promotes books through the power they have to inspire and shape a person

2012-02-02T12:52:00.001+13:00

Very cool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FCNsqxTNhs

Jamie Raab Interview Sparks eBook Royalty Debate

2012-02-02T12:49:00.002+13:00

By Maryann Yin on Galley Cat, February 1, 2012

GalleyCat contributor Jeff Rivera interviewed Grand Central publisher Jamie Raab for mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do? feature today.
In the interview, Raab (pictured, via) defended her imprint’s standard practice of giving authors a 25% royalty rate for eBooks: “We have an infrastructure to support.” She outlined the values of what traditional publishers have to offer whether they are new in their writing career or established New York Times bestselling authors.
When asked on whether or not she fears big-name writers will take a less traditional publishing route, she replied: “I think about that a lot because I know it’s on authors’ minds. And I think it’s incumbent on every publisher to do a better job than they’ve ever done before — more creative on marketing and eBooks, working in partnership more closely with their authors, keeping them in the loop, publishing more strategically.”
What do you think? Should eBook royalties be higher?
Several members of the industry have given their reactions to Raab’s interview including Smashwords founder Mark Coker, literary agent Peter Riva, Drama High author L. Divine and author Seth Godin.
Seth Godin: “eBook royalties should be significantly higher and the reason is simple: there’s no marginal cost of paper, shipping, returns, etc., to be paid for. If publishers started paying cash money to get better eBook distribution and sales, that’s a very different story. But right now, the gross margin is much much higher than it is on a print book.”
Mark Coker: “I’m impressed by Jamie Raab’s spirit and passion. She typifies the publisher of the future who will survive and thrive because she and her team are doing for authors what many authors cannot do for themselves…[However,] until publishers learn how to clearly communicate this in a way that authors understand, believe and agree with, some authors will continue to feel shorted.”
Peter Riva: “Remember I favor authors, but unless the company is strong, there will be no traditional publishing all too soon.”
L. Divine: “That [interview] was just what I needed to validate my own announcement this morning…I’ve worked with editors who don’t edit, and most of the marketing comes from my own footwork. So, I am going to jump on this eBandwagon with my series and see where it takes me.”

Announcing the 2011 Discover Great New Writers Award Shortlist (Fiction and Non-fiction)

2012-02-02T06:40:00.001+13:00

Dear Readers,

David Guterson received the very first Discover Great New Writers Award for Snow Falling on Cedars in 1994. Other winners include Chang-rae Lee for Native Speaker, Elizabeth McCraken for The Giant's House, Hampton Sides for Ghost Soldiers, and David Sheff for Beautiful Boy.

Safe to say that the authors on the 2011 shortlist are in great company.

The 2011 Discover Great New Writers Award shortlist:
Fiction:

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante (Atlantic Monthly Press)
Untouchable by Scott O'Connor (Tyrus Books, a division of F+W Media)
Volt by Alan Heathcock (Graywolf Press)

Non-fiction:

Day of Honey by Annia Ciezaldo (Free Press)
Kosher Chinese by Michael Levy (Henry Holt & Co.)
[sic] by Joshua Cody (W.W. Norton)

Full piece including comments on each shortlisted title.

Alex Preston's top 10 literary believers

2012-02-02T06:29:00.001+13:00

From Dostoevsky to Zadie Smith, the novelist picks his favourite portrayals of characters struggling with faith

Alex Preston - guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 February 2012

Gillian Armstrong's 1997 film version of Oscar and Lucinda.

Alex Preston was born in 1979. He lives in London with his wife and two children. His first novel, This Bleeding City, was published in 2010. His second, The Revelations, is published this month by Faber and Faber. He also writes reviews for the Observer and the New Statesman and a regular panellist on the BBC Review. He tweets as @ahmpreston.

" Steady, plodding relationships are not the stuff of great literature. As we all know, happiness writes white. Friction, fissures, flaws – love stories take their energy from impediments, they thrive under the heat of conflict. The same goes for belief. Quiet, placid faith fails to stir us. It's the dark night of the soul that we want in our fiction, the adolescent torment of Salinger's Franny or the guilt-ravaged Bendrix coming reluctantly to God in The End of the Affair.

"In previous centuries authors would have presupposed both faith and familiarity with the scriptures in their audience, but now religion has withered in the bright glare of science (at least in Britain), and our churches are increasingly Larkin's 'accoutred frowsty barn[s]'. Yet we still, some of us, feel the God-shaped hole, and courses and cults have sprung up to cater to those looking for meaning disenchanted world.

"I have always been fascinated by the outer reaches of religious experience, by the titanium-plated smiles of the born-again, by the visitations and mass-hysteria of Christian evangelicals. It's not only the secrecy and intrigue of those closed worlds; it's the way their members seem to have found an answer to so many of life's great questions. Frankly I'm envious. So when I read and write about believers, it's partly that I'm trying to find an authentic way into what they've got. So far I've not had much luck. Perhaps this is why it's characters in books who struggle with, rather than revel in, their faith who attract me.

"The four young friends in The Revelations all believe, but their conviction is tested to breaking point by the tragedy that unfolds over the course of a weekend religious retreat. Doubt stalks their every footstep, the charismatic priest who leads them suffers his own crisis of faith; that some of them are still believers at the end of the book is a kind of miracle."

1. Franny in Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger

Marcus and Abby Glass, two of the heroes of The Revelations, take their surname from Salinger's precocious family. Franny's breakdown in the second story perfectly captures the headrush of adolescent spirituality (and its resultant comedown). I have always been a little bit in love with her which is, I suppose, creepy, now I'm over 30 and she's still at college.

2. Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Alyosha is a novitiate Russian Orthodox monk, Jesus-like, compassionate but totally powerless. He clashes with his brother Ivan, a rationalist and an atheist. Alyosha isn't divorced from the real world, though; he is a realist. As Dostoevsky says: "Faith, in the realist, does not spring from the miracle. But the miracle from faith."
Read the full list at The Guardian.

Stories don’t need morals or messages

2012-02-02T06:24:00.001+13:00

A "stupid" test shows that the Puritan ethic lives on. Why do we insist on learning lessons from the books we read?

By Laura Miller - Salon.com - Tuesday, Jan 31, 2012 2:00

(Credit: iStockphoto/Yayayoyo via Shutterstock)

What is the purpose of reading stories, especially made-up stories? That’s the question lurking behind a recent posting to the New York Times’ education blog, SchoolBook. Ann Stone and Jeff Nichols, the parents of twins, wrote about taking their kids’ third-grade English Language Arts test with some friends as a party game on New Year’s Eve. The group read an inane little story about tiger cubs learning to tear bark off logs, but, to their surprise, couldn’t agree on a single answer to the multiple choice question that followed: “What is this story mostly about?”
Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students “a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.” The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a “banal” story like this tiger-cub number admits “multiple interpretations,” and the prod to “reduce the work to a single idea” does a disservice to both reader and text.
I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her “Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,” 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference).
Full piece at Salon.

The work of Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, has been compared to “Mills & Boon” authors in a damning attack by the Oxford Professor of Poetry

2012-02-02T06:13:00.002+13:00

Duffy, who grew up in a 'bookless house' and is a passionate advocate of poetry teaching in schools, became Poet Laureate in May 2009 Photo: REUTERS/Phil Noble

By James Orr - The Telegrpah - 31 Jan 2012

In a lecture entitled Poetry, Policing and Public Order, Sir Geoffrey Hill criticised the 56-year-old for her eagerness to ‘democratise’ the art form.

The Scottish poet and playwright has previously sparked controversy by arguing children who used social networking sites and text messaging were “perfecting” their poetry skills.

But Sir Geoffrey, who was once widely tipped to receive the Poet Laureateship himself, said she must “consider that she may be wrong”.

Speaking at a lecture in Oxford, Sir Geoffrey referred to an interview Duffy had given to the Guardian in which one of her early poems about the death of an old English teacher was discussed.

He said: “For the common good she is willing to have quoted by the Guardian interviewer several lines from a poem by herself that could be easily be mistaken for a first effort by one of the young people she wishes to encourage.
Full report at The Telegraph.

Gold medallist Mark Todd Autobiography to Orion

2012-02-02T06:09:00.000+13:00

01.02.12 | Charlotte Williams - The Bookseller

Orion has acquired the autobiography of double Olympic gold medallist eventing champion Mark Todd, who has also won four times at the Badminton Horse Trials, and five times at Burghley.

Orion managing director Susan Lamb and Weidenfeld & Nicolson publisher Alan Samson bought world rights, Europe and Far East exclusive, to the title, Second Chance, directly from the eventing champion. Orion will publish in hardback on 19th April, priced £20.
Todd is the only rider since 1932 to have won back-to-back individual titles at the Olympics, which he did at Los Angeles in 1984 and Seoul in 1988. After the Sydney Olympics in 2000 he retired from eventing to take up a career as a racehorse trainer and breeder in his native New Zealand.
He made an eventing comeback at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and last year won Badminton. He will compete at the London Olympics this summer.
Samson said: “We’re thrilled to be publishing one of the best known and most successful eventing champions in the world. And it really will be a must-have book for anyone interested in eventing, and beyond.”
Todd said: “When I was in the lead after the cross-country at Badminton last year, it did occur to me that it would be an amazing story if I won. It shouldn’t really have been possible, and yet it happened.
"In fact, the whole story has been extraordinary; when I started competing, I considered myself a dairy farmer who rode a bit. When I won an Olympic gold medal, I realised I might be able to make it.”

A Band of Determined Eccentrics - Indie Booksellers

2012-02-02T06:03:00.001+13:00

01/31/2012 - Huffington Post - William Petrocelli

In early January Frommer Guides arranged for a New Orleans literary group to lead a band of booksellers on a "Literary Pub Crawl" of the Big Easy. The guide's spiel got more and more colorful after each watering hole. When asked about local eccentrics, he responded thus:

There are different ways of looking at eccentrics. In New York, they ignore them. In Los Angeles, they arrest them. But in New Orleans, we encourage them.

In a way, that was a metaphor for the independent booksellers who were gathered that week in New Orleans for the annual Winter Institute of the American Booksellers Association. If "eccentricity" can be defined as having a vision that departs from the conventional wisdom, then independent booksellers have it in abundance. An unexpected optimism was in full bloom among the booksellers at that meeting.
But how could that be? Independent booksellers have been written off for years by experts who sit in their offices and watch Main Street America from a distance. And there are plenty of statistics that seemingly support the doomsayers. In the 1990s the growth of chain bookstores led to a doubling of the amount of bookselling space in America without any growth in the number of readers. That -- along with a rash of unfair pricing tactics -- left many independent booksellers fallen by the wayside. A few years later, the growth of online bookselling had an even greater impact. Once again, there was an increase in cut-throat competition -- again with no real increase in the number of book-reading customers. But this time the casualties included the giant book chain Borders, which came crashing to the ground in 2011. And all of that occurred before the full advent of e-books.
So, why the optimism? What accounts for an upsurge in confidence among independent booksellers?

Read William Petrocelli's full essay here.

Footnote:
William Petrocelli is an author, a bookseller, and a former attorney.
For the past thirty years or so he has been the co-owner with his wife Elaine of Book Passage, a retail bookstore in San Francisco and Corte Madera, California.

He is the author of Low Profile: How to Avoid the Privacy Invaders (McGraw Hill) and co-author of Sexual Harassment on the Job: What it is and How to Stop it (Nolo Press). He is also the author of the forthcoming novel Women For Peace.

AAP eBook Sales Nudge Back Up In November, As Children's Hardcovers Shine

2012-02-02T05:56:00.003+13:00

PublishersLunch

eBook sales as reported by a small butgrowing group of publishers to the AAP remained lower than their peaks earlierin the year in November, at $77.3 million up modestly from October's reported$72.8 million. Overall, ebooks comprised 16 percent of trade sales, compared to12.6 percent in October. The peak during 2011 was February, when high ebooknumbers and low print shipments made digital 29.5 percent of the month'sreported sales. Further skewing the month-to-month and year-over-yearcomparisons, the number of publishers reporting ebook sales to the AAP keepschanging from month to month. For November, 8 more university presses havestarted reporting ebook sales, making 26 reporting publishers in all. (ColumbiaUniversity Press and Rizzoli have dropped off this month, but are expected toreport again in the future.) Last December, there were only 12 reportingpublishers.

Following the year's pattern, the gain of$30.7 million in ebook sales over last November couldn't make up for the largerdrop in print shipments, as total AAP trade sales declined $29.7 million or 5.7percent for the month. (Indeed, for the 11 reported months, overall tradedollars are down 5.8 percent compared to 2010, which isn't bad considering thedisappearance of Borders and the growth of lower-priced ebooks.)

Children's and YA hardcovers were thebiggest gainers after ebooks in the month, at net shipments of $87.2 million up27 percent compared to a year ago. That made children's hardcovers the secondlargest trade segment for the month (with ebooks once again just barely infourth place). Religious books--which we don't count as trade, but the AAPdoes--also rose slightly for the month.

A Self-Help Rights Guide for Independent Publishers

2012-02-02T05:52:00.000+13:00

Publishing PerspectivesPetra Hardt, Foreign Rights Director at Berlin's Suhrkamp Verlag, has written'Rights: Buying. Protecting. Selling' to help publishers make the best choices.

Read here.

DISCUSSION:
Whatis the Appropriate Term for a Book Contract?
With digitization offering authors new opportunities faster that publishers cantake advantage of them, long book contracts grow increasingly unattractive.

Calling for applications for Iowa International Writing Program

2012-02-01T16:41:00.001+13:00

CreativeNew Zealand is calling for applications from New Zealand fiction andnon-fiction writers, poets and playwrights to take part in the renownedUniversity of Iowa International Writing Program in the United States.

The result of a 20-year partnership between Creative New Zealandand the university, the three-month residency is an opportunity forwriters to participate in a programme which has hosted more than 1400 writersfrom a 140 countries since its inception in 1967.

Emerging or established writers, with a publishing track record,will have time to work on an approved project and take part in literaryactivities, field trips and excursions with other writers from all over theworld.

New Zealand’s 2010 recipient writer David Hill (right) described the programmeas a “writer’s paradise”. “For three months I was able to write ina state of financial security, intellectual stimulation and professionalcollegiality.”

The residency includes travel costs, accommodation, a stipendand is supported by Creative New Zealand. It will run from late August tomid-November, 2012 and the recipient will be expected to have completed, orsubstantially completed, a body of writing.

The deadline forapplications isFriday 9 March 2012.

To find out more about how to apply please goto our website or to forward to potential applicants click on the ‘Pass iton’ link on the right hand tool bar
About the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program

Alan Hollinghurst in Sydney next month

2012-02-01T14:45:00.000+13:00

Sydney Writers' Festival presents a very special event withAlan Hollinghurst.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize for his brilliant satire ofThatcher's London, The Lineof Beauty, Hollinghurst will discuss his latest novel, The Stranger's Child.

The Stranger's Child casts alonger gaze, beginning with the story of two families and two houses on the eveof World War I then coursing through the 20th century to tell a larger story ofEngland -- and of its truths secreted by time.
Alan Hollinghurst will appear in conversation with SydneyWriters' Festival artistic director Chip Rolley.
Tickets on sale now.
Location: VerbrugghenHall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music
Date: Friday 9 March 2012
Time: 7.00pm - 8.15pm

News from the Arts Foundation

2012-02-01T14:07:00.002+13:00

Derek Lardelli (Laureate) and has beenawarded a new academic position. He becomes an Associate Professor to Tairawhiti’sEastern Institute of Technology.

Derek is recognised nationally forthe revival of Ta Moko and as a key figure in the field of kapa haka. Hehas been the cultural advisor to the All Blacks since 2005 and responsible forthe branding of the Athens and Kuala Lumpur New Zealand Olympic teams, amongmany other projects.

Pop-up literature

2012-02-01T14:02:00.001+13:00

Exciting news from the Institute of Modern Letters Newsletter

Wellingtonis to have a temporary Literaturhaus,courtesy of the Goethe Institute. The first week’s programme runs 7-11February, and includes presentations by Kate de Goldi andLloyd Jones and a poetry cabaretwith Lorenzo Bühne, BillManhire and Chris Price.

The poetry cabaret takes place at Meow, which hosts another poetryevening a week later, at which Poet Laureate Ian Wedde reads alongside AmyBrown, Aleksandra Lane and Lynn Jenner. More here.

Further comment on the New Zealand Hierarchy of Book Publishing

2012-02-01T13:02:00.002+13:00

This was Kauri Bookend's opening gambit posted on the blog last week:
Following my post yesterday on the international Hierarchy of Book Publishing, Kauri Bookend has left a new comment suggesting his/her NZ top twenty. My thanks to Kauri Bookend. Here it is for your amusement and/or comment with a few pics I have added:

1. Unity Books Auckland and Wellington: Simply the best
2. Bill Manhire : Done more to raise the quality of NZ Fiction and Poetry than anyone else
3. Geoff Blackwell : Shame he isn’t running one of the local multi-nationals. He should be
4. Lloyd Jones : Our pre-eminent novelist with a five star track record.
5. The Editors: especially Barbara Larson, Jane Parkin and Anna Rogers: Making good books better.

6. Neil Cross{Wellington]: Lead writer on Spooks, creator of Luther, author of nine great books including the Booker listed Always the Sun. Photo-SST
7. The other independent booksellers: apart from that grumpy bugger in Timaru.
8. The Reps- a diminishing breed but still a vital link between publishers and booksellers who care.
9. Karen Ferns – keeping Random House head and shoulders above the rest.
10. Neil Hyndman – proving it is possible to make real money out of publishing.
11. The Agent – Ray Richards. Are there any others?

12. Tony Fisk – probably the smartest MD in NZ Publishing – why isn’t he Prime Minister?
13. The team at Craig Potton – Carrying the flag for quality small publishers after the disappearance of Godwit, Shoal Bay, Tandem, Longacre and Mallinson Rendell
14. Bill and Phil [Noble and King] University Booksellers Supreme
15. Publishers – The Magnificent Seven : Harriet Allan, Fergus Barrowman, Jane Connor, Sam Elworthy, Nicola Legat, Rachel Scott, Bridget Williams. Quality rules.
16. Elizabeth Knox : An author with a great depth and breadth of talent and a hard-won international reputation
17. Joan Mackenzie : Has it in her power to make a real difference for New Zealand Publishers. I am sure she will use it wisely

18. Maurice Gee: now why hasn’t he been knighted?
19. The bloggers: especially Rachel King, Vanda Symon, Chris Bourke, Auckland and Christchurch libraries. Oh alright – also that Beattie chap.
20. The readers – where would be without them??

Brian Phillips then responded as follows:

Hard to resist responding to this…
Whilst I agree with most of Kauri Bookends’ selections I would venture to add afew more..
In no particular order [as they say on the X factor] I would offer
The two Fionas – Farrell(right) and Kidman(left). Wonderful women writing wonderful books
Carole Beu – if all booksellers were as active and enthusiastic we would sellmore books….
The retirees – especially David Elworthy, Ros Henry and Bob Ross. They may nolonger be involved in commercial publishing but all continue to do ‘bookish’things. Long may they flourish.
The broadcasters – especially Kim Hill and a special mention for theincomparable Elizabeth Alley.
Jill Ewing at Random House. This company is regularly voted Distributor of theyear by booksellers. Jill runs Random’s distribution. Enough said.
Belinda Cooke at New Holland – quietly running a small but perfectly formedcompany.
The third party book distributors – big and small – without them many smallerpublishers would have no cost-effective way of getting their books into themarketplace. As I am a naturalised Cantabrian special mention must go toNationwide Books at Oxford.
Those who run Writers Festivals throughout the country. Love them all.
Finlay Macdonald. Also Guy Somerset, Philip Matthews, Iain Sharp and DavidEggleton.
PS Who is the grumpy bugger in Timaru? Can't think of anyone who fits thatdescription...

Today Old Timer has commented:
Kauri Bookend’s top twenty was an excellentcontribution. Old Timer offers a commentor two.

There is a small clash between #four Lloyd Jones and # 18 Maurice Gee; another between # nine Karen Ferns and #12 Tony Fisk.

Publishers who have disappeared, add: Avery, Bascands, Beckett Sterling, BentonRoss, Booker & Friend, Caxton, Dunmore, Millwood, Moa,Pacific/Whitcoulls. Paul’s, Pegasus,Sweet &Maxwell – where have all the roses gone?

And Bookman Beattie has decided to have his pennethworth too:

Significant other players worthy of mention include:

Nielsen Book Scan - in spite of Whitcoulls attempt to scuttle their weekly statistics they continue to provide an invaluable service

Book Publicists - tireless workers, almost exclusively women, this blog would be a lesser place without them.

Book designers - designing books in NZ of world class standards

Bureaucrats running those key organisations - Lincoln Gould (Booksellers), Anne de Lautour (Publishers), Maggie Tarver (Authors) and Catriona Ferguson (Creative NZ).

Literary journals, especially but not only Sport and Landfall.

All those wonderful, informed indie booksellers out there, especially at my favourite weekend haunt. the Village Bookshop at Matakana.

Media book page editors especially Linda Herrick, Mark Broatch, Guy Somerset and Philip Mathews.

The Listener - widespread book coverage week in and week out.

Facebook & Twitter

The Guardian & The New York Times - daily book reviews and book news.

PW & The Bookseller - keeping the trade informed on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world

Martin Taylor - the man who led the push into digital publishing in NZ.

Anyone else got further nominees? Feel free to comment.

Neil Gaiman & Todd McFarlane Settle Decade-Long Dispute

2012-02-01T11:21:00.000+13:00

By Dianna Dilworth on Galley Cat, January 31, 2012

Fantasy authors Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane have settled their decade long dispute about who owns the copyright to Spawn characters that Gaiman created for McFarlane’s comic book in a guest appearance.
In 2002, Gaiman filed his first suit claiming that he co-owned Medieval Spawn, among other characters that he had created. In 2010, Gaiman won a suit in which a judge determined that he should be paid royalties.
The Daily News has more about the settlement: “Jeffrey Simmons, one of Gaiman’s attorneys, said terms of the agreement were confidential … ‘This is intended to put an end to the whole thing. It’s fair to say both parties are pleased to have this resolved,’ Simmons said.”

Barnes & Noble Stores Will Not Stock Books Published By Amazon

2012-02-01T11:18:00.002+13:00

By Jason Boog on Galley Cat, January 31, 2012

Barnes & Noble has decided not to stock books published by Amazon in their physical stores, keeping the new publisher out of the country’s largest network of brick and mortar bookstores.
Bloomberg Businessweek senior reporter Brad Stone called it “a declaration of war,” breaking the news with a statement from B&N’s chief merchandising officer, Jaime Carey. The bookseller will offer Amazon titles in their online store. Last week, Amazon revealed that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will distribute print books from Amazon Publishing.
Check it out: “Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain eBooks to our customers. Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content. It’s clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

The Book: A Life Cycle - The Inaugural Symposium

2012-02-01T11:10:00.002+13:00

for the Centre for theBook at Otago University

Thursday29 March 2012: Dunningham Room, Dunedin Public Library

7.00pm - Prof David Skegg – Opening address

7.20pm - "the old rag and bone shop" John Quilter, Quilter’sBooks, Wellington

Friday30 March 2012: Barclay Theatre, Otago Museum

9.00:Introduction/Opening

DrShef Rogers (English) *this session may alter if Prof. Howsam is here.
9.30:Futures of the Book

HowardAmos (University Librarian)

DrErika Pearson (Media and Communication)

PenelopeTodd (Rosa Mira Books)

10.30– coffee break

11.00-12.00:Research Potentials in Print Culture

Prof.Tony Ballantyne (History) – ‘Print and writinghistories of colonialism’

AnthonyTedeschi (Rare Books, Dunedin Public)

DrLachy Paterson (Te Tumu)- ‘Indigenous Texts,Indigenous Histories’

12.00–1.00 Lunch

1.00–3.30: Life Cycle of the Book

Author- Vanda Symon (Independent writer)

Design– Ralph Lawrence (Independent Designer)

Publisher– Barbara Larson (ex-Longacre; Commission editor for Random House)

Sales– Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb (UBS)

Survival– Sharon Dell (Hocken Library)

3.30– afternoon tea break

4.00– 5.00: Issues & Wrap Up

Prof.Helen Leach – The Non-conformist Cookbook

DrRoger Collins – Revisiting Louis-Auguste de Sainson: Bibliography, Bibliophilyand Biography

NoelWaite, Dunedin City of Literature – The State of the Play?

DonaldKerr/Shef Rogers

Registration for the full day is $25 (waged); $10 (unwaged).

To register e-mail books@otago.ac.nz for an electronic registration form.

Time Out Bookstore in Auckland's Mt.Eden features on Localist.

2012-02-01T09:33:00.001+13:00

There’s nothing quite so magical as a bookstore; the smell of print, the promise of fresh new worlds between crisp white pages.
Sadly, the future of bookstores is becoming precarious. With the advent of Amazon and internet shopping, and E-readers like Kindle, the little local bookstore is somewhat of an endangered species.
Luckily for bibliophiles like me, there are some well-loved little stores that are bucking the trend.
Time Out Bookstore in Mt Eden village is one such store. Opening in 1988, it has a well-deserved reputation as one of the best bookstores in the country. It has a huge range of literary fiction, a wonderful kid’s section, and a mind-boggling, eclectic range of non-fiction, with everything from architecture and sport, to travel and religion.
But best of all, it has a cat.
The first Time Out cat, Oscar, was somewhat of a local identity in Mt Eden. He was a big Burmese, who lived the life of Riley, was generally adored and pampered by shoppers and staff, and often seen lounging in the shop window, attempting to lure in passing punters.
Sadly Oscar died recently, but a new kitty, the lovely Lucinda, has taken his place as the store mascot.
The staff at Time Out are great. They are all super friendly and knowledgeable. Their recommendations are spot on – they’ve introduced me to many great authors over the years.
They keep up-to-date with all the international trends in the book world, and make sure they stock all the award-winners as soon as they’re announced. If something is out of stock, they’ll order it in for you.
They are open 12 hours a day (9am-9pm), seven days a week, which is great if you’re in the village waiting for a takeaways, or for a mate to turn up for a drink.
If you’re a book lover, put this on the top of your list of shops to visit, and make a night of it in Mt Eden. What could be better than book shopping followed by a dinner and a drink at one of village’s great eateries?

Time Out Bookstore

432 Mt Eden Rd, Mt Eden Village, Auckland
email books@timeout.co.nz
Ph/fax +649 630 3331 Open 9am - 9pm, 7 days

Writers & Readers Week at the Fesival - MEET THE BEST IN LOCAL LITERARY TALENT

2012-02-01T07:50:00.002+13:00

Joining some great voices in contemporary literature from around the globe will be our own outstanding selection of local writers. New Zealand's first poet laureate Bill Manhire will search out exciting new poetic voices; Patrick Evans will delve into the imagined world of Janet Frame and Frank Sargeson; and join with fellow Christchurch writers Fiona Farrell and Jane Higgins for Christchurch Quakes: Changing Everything - a poignant session on writing and living through the Christchurch quakes. Also featured are some of our best emerging writers: Eleanor Catton, Hamish Clayton and Craig Cliff.

Photo above - Patrick Evans, Fiona Farrell and Jane Higgins are part of a stellar line-up of Kiwi writers.

B&N expands international content team

2012-02-01T07:21:00.001+13:00

31.01.12 | Philip Jones - The Bookseller

Barnes & Noble has grown its international content team, as the US bookseller seeks to establish further relationships with overseas publishers.
According to Publishers Marketplace, Emily Williams has joined Barnes & Noble as international content manager for digital products, reporting to Patricia Arancibia, who was recently promoted to director, editorial & publisher relations for international content. Williams was most recently digital content producer for Publishers Marketplace.
Barnes & Noble is looking to take its digital e-reader the Nook overseas and its reportedly close to revealing a deal to sell the device through Waterstones in the UK. It has also been growing its overseas content and non-English-language content for sale in the US through deals with foreign publishers. The New York Times reported over the weekend that B&N was working on a fifth iteration of its Nook device, with the new model expected to be unveiled in the spring.

What Do You Love About Your Dialogue?

2012-02-01T07:18:00.000+13:00

Posted by - mooderino

The general advice about writing dialogue tends to follow the same basic precepts. Conflict, goals, move the plot forward, don’t waste time with chit-chat, etc. That is certainly all useful stuff and will help keep the story moving.

But there’s more to dialogue than just getting across information.

People loves great dialogue. In books, in plays, in movies. In real life. Sparkling conversation holds the attention, even when it has nothing to do with anything. People like hearing it. It’s enjoyable to read. But it’s very difficult to write.

Sometimes, a memorable line is designed to be so. Everything builds up to it. A character gets teed up to say the thing that will define the rest of their life, and wham: Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. Beautiful. AFI’s most memorable quote of all time.

Sometimes, though, it is not quite as clear why a line enters the collective consciousness. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Who would have thought that would be the most enduring line from Star Wars?

Which is the thing about dialogue. It’s all about the context.

It is entirely possible to have a bunch of people gathered together just chatting, and for it to be entertaining. But those writers who excel at that sort of thing, whether it be Tarantino or Oscar Wilde, do more than just collect a bunch of witty epigrams.

Read the full essay here.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo cancelled in India

2012-02-01T07:17:00.003+13:00

Oscar-nominated thriller withdrawn from release in India after director David Fincher refuses to cut 'unsuitable' sex scene

Ben Child
guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 January 2012

Cancelled in India … Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Oscar-nominated crime thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo will not be shown in India after director David Fincher refused to cut scenes depicting rape and sexual intercourse.

India's Central Board of Film Certification had insisted five scenes be excised, including two in which actors Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara make love and another in which Mara's character Lisbeth Salander is raped by her legal guardian, the Wrap reports. Fincher refused to make changes to his film, and Sony Pictures abandoned plans for a 10 February release.

"Sony Pictures will not be releasing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in India," read a statement from the company's Mumbai office. "The censor board has judged the film unsuitable for public viewing in its unaltered form and, while we are committed to maintaining and protecting the vision of the director, we will, as always, respect the guidelines set by the board."

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the second adaptation of the first book in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, has not been an enormous box-office hit but picked up five Oscar nominations last week and is well on its way to a $200m global haul against a budget of $90m. Despite predictions to the contrary, production on the sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is reportedly under way, with Mara and Craig set to return.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (US)
Production year: 2011
Countries: Rest of the world, USA
Cert (UK): 18
Runtime: 152 mins
Directors: David Fincher, Niels Arden Oplev
Cast: Christopher Plummer, Daniel Craig, Joely Richardson, Lena Endre, Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Peter Haber, Robin Wright, Rooney Mara, Stellan Skarsgard, Steven Berkoff, Sven-Bertil Taube, Yorick van Wageningen
More on this film

A Most Optimistic Unconference: Publishers, Libraries, and Independent Bookstores at Digital Book World 2012

2012-02-01T07:11:00.001+13:00

January 29, 2012 By Heather McCormack

If you’re lucky, at every conference there’s a revealing unconference going on inside of it. This was very much the case with Digital Book World 2012, which drew the usual cliques of publishers, authors, agents, entrepreneurs, editors, and marketers last week to New York. As at the 2011 show, keynotes, studies, and panels about international markets, metadata, ebooks, and DRM attracted large audiences. Amazon and Barnes & Noble reaffirmed their power (and rivalry) as manufacturers of dedicated e-readers and quasi-discovery centers and publishers.
Yet I sensed a markedly different psychology among the Big Six suits that has thus far gone unreported and wasn’t spoken of out loud near me during the show. Although a bit crooked-shouldered after suffering another year of disintermediation beatings by Kindle, these professionals are seeing straighter—and farther down the workflow. The damaging fear-induced myopia that took over publishing with the rise of ebooks in 2009 seems to be waning.
Four, even two years ago, dropping the term ecosystem was not a cool thing to do in the rarified corners of the culture business, the equivalent of conjuring a dirty hippie genie at a cocktail party. At Digital Book World, however, I heard more than one CEO use it, along with independent booksellers, it must be noted. The word, of course, encapsulates what librarians and library advocates have long argued for in the digital wars—capitalism that supports anyone with a stake in information and encourages fluid tiers of access. Or, if you will, a most beatific “United Nations of Reading,” to quote Eric Hellman, who was inspired last fall by Brian O’Leary’s excellent Books in Browers presentation, “The Opportunity in Abundance.”
Forget the supreme logic of leveraging your partners, or even your supposed competitors when you are dependent on the whims of a relatively small consumer base. The all-important data to buy into a new, bigger picture is compelling. At Digital Book World, Verso Media presented the findings of its 2011 Survey of Book-Buying Behavior. It reported that there are 70 million “avid book-buyers” in America and that they exhibit “split purchasing behavior.” In other words, they patronize online retailers, chain bricks-and-mortars, and local independent bookstores. This finding led the Verso team to recommend that publishers maintain and nurture “a diversified retail ecosystem [emphasis added]…because it mirrors consumers’ preferences.”
Attendees did not talk up libraries as a bona fide sales channel, despite OverDrive’s laudable efforts last summer to convert library catalog browsing to sales, and that’s fine by me because libraries serve a much more valuable function. The buzz word of Digital Book World 2012, discovery is being vaunted as that crucial bit of foreplay in the reader-book relationship (sorry, new metaphor). As communion cannot happen without a meeting ground, authorities ranging from Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, to Ruth Liebmann, Random House VP director of account marketing, stressed the inestimable worth of a physical space for encountering just the right bit of textual stimulation.
Read Heather's full piece at Library Journal.

One takeaway from Digital Book World that is not to be missed

2012-02-01T07:05:00.001+13:00

The Shatzkin Files

Posted by Mike Shatzkin on January 30, 2012

I think just about everybody has fun at Digital Book World, but it is hard to have more fun there than I do. It’s damn near a year of work coming together over a couple of days with dozens of smart speakers making me personally look good for putting them on the program. So they work hard and satisfy the audience and I get congratulated. What could be better (for me) than that?
(OK, I did do a little bit of work. Besides emceeing the show and co-hosting the final panel, I delivered opening remarks trying to set the stage.)
There were a lot of great takeaways this year. Perhaps the biggest news was the final presentation before the wrap-up panel Michael Cader and I hosted. That was by Matteo Berlucchi, the CEO of Anobii, a UK-based ebook retailer that has substantial investment from Penguin, Random House, and HarperCollins. Matteo didn’t exactly “call for the end” of DRM, but he certainly described a better world without it. And the main point he made was, “I want to sell to Kindle customers and the only way I can do that is if we get rid of DRM.” The combination of the message and the messenger made this the most newsworthy presentation of the show, I thought.
But the factoid that most grabbed me was delivered on the previous day as part of the data developed by AllRomanceebooks.com about the romance readers market. Very superficially, the point being made was also about DRM, but that’s actually a distraction. There was a much larger point buried within.
All Romance is a specialized ebook retailer. To serve the romance reader community more effectively, they’ve built out the BISAC taxonomy for romance, adding more categories. And they’ve added a metadata element called “flames” which basically measure the frequency and explicitness of the sex scenes in any particular book.
The romance world, particularly among the cognescenti in it, is a very anti-DRM environment. And an outfit like All Romance, which has no “device lock-in” working for them — essentially everything they sell gets “side-loaded” somehow, and DRM can often make that more challenging — is right in step with their community sentiment. So the survey contained questions trying to get at the audience attitude about DRM.
There were two relevant stats that I recall. One is that only about 20% of even All Romance’s readers really resist books with DRM. That is to say: 80% don’t. But the factoid that grabbed me is that 96% (that’s not a typo: ninety-six percent) of the ebooks they sell do not have DRM.
All Romance also reports that 91% of the titles they have available are protected by DRM. That makes sense, since all the titles from all the Big Six publishers and all the titles from Harlequin except those from their new digital-first imprint, Carina, have DRM.
What this means is that the nine percent of All Romance’s offerings that do not have DRM are selling 96% of their units overall. And since only 20% of their customers find DRM as a strong deterrent to sales, that means those fledglings are outselling all the majors for other reasons.
This provokes two very important lines of inquiry to me, and neither of them have anything to do with DRM.
The first one would be top of mind to me if I were a major publisher. What are these books that are selling like hotcakes? Why are these books selling like hotcakes? Why can’t we publish these books that are selling like hotcakes?
Read the rest of Mike Shatzkin's File here.

Toshiba outlines e-book ambitions

2012-02-01T07:00:00.005+13:00

31.01.12 | Michael Fitzpatrick - The Bookseller

Toshiba, which will launch its first dedicated digital reader on 10th February, is aiming to be Japan’s biggest retailer of e-books by the spring.
Adding the colour LCD screened, Android-based BookPlace DB50 to its existing tablet line-up is aimed at bringing more readers to its expanding Bookplace e-book store which Toshiba has said it will beef up with over 100,000 titles by the end of March.
“We now have about 50,000 publications available that include books, magazines and comics,” a Toshiba spokeswoman told The Bookseller, although what percentage of that number is comprised of books was not disclosed. “But we plan to have 100,000 online by March.”
Even if such a target is reached, however, the figure underlines how poorly developed Japan’s e-book trade is, according to Tokyo-based publisher Robin Birtle. “Even though Toshiba have partnered with Booklive, one of the larger Japanese e-Bookstores, DB50 owners will be underwhelmed by their content choice,” he said.
Booklive is a unit of the Japanese printing giant Toppan.
Although late to the crowded tablet and e-reader market in Japan, Toshiba is anticipating the launch of the Kindle Fire, expected for the first time in Japan later this year. Priced at 22,000 yen the DB50 costs and dimensions are comparable.
The hand-sized Toshiba tablet is aimed at commuters who often have to stand on crowded trains reading with one hand.
Analysts do not see the new offering standing up to the appeal of a similar sized Kindle Fire, which unlike the Toshiba reader comes with non-glare, e-ink, when the Kindle finally does reach Japan.
“Toshiba has missed the boat on this one,” said publishing analyst Rob MacGregor at Tokyo-based Strategy Core. “The launch is 2-3 years too late. It has its appeals but the appetite for black and white e-ink based readers proves you don’t need a full-colour screen.”
At its launch in Tokyo, Toshiba suggested the new e-reader might be also sold abroad. The Toshiba spokeswoman confirmed this but declined to discuss such possibilities further.
Books that are available already through Toshiba’s Bookplace store include bestsellers such as the Steve Jobs biography from Kodansha priced at 2,000 yen. More typical Japanese authored books, particularly manga, are selling on the store for under 1,000 yen each.

Harlequin Acquires Heartsong Presents

2012-02-01T06:56:00.000+13:00

PW - January, 30, 2012

Harlequin has acquired the book club assets of Heartsong Presents Book Club, the inspiration book club owned by the Christian publisher Barbour Publishing. Heartsong Presents provides its members with four Christian romance novels a month, with a focus on inspiration, hope and faith, written by leading inspirational authors.

"We are thrilled to add Heartsong Presents to our portfolio," said Donna Hayes, publisher and CEO, Harlequin. "Our subscribers trust us to provide compelling stories that are delivered to their doorstep monthly. The Heartsong Presents editorial dovetails perfectly with that of Harlequin -- women's fiction and inspirational publishing -- making it a natural fit."

Estimate Puts Kindle Fire Sales at 6 Million

2012-02-01T06:52:00.001+13:00

PW - Jan.30, 2012

With Amazon set to release its fourth quarter—and year end—results Tuesday afternoon Stifel Nicolas analyst Jordan Rohan estimates that the company sold 6 million Kindle Fire tablets in the fourth quarter. Rohan had previously put the number sold at 5 million units.
Rohan believes the strong performance of the Fire will provide Amazon with ongoing benefits by increasing the amount of content, including e-books, that new Fire owners will buy.
As a result he has upped his revenue forecast for 2012 by over $2 billion to a total of $67 billion. And while Amazon is making no money on the Fire, Rohan notes that as more customers buy digital content, Amazon’s margins could improve because of lower shipping costs.

Siri Doesn’t Do Scottish

2012-02-01T06:47:00.002+13:00

Oli Scarff / Getty Images

Siri and Scotland are separated by a common language. The debut of Siri, Apple’s new virtual assistant, gave rise to a meme as excited customers tested out the new voice-recognition software. Except in Scotland, where the assistant appears unable to understand the Scottish brogue. A puzzled Siri responds to “What's the weather like today?” with “What's available in Labor Day?” Another request to “create a reminder” is greeted with a straight “I don’t understand,” and finally “I don't know what you mean” by “create Alamain.” Nevertheless, the new iPhone has sold well in Scotland.

Read it at The Los Angeles Times (Via The Daily Beast)

January 31, 2012

The Snow Child - an excited first-time author reports

2012-02-01T06:45:00.000+13:00

I have so much to tell you, I hardly know how to start this letter.
I want to tell you how wonderful the staff and readers are at Tattered Cover in downtown Denver, where I participated in my first official author reading and book signing. I want to tell you how heart-warming it is to be surrounded by talented authors, kind book lovers, a beautiful bookstore. I even had my uncle at my side as I signed copies of The Snow Child! It is a day I will never forget.
But I also want to tell you how much I’ve appreciated your emails, messages and tweets telling me where you have spotted The Snow Child. Here are just a few places where there have been “Snow Child sightings.”

Buffalo, New York
Hawaii
The Costco Connection magazine that goes out to Costco members and featured an interview with me and a review of The Snow Child this month.
New Mexico
Delaware
Barnes & Noble in Baltimore, Maryland
Kodiak, Alaska
Olympia, Washington
Florida
Laramie, Wyoming
Powell’s Bookstore in Oregon
Pittsburg, Kansas
South Hadley, Massachusetts at the Odyssey Bookshop
Lansing, Michigan
Reno, Nevada
Oprah Magazine, February issue, Page 111 (I had to see it to believe it.)
Northwest Book Lovers blog
Idaho
Chicago
Pennsylvania
Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City
Rome, Italy
Ireland
Corsica
Flagstaff, Arizona Barnes & Noble
Jerusalem
Boyd Farm in Palmer, Alaska

It’s simply amazing!

Read more at Eowyn's blog - Letters from Alaska
And have a look at her website too.

Supporters of Menlo Park Store Formalize As Kepler's 2020 Project

2012-02-01T06:37:00.002+13:00

PublishersLunch

Efforts to stabilize, preserve and redefineKepler's Books in Menlo Park, CA that we covered in January have taken shapeinto a formal Kepler's 2020 initiative, announced via press release and at thestore's web site. "The project aims to create an innovative hybridbusiness model that includes a for-profit, community-owned-and-operatedbookstore, and a nonprofit organization that will feature on-stage authorinterviews, lectures by leading intellectuals, educational workshops and otherliterary and cultural events."

As noted previously, entrepreneur PraveenMadan is leading "a volunteer transition team [that] has begun work on acomprehensive development, financial and operational plan" for the store.Among the initiatives they are considering are: POD, "an e-book friendlyin-store browsing experience; concierge services to provide 'literarymatchmaking' for customers, book swaps and other innovative programs to bringpeople of all ages together around their shared love of books; and a speaker’sbureau with readership development services for emerging authors." Theyare launching a new capital campaign this month to raise $100,000 to supportongoing operations at the store.
Release

Combining the Television and Publishing Mindset

2012-01-31T21:39:00.000+13:00

Publishing Perspectives

"We don't have editors," says Michael Fabiano, head of recentlylaunched NBC Publishing, "we have producers, and that's an importantdistinction."
Read here.

DISCUSSION:
AreReports of the Death of the Book App Premature?
Publishers say book apps "cost too much to produce." Of course theydo, after all, they are publishing companies, not production companies.

Poem of the week: Francesca of Rimini by Lord Byron

2012-01-31T21:35:00.005+13:00

This fascinating translation of Dante was intended to be faithful, but presents its English reading in a distinctly Byronic fashion

Carol Rumens - guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 January 2012

Lord Byron, as pictured in a copy of a portrait by by Thomas Phillips. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Lord Byron, described by EH Coleridge as "de facto if not de jure a naturalised Italian", was at pains to produce a faithful translation ("word for word and line for line") in his excerpt from Canto five of Dante's Inferno. The translation, "Francesca of Rimini", is this week's poem, but if it leads you back to the magnificent original, all the better.

Byron's work on Canto five, and his other Italian literary projects, were inspired by his young mistress, the Countess Teresa Guiccioli. Like Francesca, Teresa was a native of Ravenna, bound in a marriage of convenience to an undesirable husband, and illicitly in love. As for Paolo and Francesca, shared reading was an erotic spur to the relationship between Byron and Guiccioli.

Matthew Reynolds, in his recent fascinating study, The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue, points out the connection between Byron's desire to be faithful to his girlfriend and to Dante. It's one of several intriguing connections. Dante's text (one Byron had, of course, previously visited in the first Canto of Don Juan) now offered to embody a far more personal and un-ironical story. It would permit impassioned self-disclosure, not only through the persona of Francesca, but through Dante's own ambivalent commentary.

For all his aspiration to fidelity, Byron cuts Dante's exposition altogether, so we lose the stunning imagery of the second circle of hell, with its whirling, lightless storm-winds buffeting like helpless birds the souls of those who, in life, could not control their lust. He even omits the first stanzas of Francesca's speech. The rhyming is usually deft, but the syntax often pays the price in convolution. The sentence in lines 7/8 (more simply translated as "Love, that excepts no one beloved from loving") is painfully inverted and suffers an awkward line-break. The repetitions of "yet" (line nine) suggest metrical padding as much as rhetorical intensity.

The tougher, sharper sounds of Byron's translation are not simply the result of the different sonorities of English, or the scarcity of feminine endings. They are related to interpretation. Byron, for example, hardens Dante's "doloroso passo" to "evil fortune": Dante's "desio" becomes the more emphatic "strong ecstacies" (the adjective "strong" occurs twice in a fairly short space of time). In Dante's text, Francesca names dispassionately the author/book responsible for the lovers' fall: "Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it." Byron omits Galeotto and substitutes, "Accurséd was the book and he who wrote it." Later, in the penultimate line, "smote" seems needlessly fierce. Even when Francesca talks, the poem has a forceful and slightly masculine tone.

Byron is an immense poet, combining the best of Augustan wit and intellect with the best of sensuously and politically charged Romanticism. For me, he is by far the outstanding Romantic, and he is as readable and relevant today as ever. The flaws in "Francesca of Rimini" do not diminish him. This is an occasional poem, as well as a translation, and it's foolish to demand that it be comparable with his original poetry, lyric or epic. However, the work is extremely interesting for the light it throws on poetry-translation itself, and the complexity of the relationships involved. A translation is never less than a transformation – and it may be, for the translator, self-revelation.

Taking the rough with the smooth, the reader can enjoy "Francesca of Rimini" as a poem in its own right. The personal touches – the infidelities, if you like – are not slips, but planned insurgencies, and part of the poem's tough vitality. And when Byron risks using feminine endings (surely associated in his mind with comedy and irony) there is pleasure for the ear, as well as a little humour ("the long-sighed-for smile of her"). The concluding lines have a sense of dramatic fatality that is hard to resist. Even the harsh "smote" earns its place by contributing to the rich alliterative music.

Francesca of Rimini
"The Land where I was born sits by the Seas
Upon that shore to which the Po descends,
With all his followers, in search of peace.
Love, which the gentle heart soon apprehends,
Seized him for the fair person which was ta'en
From me, and me even yet the mode offends.
Love, who to none beloved to love again
Remits, seized me with wish to please, so strong,
That, as thou see'st, yet, yet it doth remain.
Love to one death conducted us along,
But Caina waits for him our life who ended:"
These were the accents uttered by her tongue.—
Since I first listened to these Souls offended,
I bowed my visage, and so kept it till—
'What think'st thou?' said the bard; when I unbended,
And recommenced: 'Alas! unto such ill
How many sweet thoughts, what strong ecstacies,
Led these their evil fortune to fulfill!'
And then I turned unto their side my eyes,
And said, 'Francesca, thy sad destinies
Have made me sorrow till the tears arise.
But tell me, in the Season of sweet sighs,
By what and how thy Love to Passion rose,
So as his dim desires to recognize?'
Then she to me: 'The greatest of all woes
Is to remind us of our happy days
In misery, and that thy teacher knows.
But if to learn our Passion's first root preys
Upon thy spirit with such Sympathy,
I will do even as he who weeps and says.
We read one day for pastime, seated nigh,
Of Lancilot, how Love enchained him too.
We were alone, quite unsuspiciously.
But oft our eyes met, and our Cheeks in hue
All o'er discoloured by that reading were;
But one point only wholly us o'erthrew;
When we read the long-sighed-for smile of her,
To be thus kissed by such devoted lover,
He, who from me can be divided ne'er,
Kissed my mouth, trembling in the act all over:
Accurséd was the book and he who wrote!
That day no further leaf we did uncover.'
While thus one Spirit told us of their lot,
The other wept, so that with Pity's thralls
I swooned, as if by Death I had been smote,
And fell down even as a dead body falls."

March 20, 1820.

A New Honor for the Hatchet Job

2012-01-31T21:33:00.002+13:00

By JOHN WILLIAMS, New York Times

“A good hatchet job draws as much excited attention as a good book any day.” That’s the late, great critic Wilfrid Sheed, from a 1964 piece in which he laid out six rules reviewers should follow for “smoother, more satisfying demolitions.” On Feb. 7, The Omnivore, a British Web site that aggregates cultural criticism, will announce the winner of its first annual Hatchet Job of the Year Award for book reviews. Links to all eight finalists can be found here.
The Omnivore calls the new prize “a crusade against dullness, deference and lazy thinking.” This has the potential to be a crackling addition to the literary calendar, but the inaugural nominees are not a particularly vicious bunch. Some even err on the side of fair-mindedness, an unforgivable sin in this arena. Better to give in to hysteria, as Mark Twain did when he wrote to someone about Jane Austen: “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
So how do the contestants stack up by the lights of Mr. Sheed’s guidelines? His first rule: “Hatchet jobs should never run an inch longer than the victim merits. Three sentences are always better than twelve — the length being in itself a form of comment. The critic who goes on swinging after the tree is down draws attention to himself; he becomes overexposed. After all, perhaps he isn’t such a hot writer either.” Mr. Sheed acknowledged that the second rule — to avoid too many “short aphoristic dismissals unless your taste in them is absolutely infallible” — was the “complete opposite” of the first. “The contradictoriness of these first two rules may serve as a warning,” he wrote. “Hatcheting is not as easy as it looks.”

Seven of the eight nominees for The Omnivore’s honor appeared in daily newspapers, and none take up enough space to outstay their welcome. As for aphorisms, the lack of quotable punchiness is notable, with rare exceptions — like Leo Robson’s line about the author of a Martin Amis biography: “Richard Bradford considers himself the man for the job, but I doubt that anyone else will.”
In his third commandment, Mr. Sheed wrote, “Almost any quoted matter, encapsulated in sneers, will do,” but he modified that with the fourth: “On the other hand, two or three short quotes, however well chosen, are barely enough. A make-believe massacre requires an appearance, at least, of massive forces.” Lachlan Mackinnon’s review of Geoffrey Hill’s “Clavics,” a poetry collection, earned its nomination entirely in its last paragraph, by referring to the book as “the sheerest twaddle,” and by sticking its landing: “Writing this bad cannot earn the kind of attention Hill demands; he is wasting his time and trying to waste ours.” But at little more than 500 otherwise tepid words, it lacks the shock-and-awe approach of a massacre.
Full piece at the New York Times.

Rage against the machines

2012-01-31T15:39:00.000+13:00

NZ Herald - Saturday Jan 28, 2012 - Stephen Jewell

Left - Anthony McCarten.

AnthonyMcCarten didn't intend to write a follow-up to his novel Death of aSuperhero when he embarked upon his latest work, In the Absence of Heroes. But after coming up with the premise for a story involving a triangleof characters, it dawned on the Gloucestershire-based New Zealander that he hadalready created three ideal protagonists in the shape of Jim and Renata Delpeand their elder son, Jeffrey. Set some time after the death of the Delpes'youngest son, Donald, In the Absence of Heroes finds the trio retreating into their ownseparate computer-generated fantasy worlds as they struggle to come to termswith his premature passing.
"I originally came up with anentirely independent idea that ostensibly required a father, a wife and ason," recalls McCarten, 51. "Then I realised I had already inventedthem in the last book so I thought I would try and see if I could marry the twotogether and it was a natural fit. It added so much more because I couldexplore aspects not covered in the first novel, which was pretty preoccupiedwith its central character.
"I knew they were a family that wasn't connecting with each otheras they had been cast into a state of grief and isolation from each other inthe aftermath of Donald's death. It was the perfect setting to justify thisdisconnect between all the characters."

Death of a Superhero saw terminally ill Donald delving intothe testosterone-fuelled world of comic books. This time, the internet andonline role-playing games initially provide 18-year-old Jeff and his father,Jim, with some solace in In the Absence of Heroes.
"One of the pleasures of writing both books was being able to playwith different ways to tell a story," says McCarten. "I stumbled uponthis journey with Superhero, where I couldalmost jump tracks in the narrative across to another level of reality butstill pursue it as a story with allegorical meanings. The reader would imputewhat I was trying to get at and then jump back to the main story. Thatbinarism, which I've been interested in playing with as a narrative device, ishopefully even more fitting in this book, which is about computers and whatthey're doing to our own lives."
According to McCarten, the internet has had a detrimental impact on ourlives. "I'm not a computer game person but I'm really interested in thehold it has on popular culture," he says. "If you go into my localBlockbuster, you used to be faced with a wall of new movie releases but it'snow almost entirely given over to computer games while movies have beenghettoised to the back corner."
As the father of two teenage sons, McCarten worries about the wideninggap between the generations. "I'm very aware of the changing face offamily and the shift in parental roles that's going on. In the old days, yourkids would go and play in the playground, but now they're disappearing wheneverthey've got an internet connection into games of mass murder.
"What's the long-term significance of this going to be? Kids havealways played with guns, but the veracity of these games and the fact youbecome so immersed in them is disturbing, and the simulation of killing andbeing killed is incredibly realistic."
But the net is all around us, as McCarten demonstrates during ourmeeting at a Notting Hill brasserie by pulling out his iPhone to check hisemails. "It's like a tidal wave," he laughs. "It's taken outevery village and we're all drowning in it. It's now considered sociallyaggressive if you're not connected; that there must be something wrong with youif you don't have a smartphone, an email address or a Facebook account. We'reall being dragged under by this tsunami."
Rest of story at the New Zealand Herald

Sr Citizen by Charles Olsen

2012-01-31T12:39:00.001+13:00

Charles Olsen was born 1969 in Nelson, New Zealand. He then lived in England for many years before moving to Madrid in Spain in 2003, where he lives now.

He is a talented painter and poet and Sr Citizen, an attractive and appealing slender volume, is his first collection to be published . It features both his poetry and art.
Most of the poems are written in Spanish and have English translations.
You can read his poetry at pensamientoslentos.blogspot.

And for bio info go here - http://www.artreview.com/profile/CharlesOlsen

How To Read Poetry

2012-01-31T12:17:00.000+13:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqlPKnPTz7s&feature=youtu.be

Not to be taken seriously !

Outstanding Australian cook book publishers

2012-01-31T11:55:00.000+13:00

I reckon the Aussies publish the world's best cookbooks and leading the way are three book publishers who are hugely impressive in this field. There are others too of course but these guys are the trend setters. I refer of course to Hardie Grant Books, Lantern and Murdoch Books.
To illustrate my point I am looking today at three books currently on the dining room table, all from Hardie Grant Books.
They are Four Seasons - A Year of Italian Good by Manuela Darling-Gansser which I wrote about late last year when it was published.

And then the two that arrived just as I was heading off for the Christmas holidays, both large, spectacular and totally captivating.

MARQUE - a culinary adventure by Mark Best and Pasi Petanen
and
The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon

MARQUE - a culinary adventure
Way back in 2000 Annie and I were fortunate enough to be warmly recommended this restaurant by some NSW friends so we made a booking (from New Zealand) and bowled along on one of our three nights in Sydney. Even then in its first year of operation bookings were heavy and the only time we could get in was at 6.30pm. A bit early but it was Hobson's Choice. What a wonderful experience it turned out to be even though the location was then in the rather down-at-heel suburb of Surry Hills. There has been much gentrification since!
Mark's wife Valerie was the host and when she found out that one of our main reasons for visiting Sydney was to eat at Marque she sat with us at our table a couple of times and we learned about the opening of the restaurant and how it was going. Then towards the end of our wonderful meal Mark emerged from the kitchen and we had a pleasant chat with him for a few minutes before he was called back.
We have never forgotten that experience and have been back twice in the intervening years although didn't make contact with Valerie or Mark on those visits.We are planning a winter visit to Sydney this year so I'll be calling them in advance to make another booking.
So you can imagine my delight when Mark's cookbook turned up.
Marque is a highly illustrated, contemporary recipe book, celebrating and reflecting on Marque, this highly succesful Sydney restaurant. Also included is the personal journey of chef and owner Mark Best and approximately 80 of Marque's signature recipes. Most are complete dishes but the book also contains a myriad of smaller recipes and techniques which are the backbone of Mark Best's creations. A stunning book to treasure as both a compilation of beautiful recipes and a record of one of the world's best restaurants. And for me a special souvenir.
I should add that Marque is one of only four Australian restaurants to make the coveted top 100 in the San Pellegrino World's Best Restaurant award. RRP $79.99

The Complete Asian Cookbook
Charmaine Solomon - $59.99

This is a completely revised and updated edition of Charmaine Solomon's influential and iconic book of the same title first published 36 years ago back in 1976.And what a handsome new edition it is - a big beauty I would call it.
It covers more than 800 classic and contemporary dishes from fifteen countries - India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, The Philippines, China, Korea and Japan.
Written with the home cook in mind, Charmaine's recipes are straightforward, simple to follow and work every time. Recipe and chapter introductions give valuable information about how local dishes are prepared and served, while the comprehensive glossary explains unfamiliar ingredients (which are steadily more commonplace in supermarkets today). The Complete Asian Cookbook is a book that should be in the kitchens of every household.

And here are a couple of recipes from this wonderful book for you to try reproduced here by kind permission of the publisher:

URAP

Cooked vegetables with coconut

Serves: 4–6

½ teaspoon dried shrimp paste

65 g (1 cup) freshly grated coconut or 90 g (1 cup)desiccated

coconut soaked in 2 tablespoon hot water

1 small onion, finely chopped

½ teaspoon sambal ulek (page 250) or chilli powder

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons lemon juice

250 g (2 cups) sliced green beans

4 carrots, cut into thin strips

230 g (2 cups) fresh bean sprouts, trimmed

½ small cabbage, sliced

1 tinned bamboo shoot, thinly sliced

Wrap the shrimp paste in foil and roastunder a preheated

griller (broiler) for 5 minutes,turning once. Unwrap the

shrimp paste and place in a bowl alongwith the coconut, onion,

sambal ulek, salt and lemon juice,stirring well to combine.

Put all of the vegetables in a steamerbasket and pour the

coconut mixture over the top, reservingsome to use as a

garnish. Steam the vegetables for 5–8minutes, then turn

out onto a serving dish and sprinklewith the reserved

coconut mixture. Use as anaccompaniment or as a salad

in its own right.

KAUKSWE KYAW

Mixed fried noodles with chicken

Serves:6

500 g egg noodles

125 ml (½ cup) oil

4–5 dried shiitake mushrooms

5 onions, chopped

5 garlic cloves, chopped

500 g chicken breast fillets orthighs, thinly sliced

1 chicken liver, thinly sliced

1 chicken gizzard, parboiled,thinly sliced

2 tablespoons light soy sauce

½ cabbage, shredded

¼ white Chinese cabbage (wongbok), shredded

2 celery sticks, finely chopped

6 spring onions, thinly sliced

4 eggs, lightly beaten

Cook the noodles accordingto the packet instructions, then

drain well. Spread thenoodles on a large dish or tray. Pour

2 tablespoons of the oilover the top and toss gently to coat —

this stops the noodlessticking to each other.

Soak the mushrooms in hotwater for 20–30 minutes, then

drain, cut off and discardthe stems and thinly slice the caps.

Heat the remaining oil in awok or large heavy-based frying

pan over medium heat. Addthe onion and garlic and cook

until soft. Add the chickenmeat, liver and gizzard and stir-fry

until lightly brown on allsides, then add the soy sauce,

cover, and simmer gentlyuntil the meat is tender. Add the

cabbages, celery, mushroomand spring onion and continue

to stir-fry until thevegetables are tender. Remove from the

wok and set aside.

Put the noodles in the wokand toss gently for 3 minutes,

then remove. In the samewok, scramble the egg, adding a little

oil if necessary. Seasonwith salt and freshly ground black

pepper, to taste. When readyto serve, spread the noodles in a

serving dish, then coverwith the meat and vegetables. Garnish

with the scrambled egg.Serve hot or cold.

Accolade to publisher:
Hardie Grant I extend my warm thanks and hearty congratulations to you for all the outstanding cookbook publishing you deliver to us. I am proud to have your books on my shelf and to frequently use recipes from them as well as often just reading them for foodie reading pleasure.
I salute you and your chef authors, photographers, designers, editors, stylists, publicists and indeed all the team required to carry out such special publishing.

The Tuesday Poem

2012-01-31T11:54:00.003+13:00

Today's Editor, Helen Rickerby writes:

One of the cool things about the Tuesday Poem, and having your turn at being the editor of tis hub blog especially, is having the opportunity to share your favourite poems with other people. ‘Appointment with Sophie Calle’ is one of my favourite poems, and I would love to have shared the whole thing with you, but it’s a very long poem. So I’ve just chosen four little pieces, which are poems in themselves, to act as a taster. I hope you’ll go and seek it out and read the whole thing. You’ll find it in Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins, by Paula Green (left), which was published by Auckland University Press in 2007.

It's a wonderful book, but this poem (or poem sequence - with long poems divided into sections like this, there is always that dilemma of whether it's a poem or a sequence, or both) is a stand out for me, and one I've returned to over and over. The Sophie Calle of the title is a French conceptual artist - I hadn't heard of her before reading this poem, but her artwork is worth reading about. She is someone who weaves lives - her own and other people's - into art. One project involved getting her mother to hire a private investigator to follow Calle around and take photographs of her. He didn't know she knew he was following her, and she led him around places that meant something to her. The aim was an attempt 'to provide photographic evidence of my own existence'.

Full Tuesday Poem post - link here.

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd

2012-01-31T11:40:00.000+13:00

Long-time book trade personality Andrew Rumbles reviews William Boyd's latest on his blog founded last November, AndrewTalksBooks .

J'aime Paris: A taste of Paris in 200+ culinary destinations

2012-01-31T11:07:00.000+13:00

Was there a more beautiful book than this one published anywhere in 2011? Not that I came across. Some adjectives that can be applied to this stunner include beautiful, alluring, awesome, magnificent, classy, dazzling, elegant, ravishing - I had better stop there but truly this is the most lavishly photographed book you will come across in a long long time.

I may never visit any of the famous and not so famous foodie haunts featured in it but I shall treasure this book as my souvenir of the twenty or so times I have been fortunate enough to visit that most appealing of cities. Believe me it is a stunning. And I must add too a snip at NZ$60.

In the book you join France's most celebrated chef, Alain Ducasse, on a personal journey around Paris as he reveals his favourite foodie haunts including restaurants, cafes, local bistros, patisseries and other artisanal stores. From a morning croissant on the Canal Saint-Martin to a magical dinner on the Eiffel Tower, Alain Ducasse takes you on a stunning gourmet tour of Paris. From his own 3-star restaurants to his favourite icecream store, to his insider's tip on the best local creperie in town, Ducasse share the stories, histories and encounters with the men and women who make up Paris' extraordinary culinary landscape. Spectacularly photographed, Paris by Alain Ducasse showcases the gourmet highlights of the capital, telling of the Chef's passion for cookery and his sincere love of Paris.

It is a work that will set all admirers of beauty, excellence and authenticity dreaming, wherever they may live. I am dreaming now, here in Auckland, NZ as I write this and again browse through the pages.

Also included, tucked handily in to the back inside cover, is a pocket size listing of all the places listed in the book complete with address details, websites, and a brief description of each. The book itself is 598 pages long - not one to take on a plane as it is likely to contribute to excess baggage problems! And the restaurant note book included runs to 56 pages.

Don't miss this one.

As Barnes & Noble Goes, So Goes the Future of Publishing

2012-01-31T10:44:00.001+13:00

From Sam Sattler's Book Case Blog. (always worth a visit).

A New York Barnes and Noble Location

Not all that long ago, I was able to choose between buying a a recently published book from Barnes and Noble, B. Dalton, Borders, Book Stop, Crown Books, and even a handful of really good, but much smaller, booksellers. Now there are just Barnes and Noble and the Books-A-Million chains, the latter of which has never had much of a presence in Houston. When they first appeared, all of the national chains were harshly accused of running out of business all the little guys that had been selling books locally for decades. The chains were most definitely cast as the bad guys, and they probably were. Now, however, I would kill to have them back because even the last standing giant, Barnes and Noble, may not be long for this world and the little guys are not likely to return even if that happens.

The CNBC website has posted a heartbreaking, and terrifying, New York Times article clearly presenting the predicament that traditional publishers are in today. The publishers recognize that the survival of Barnes and Noble is now closely tied to their own future survival. This is true, despite the fact, that the bookseller is walking a very fine line itself as it tries to compete with Amazon in the e-book market while not, as a result, entirely killing off so much of the demand for printed books that it has to close its brick and mortar bookstores. Without Barnes and Noble's bookstores, the future of printed books will be much different than today - and many experts are already predicting that Barnes and Noble has started down the path of a long, slow death spiral of its own.

Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense, suddenly seems a reach. Marketing books via Twitter, and relying on reviews, advertising and perhaps an appearance on the “Today” show doesn’t sound like a winning plan.

What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.

While publishers’ fates are closely tied to Barnes & Noble, said John Sargent, the C.E.O. of Macmillan, it’s not all about them. “Anybody who is an author, a publisher, or makes their living from distributing intellectual property in book form is badly hurt,” he said, “if Barnes & Noble does not prosper.”

If, as a true book-lover, any of this scares you or makes you nervous, you should read the entire article. It will terrify you and make you wonder if Jeff Bevos, head of Amazon, is on the verge of killing off the industry dearest to our hearts...and yet, few of us can resist the lure of Amazon's cheap prices and quick delivery. Are we nuts?

‘The Help’ Wins Three SAG Awards

2012-01-31T10:43:00.002+13:00

By Maryann Yin on Galley Cat January 30, 2012

The film adaptation of Katheryn Stockett‘s The Help took three awards at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards last night, including Best Ensemble Cast.
Follow this link for the full list of winners. Lead actress Viola Davis and supporting actress Octavia Spencer (both pictured, via) also won SAG Awards for their roles as Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson. Spencer recently received the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.
Both Davis and Spencer have been nominated for Academy Awards. The Envelope had this quote from Spencer: “I love taking men home. I would be lying if I didn’t say to you I would love to win an Oscar. But we have a group of brilliantly talented actresses, and it’s not a foregone conclusion that because I’ve won these [awards] then I’ll win [the Oscar].” (Via The L.A. Times)

Mary McCallum's Tuesday Poem: The Barn

2012-01-31T09:20:00.001+13:00

Tuesday Poem: The Barn

Here, it is that we are
a breath outwards
returning, the gate –
on a slant – the paint pulling
from the wood – closes –
we let it,
let go of the road,
the run of fences, the tin-cut
tilting hills, the world’s rim, let
the dog out to run,
and we drive
with the windows wound
down - lavender -
olive trees - cypresses.
The barn, at last. Blushes! – there
you are.

Here, it is that we are
a breath outwards
returning, and not much
more than a breath this time,
not much more than skin
and bone,
rubbed thin by all
our comings and goings, all this
living in the light. We can see
through our scraps of selves
to paint the colour
of ox-blood wrinkling
like the skin on milk around
the double-hung windows.
In the exposed
wood, in the beginnings of
rot, in the rare blushing light.

Here, it is – (breath outwards)
a glimpse (returning) – that time –
when the paint clung so
tightly the timber groaned,
and in the stampeding wind –
in the hot sun – under the welt of stars –
the barn was an instrument
filled with our spit and wild
breathing. Daughter, plump
as a pigeon,
flapping on the ground
by a tree in a bag for planting,
and her brothers
snickering like ponies
on their way back from the frogpond –
their tins and string and
percussive boots.

Light is trickery.
The paint
blisters and peels,
and it’s all we can do
not to help it off.
My knuckles
rest
on the warm wood.
I lean close.
I feel it - or someone - humming.

Mary McCallum

This is a poem I worked on over the summer up at the place we call The Barn. It's ours and it's blssful - as a place to be alone and with family, and to write. There are some photos of our summer here with a glimpse of The Barn.

The poem was written to contribute to an exhibition as part of the Fringe Festival here in Wellington. It's called Translucent Landscapes and it's opening March 1. There are 11 of us involved: a number of visual artists (including installation artists, videomedia artists etc), a composer, and me. I have written four poems for the exhibition so far and am wondering how to present them now (follow the link to Translucent Landscapes above for some thinking on that.)

In this poem, the theme of the exhibition is concentrated around the line: 'Light is trickery' - the way light can 'show' us what's real and what's not - shining onto the present and yet somehow 'lifting' it like paint - summoning the past as real as if it's there in front of us - the paint - the wood - the paint - the wood - and the way light, too, can wear away at what's there now - 'too much living in the light' - so, again, the past comes through - bidden and unbidden ... these things preoccupy me...

At the Barn there's no internet connection - although I can use my phone when I need to. There's also no Mac computer, just an old laptop which is rather slow. So, I write a lot by hand at the Barn without interruption, which means poems written there are different somehow.

Do go and read the Paul Green poem taster at the Tuesday Poem hub - and the fascinating commentary by Helen Rickerby. Truly it's worth it.

BLOG STATS

2012-01-31T09:08:00.001+13:00

Almost 14,000 visitors last week, around 2000 more than the average week.

They came from:

51% New Zealand

12% USA

8% UK

5% Australia

2% each France, Canada, India

1% each Germany/Italy/Spain

15% Spread across 51 other countries

Excitement at the post office

2012-01-31T06:58:00.001+13:00

Three individual parcels in the mail, each containing a book, all special books:

LETTERS OF FRANK SARGESON
Selected and edited by Sarah Shieff
Vintage
Hardback - $49.99
Enthusiastically reviewed by Patrick Evans in the Sunday Star Times yesterday so far I have only dipped into it but I must say what I have read I have found riveting.

PHANTOM
Jo Nesbo
Harvill Secker - $37.99
Hey hey hey, yes, being published in NZ on 3 February (nearly 6 weeks ahead of the UK publication) the much anticipated new Jo Nesbo thriller featuring Harry Hole. Can't wait to get into this so it is promoted to number three in the bedside pile!

THE DAY SHE CRADLED ME
Sacha de Bazin
Black Swan - $37.99
A debut novel from this Nelson-based author. An historical novel, which the publishers say has been exhaustively researched, featuring the life of Millie Dean, the only NZ woman ever to be hanged, and a legendary figure in Southland.

Accused of infanticide and awaiting trial and then sentence, Minnie confides in the Reverend Lindsay. Alternating between these two contrasting personalities, the novel tells Minnie's version of events. From her oppressive upbringing in Victorian Scotland to adulthood in Southland, Minnie battles her own nature and the hardships of colonial life and social hypocrisy. Once Minnie is tried, she has to face her impending execution, while the Reverend Lindsay, who has become her unlikely ally, fights to prevent her paying the ultimate price for society's sins.
This book is going to attract a lot of attention.

About the author:

Sacha de Bazin (right) is a 38 year old mother of 5 children, who range in ages from 12 down to 2. Previously she was a primary school teacher, with a BA in English. She grew up in Tokoroa, studied in Auckland, raised children in Canterbury and recently moved to Nelson. This is her first novel.

New publisher, new New Zealand author

2012-01-31T06:57:00.001+13:00

An appealing looking novel arrived in the mail last week from Hachette NZ published under the Two Roads imprint. I had not heard of the Two Roads imprint before, it just said inside the book, a Hodder & Stoughton imprint, so I wrote and enquired about it. Two Roads Publisher Lisa Highton has now replied:

When I started Two Roads books just a year ago I found whatI wanted in a book, either to read or to publish, came down to just four words:stories voices places lives. Like many readers I wanted a strongpage-turning story, told in an original voice, transporting readers toother places and telling us about other people's lives and, thereby, ourown.

People often ask me 'how do I know I want to publish a book - fiction ornon-fiction?' It's actually a kind of magic, almost a physicalreaction...I knew I wanted to publish TheSea on Our Skin from the moment I set foot on theisland's beach, I could hear the waves, smell the sea and the firstwords seemed to say... let me tell you a story...and this is avery beguiling story from a new and talented writer. It seemed a perfectfit for a new fiction list.

On themorning of the wedding of Ioane Matete and Amalia Hoko, it rained. The cloudsthat had been waiting, dark and swollen for days, gave in to their impatienceand a torrent of water pounded the island. The damp between Ioane’s toes madehis feet itch and the itch in his feet made him desperate to move on. He was anexplorer, not used to staying still. As soon as the wedding – by which he meantthe wedding night – was over, he would leave his new bride and set out oncemore on his travels.

Surprisinglyfew books are set in the South Seas and maybe it took a travelling Scottishgirl to write one (after all there is precedent, with Robert Louis Stevensonaka Tusitala). Madeleine's writing has a kind of island rhythm as wefollow the story of Amalia, her marriage to Ioane and their four unusualchildren.

About the author:

Madeleine Tobert
Originally from Scotland, Madeleine spent several years in the Pacific islands. She tried to leave but found she just couldn’t. She now lives in Auckland with her Fijian husband. The Sea on Our Skin is her first book.
Madeleine’s website here

Footnote:

Thanks Lisa, The Sea on Our Skin looks most appealing, and is now in my reading pile.Best wishes with your new imprint.

The self-epublishing bubble

2012-01-31T06:51:00.002+13:00

In August 2011, Ewan Morrison published an article entitled Are Books Dead and Can Authors Survive?. Here, he tracks the self-epublishing euphoria of the last five months and argues that we are at the start of an epublishing bubble

Ewan Morrison - guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 January 2012

Unlikely to last very long ... a bubble rises. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters

The internet is full of ironies. I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things. I've been on an End of Books reading tour since August and it turns out that what the internet gurus say about consumers being more willing to pay for events, speeches and gigs, rather than buying cultural objects, is now becoming true.
At the other end of the political spectrum from me, among the epublishing enthusiasts and digital fundamentalists, similar ironies are playing out: there is now a boom industry in "How to get rich writing ebooks" manuals, as well as a multitude of blogs offering tips and services, and a new breed of specialists who'll charge you anything from $37 to $149 to get your ebook into shape.
This all seems like a repeat of the boom in get-rich-quick manuals and "specialists" that appeared around blogs and etrading. Did anyone actually get rich from writing blogs, you may ask? Well, according to Jaron Lanier (author of You are not a Gadget) there are only a handful of people in the world who can prove that they make a living from blogging: it's entirely possible that more money was made by those who wrote and sold the how-to manuals than by the bloggers themselves. But who cares, right? It's all part of the euphoria of digital change, and technological innovation is as unstoppable a force as fate. Reports show that paper book sales are "tanking" – down a massive 54.3% while ebook sales are up triumphantly by 138%. The revolution will be epublished, and we're all going to be part of it.
All of this ebook talk is becoming a business in itself. Money is being made out of thin air in this strange new speculative meta-practice: there are seminars, conferences and courses springing up everywhere, even at the Society of Authors (a writers' union which, until recently, was largely against epublication). Television and radio programmes are being made about self-epublishing (I've personally been asked to speak about it on 12 occasions since August). Everyone can be a writer now: it only takes 10 minutes to upload your own ebook, and according to the New York Times "81% of people feel they have a book in them ... And should write it"

Full story at The Guardian.

While at Galley Cat:

Should Entrepreneurs Self-Publish?

By Jason Boog on Galley Cat, January 30, 2012

Formula Capital managing director and author James Altucher wrote a TechCrunch post this weekend explaining “Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book.”
In the article, Altucher bashed the Penguin publicity team that worked on one of his earlier books and urged entrepreneurs to abandon traditional publishing. What do you think of his provocative article?
Check it out: “You’re an entrepreneur because you feel you have a product or an idea or a vision that stands out among your competitors (if you don’t stand out, pack it in and come up with a new idea). You know how to do something better than anyone else in the world. How do let the world know that you are better? A business card won’t cut it. People will throw it away. And everyone’s got a website with an ‘About’ button. Give away part (or all) of your ideas in a book.” (Link via Publishers Weekly; Image via Google Plus)

Erotic books popular with e-readers

2012-01-31T06:48:00.005+13:00

CBC News - Posted: Jan 28, 2012

Lady Mechatronic and the Steampunked Pirates is one of many popular erotic e-books offered by B.C.'s eXtasy Books. ((Devine Destinies/eXtasy books))

Sales have soared for erotic literature with the advent of e-readers such as Kobo and Kindle, with one company in British Columbia reaping the benefits.
Tina Haveman, who's based in Squamish, B.C., north of Vancouver, owns a busy digital erotic publishing company and she says there are a lot of “closet readers” who would never admit to liking that kind of literature.
“Customers are starting to discover them and finding that they can read certain books that they do not want other people to see and in privacy,” Haveman, who runs eXtasy books, told CBC Radio.
The e-publisher notes that sales took off in early 2010 and doubled last year. She expects them to triple in 2012 with a majority of downloaders being female. Xtasy has more than 1,000 titles in its “store” including ones such as the paranormal Dragon’s Pearl, the hybrid fantasy/Victorian Lady Mechatronic and the Steampunk Pirates and the Western-tinged Dead Man’s Diamond.
“Women read a lot more than men. It’s always been that way.”
But within that group, interests are wide: from inspirational romance to stories involving werewolves to gay romance – each selling for between $3 and $4 online.
Nathan Maharaj, Kobo’s merchandising director, called eXtasy a Canadian success story.
“It’s reduced barriers to entry for publishers as well as for customers looking to get into it.”
“You can actually, in some ways, enjoy the fact that you’re doing something a little bit naughty in public,” Knabe said. “You could be reading your e-reader on public transit.”
According to Maharaj, sexy books are regularly cracking bestseller lists: “At any given moment in the list of the top 100 most popular titles on Kobo in any given territory there’s always some work of erotica in there."

Russian billionaire leads a London bookshop revolution

2012-01-31T06:41:00.004+13:00

Adam Sherwin - The Indpendent - Saturday 28 January 2012

It is a literary innovation that will delight London's influx of Russians – and intrigue the intelligence services. Waterstones will open a Russian-language "bookshop" within its flagship Piccadilly store next month.

Russian-speaking assistants will be recruited for the shop, which is the personal passion of Alexander Mamut, the Russian billionaire whose A&NN Group bought the high-street bookseller last year in a £53m deal.
Mr Mamut, who says he enjoys reading high-quality literature in Russian and English, has named the new store "Slova", Russian for "words". It will be housed on the ground floor mezzanine level of the Piccadilly branch and contain almost 5,000 titles.
Slova is expected to become a meeting point for the more literary-minded Russians in the capital. As well as stocking the classics of Russian literature – Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov – it will showcase commercial writers such as Boris Akunin and Polina Dashkova, Russia's most successful crime author, who has sold 40 million books. The move is the next stage in Mr Mamut's plan to revitalise Waterstones under James Daunt, its new managing director, by serving local communities.Mr Daunt told The Bookseller magazine: "For Russophiles and the large, vibrant Russian community in London, we aim to make Slova an irresistible literary and cultural destination. One won't be surprised at the source of the idea, given Waterstones' ownership."

Full story at The Independent.

A statement from Peter Robertson, President of Interlitq (now at www.interlitq.wordpress.com)

2012-01-31T06:28:00.002+13:00

“Itwas, of course, disappointing that Arts Council England did not choose to lookoutwards but, in any case, we were notdefeated, but only strengthened by thatapparent setback, and Interlitq has now regrouped successfully in order toengage in its essential undertaking—which is to publish the finestinternational literature. And, to that end, publication of Interlitq has, forthe time being, migrated to

www.interlitq.wordpress.com

Theobjective of Interlitq is to continue to publish fine literature, in an arrayof languages, and on a daily basis, instead of publishing only every threemonths which was, in fact, limiting. Let me stress that Interlitq is alsocommitted to providing a continuous platform for outstanding New Zealandliterature and, to this end, we have on our new site already published work byNZ writers such as Martha Morseth:

http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/interlitq-is-delighted-to-publish-its-poem-in-english-for-today-13-01-11-on-achieving-by-new-zealand-author-martha-morseth/

http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/interlitq-is-delighted-to-publish-its-poem-in-english-for-today-19-01-12-at-night-by-new-zealand-author-martha-morseth/

JaneSeaford:

http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/interlitq-is-delighted-to-publish-its-prose-in-english-for-25-01-12-the-story-one-of-those-days-by-new-zealand-author-jane-seaford/

andKaren Zelas:

http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/interlitq-is-delighted-to-publish-its-poem-in-english-for-23-01-12-desire-by-new-zealand-author-karen-zelas-a-contributor-to-issue-11-of-interlitq-2/

http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/interlitq-is-delighted-to-publish-its-poem-in-english-for-25-01-12-lunch-with-cook-by-new-zealand-author-karen-zelas-a-contributor-to-issue-11-of-interlitq/

andwe will be publishing a further two poems by Karen Zelas this week, with thepoem “Waiting” being Interlitq’s poem for 30.01.12.

Furthermore,we are now looking forward to publishing many NZ writers over coming weeksalongside outstanding artwork by NZ artists.

Ivery much hope that you will all continue to enjoy Interlitq, which will continueto look outwards, to nurture literary talent across the world.”

PeterRobertson

Franzen: E-books Bad for Society

2012-01-31T06:19:00.001+13:00

The Daily Beast

First it was the iPhone, now it's the e-book. Jonathan Franzen, (left-Neilson Barnard / Getty Images) the author of Freedom and The Corrections, launched a passionate defense of the printed book—and an attack on e-books—at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia. “The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology,” said Franzen. “And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model.” Wondering whether nonelectronic print will be around in 50 years, he said he fears that “it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

Read it at The Telegraph

The Bookstore’s Last Stand - everyone has something to say about Barnes & Noble

2012-01-31T06:18:00.000+13:00

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times -William J. Lynch Jr., chief executive of Barnes & Noble, with a wall full of e-readers at its site in Silicon Valley, where 300 employees are building the company's digital side.

By JULIE BOSMAN - New York Times - Published: January 28, 2012

A magazine display at a Barnes & Noble store. The company's C.E.O. says the idea that e-readers will make bookstores obsolete is nonsense.

IN March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim — with glee or dread — will go the way of vinyl records.

No, the engineers were instead fixated on the forces that are upending the way books are published, sold, bought and read: e-books and e-readers. Working in secret, behind an unmarked door in a former bread bakery, they rushed to build a device that might capture the imagination of readers and maybe even save the book industry.

They had six months to do it.

Running this sprint was, of all companies, Barnes & Noble, the giant that helped put so many independent booksellers out of business and that now finds itself locked in the fight of its life. What its engineers dreamed up was the Nook, a relative e-reader latecomer that has nonetheless become the great e-hope of Barnes & Noble and, in fact, of many in the book business.

Several iterations later, the Nook and, by extension, Barnes & Noble, at times seem the only things standing between traditional book publishers and oblivion.

Inside the great publishing houses — grand names like Macmillan, Penguin and Random House — there is a sense of unease about the long-term fate of Barnes & Noble, the last major bookstore chain standing. First, the megastores squeezed out the small players. (Think of Tom Hanks’s Fox & Sons Books to Meg Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner in the 1998 comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”.) Then the chains themselves were gobbled up or driven under, as consumers turned to the Web. B. Dalton Bookseller and Crown Books are long gone. Borders collapsed last year.

No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point? Such fears came to the fore in early January, when the company projected that it would lose even more money this year than Wall Street had expected. Its share price promptly tumbled 17 percent that day.

Lurking behind all of this is Amazon.com, the dominant force in books online and the company that sets teeth on edge in publishing. From their perches in Midtown Manhattan, many publishing executives, editors and publicists view Amazon as the enemy — an adversary that, if unchecked, could threaten their industry and their livelihoods.

Full story at the New York Times.

While over at PublishersLunch they have this to say:

Everyone Wants to Write About Barnes & Noble

Towards the end of the NYT business sectionarticle that follows the standard narrative, they note that in BN's 300-personPalo Alto division, "engineers were putting final touches on their fifthe-reading device, a product that executives said would be released sometimethis spring." The story also says that ceo William Lynch "plans toexperiment with slightly smaller stores."

Meanwhile, Amazon offers another nebulousgrowth statistic to the paper. For the nine-week holiday sales period, endingDecember 31, "Kindle unit sales, including both the Kindle Fire ande-reader devices, increased 177 percent over the same period last year."(Amazon will report earnings for the quarter on Tuesday afternoon.)

Separately, though Bloomberg doesn'texactly nail the details, it appears that Barnes & Noble's deal withWaterstones to bring the Nook to the UK has become less of a secret, though thelaunch is still a ways off.
NYT
Bloomberg

And at Book2Book:

B&N to ink first overseas Nook deal with Waterstones?

Barnes & Noble is developing a partnership with U.K.'s Waterstones Booksellers Ltd. to sell the digital tablet in its 300 locations this year. Analysts are skeptical of the success.

Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, and Fiona Allen, a spokeswoman for Waterstones, declined to comment.

crainsnewyork.com
theverge.com
Bloomberg

Perhaps the Greatest Comics Book Store in the World

2012-01-31T06:13:00.003+13:00

Publishing Perspectives

"People don’t revere the old comics enough," says Manuel Morin (above), ownerof Paris' BD Spirit, which offers 50-80,000 titles, many of them collectorsitems.
Link here for story.

DISCUSSION:
WhatMakes a Great Comic Book Store?
The one thing a great comics book store must do -- unlike a bookstore -- isensure you never forget your in a comic book store.

The Clark explores the art of copying ~ "Copycat: Reproducing Works of Art"

2012-01-31T06:10:00.005+13:00

Art Knowledge News - Posted: 29 Jan 2012 0

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA.- The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute opened itslatest exhibition, Copycat: Reproducing Works of Art, on January 29. Exploringthe line between innovation and imitation, the exhibition features 50 printsand photographs that are both original works of art and repetitions ofdrawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and architecture created by otherartists. The exhibition highlights the complex process of copying by studyingreplications of many rarely seen works from the Clark’s permanent collection,including those by Albrecht Dürer, Paul Cézanne, Eugène Delacroix, Rembrandtvan Rijn, Roger Fenton, and Édouard Manet, among others. The exhibition alsomarks the first public presentation of one of the Clark’s recent acquisitions,Jean Dughet’s series The Seven Sacraments. Copycat will be on view in theClark’s Manton Research Center building through April 1st.

WHITE CLOUD WORLDS - NZ Science Fiction and Fantasy Art Exhibition and Book

2012-01-30T15:14:00.000+13:00

White Cloud Worlds is a never-before seen collection of science fiction and fantasy artwork from New Zealand, 'The Land of the Long White Cloud'.

Embark upon a journey of exploration into a wealth of visually rich worlds and imaginings, conjured to life by 27 established and emerging artists.

The artists are profiled with a selection of their art accompanied by text written in their own unique voice, sharing their origins, inspirations and a rare glimpse into how they work.

White Cloud Worlds includes written contributions from some of the world’s most celebrated leaders in the fields of science fiction and fantasy art, such as Guillermo Del Toro, Richard Taylor, Alan Lee and John Howe.

This book honours the imaginations of the artists it showcases and gives readers a unique opportunity to be a part of their worlds.

White Cloud Worlds is published by Harper Collins.It is also available in a special slipcase edition which includes a limited edition signed print by one of the artists.

The White Cloud Worlds exhibition will open at the Lopdell House Gallery in Titirangi, Auckland on February 16th and will run through until the 15th of April.

‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and Its Sci-Fi Heroine

2012-01-30T14:46:00.000+13:00

By PAMELA PAUL - The New York Times - Published: January 27, 2012

Bookish girls tend to mark phases of their lives by periods of intense literary character identification. Schoolgirls of the ’70s had their Deenie and Sally J. Freedman and Margaret moments, muddling through adolescence in the guise of one Judy Blume heroine or another. And for almost a century and a half, girls have fluctuated between seasons of Amy and Meg and Jo March, imagining themselves alternately with blond corkscrew curls, eldest sister wisdom or writerly ambitions.

But for those who came of age anytime during the past half-century, the most startling transformation occurred upon reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It was under L’Engle’s influence that we willed ourselves to be like Meg Murry, the awkward girl who suffered through flyaway hair, braces and glasses but who was also and to a much greater degree concerned with the extent of her own intelligence, the whereabouts of her missing scientist father, the looming threat of conformity and, ultimately, the fate of the universe.

Meg Murry, in short, was a departure from the typical “girls’ book” protagonist — as wonderful as many of those varied characters are. Meg was a heroine of science fiction.

In 1962, when “A Wrinkle in Time,” after 26 rejections, was acquired by John Farrar at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, science fiction by women and aimed at female readers was a rarity. The genre was thought to be down-market and not up to the standards of children’s literature — the stuff of pulp and comic books for errant schoolboys. Even today, girls and grown women are not generally fans. Half of 18- to 24-year-old men say that science fiction is their favorite type of book, compared with only one-fourth of young women, according to a 2010 study by the Codex Group, a consulting firm to the publishing industry. And while a sizable portion of men continue to read science fiction throughout their lives, women don’t. Thirty-two percent of adult male book buyers are science-fiction fans compared with only 12 percent of women. When Joanna Russ, one of the few successful female science-fiction writers, died last year, her obituary in The New York Times referred to her as a writer who helped “deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen — women.”

Full story at The New York Times.

THE SISTERS BROTHERS

2012-01-30T14:38:00.001+13:00

So many people enthused to me about this book, it received so many positive reviews, and it was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, so in the end while on holiday I got myself a copy and read it. And I have to say I loved it.
From the terrific cover and great title to the captivating story I was enchanted; and even though the story is about a couple of hired killers,and is set in California during the gold rushes of the 1850's, it had me laughing out loud on several occasions.
I reckon the Cohen Brothers could make it into a great movie - that would have a nice ring to it - Cohen Brothers make the Sisters Brothers!
Allen & Unwin - $36.99

A local politician, a music reviewer and an author walk into a bar…

2012-01-30T11:28:00.001+13:00

Sound like the beginning of a good story?

Come along to True Stories Told Live on Monday 13 February and hear some fantastic stories, told by local politician Ray Ahipene-Mercer, renowned music store owner and reviewer Colin Morris, and authors Barbara Else, Fleur Beale (left), Catherine Robertson, with two artistic friends.

True Stories Told Live events brim with live, unrehearsed tales, told by people with a flair for storytelling. Stories make us laugh, cry and crinkle our foreheads – there is no better way to energise a quiet Monday evening.

The event, with the theme of family holidays, will raise funds for the Book Council’s Writers in Schools programme, which has been bringing books, authors and children together since 1973.

Education Manager Sarah Forster says ‘Family holidays bring out the best and the worst in people. Prepare to be enthralled and dismayed at the antics of these brilliant creative people.’

'At True Stories Told Live, the story must have a beginning, middle and an end, and it must be true, but that’s all’, says the Book Council’s Susanna Andrew.

Andrew says that past True Stories events prove that something happens in the exchange of a story. ‘What makes these events so special is not just the confessional quality of the performance. It's also the suspension of judgement that's required, a critical faculty we would normally employ, consciously or not, when we embark on a novel, start a film, or sit down in the theatre.’

Tickets are $15 for members of the Book Council, or $20 for non-members.
Go to www.bookcouncil.org.nz to book your tickets and learn more about us.

True Stories Told Live – Family Holidays
Where: Meow Café, 9 Edward St, Wellington
When: 6.15pm, Monday 13 February

Waitangi Day launch for Gavin Bishop's 'The House that Jack Built' in English and Te Reo Maori

2012-01-30T11:24:00.001+13:00

Gecko Press is pleased to launch a new edition of The House that Jack Built by Gavin Bishop, and the first Te Reo Maori edition - Koinei te Whare na Haki i Hanga - as part of Porirua's popular, multi-cultural Waitangi Day event, The Festival of the Elements . The Festival will take place from 11am till after 7pm at Te Rauparaha Park and Arena and Pataka Museum, Porirua on Monday 6 February.

Throughout the day, the book will be read in both English (by Gavin Bishop) and Te Reo Maori (by Moira Wairama) in the storytelling gazebo at NZ Community Trust Stadium (Te Rauparaha Arena). Readings will take place every hour from 11.30am to 4.30pm.

At 2.35pm, author/illustrator Gavin Bishop (left) and translator Piripi Walker will discuss The Story of the House that Jack Built: Art and Translation at the Helen Smith Community Meeting Room at Pataka Museum (duration: 45 minutes).

Throughout the day, children can help build a giant 'House that Jack Built' sculpture using natural materials, with artist Michelle Whale in the NZ Community Trust Stadium.

Martin Edmond reviews Road Markings

2012-01-30T11:19:00.000+13:00

A nation exacts a penance from those who dared to leave her wrote James Joyce, explaining why his only play was called Exiles; the line is much quoted but most people who do so leave off the next bit: payable on their return. Michael Jackson left his native New Zealand while still a young man, in the first instance for Melbourne, where he worked among the homeless and had his first encounters with Aboriginality. Later he did similar work in London and the Congo and later still went to Sierra Leone, beginning there the fieldwork that has distinguished his vocation as an anthropologist. He has been far more diligent in his repayments than JJ ever was, returning again and again and, each time, illuminating forgotten corners of what he calls the diffuse and dimly lit world of New Zealand’s collective imagination.

In Road Markings, published as a ebook by Rosa Mira Books of Dunedin and subtitled An Anthropologist in the Antipodes, Jackson sets out on a road trip through his natal land that is also an inquiry into the idea of firstness: the place of origin in our consciousness, the meaning of beginnings, the aura of the primary as a way of authenticating both personal experience and historical truth. This might sound daunting as a theme but his exploration of it is not: this is autobiographical writing of the highest order, in which the personal is resolutely explored but never just for its own sake: Jackson’s own history, that of his family and friends, his colleagues, his mentors, his literary heroes, are woven together to make, not so much a tapestry as a finely calibrated, gorgeously textured, many-coloured mahi harakeke.
To read Martin's full review link to his blog here.

My Week With Marilyn - reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

2012-01-30T07:06:00.000+13:00

In the 50 years since her death the legend of Marilyn Monroe has lost none of its power to fascinate. One of this summer’s must-see films is My Week With Marilyn starring Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench. It’s based on two diaries written in 1956 by Colin Clark, then an Oxford graduate who landed a job as a gofer on the set of The Prince And The Showgirl.

Usually I prefer to read the original book before I see the film and conveniently HarperCollins has just re-released the two diaries in one volume. My Week With Marilyn by Colin Clark ($24.99) is an engrossing period piece. It may not shed a great deal of light on who Marilyn really was beneath the veneer of fame and beauty – Clark like most men fell under her spell and this clouded his judgement – but it does provide a glimpse into an extraordinary and vanished world.

The reason two diaries cover the same period is Clark waited until after Marilyn’s death before publishing the details of his more intimate relationship with the star.

The first diary is the longest. It opens with Clark’s dogged attempts to get a job at Laurence Olivier’s film company. He gets his foot in the door partly because he is well-connected – his parents live in a castle and are friends with everyone from Olivier to Noel Coward. Still he seems likeable enough: cheeky but charming, a lover of parties and pretty girls, and breezily determined to break into the movies.

At first he’s unimpressed with the woman he refers to as MM. “She looked absolutely frightful,” he says of her first appearance on the film set. “Nasty complexion, a lot of facial hair, shapeless figure and, when the glasses come off, a very vague look in her eye.” Yet by the very next day she’s worked her magic and he’s describing her as looking “like an angel”. Soon he’s finding excuses for her behaviour: her chronic lateness, her reliance on her acting coach, her need for booze and pills.

Observant and smart, Clark is in pole position to record the few ups and many downs of filming. His insights are honest and interesting and he watches Marilyn especially closely, observing the contradictions in her character as well as her wonderful figure.

The second diary fills in the blanks Clark left in the first. It covers the nine days when Marilyn, whose new marriage to playwright Arthur Miller is already shaky, draws him close to her. First they share a chicken salad and confidences; then a day trip, a swim and a kiss on the lips; finally a night in bed.

Clark – who died in 2002 - is adamant “nothing improper” happened between them. I’m not convinced and neither does his account of their private conversations always ring true to me. Nevertheless I found both diaries intriguing and entertaining, and I’ll be queuing for my ticket for the movie version when it releases in New Zealand in March.

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino, (right NZH photo), a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 29 January, 2012

Five Hundred Buildings of New York

2012-01-30T07:05:00.000+13:00

Five hundred glorious photographs showcase the finest, most majestic and most interesting examples of architecture in my most beloved city outside of New Zealand, New York. The book represents a photographic neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood tour of the city, capturing stately and historic buildings, monuments and engineering structures. Each building is showcased on it's own page in a rich and beautiful fine resolution monochrome photograph. The accompanying text identifies location and date of completion/renovation, the building's distinctive features and historical context.

Having just come back from almost a month in that great city how could I possibly leave this stunning door-stopper of a book on the shelf at the wonderful Matakana Village Bookshop?

PS-I wonder how many photographs I own of the Flat Iron Building? Dozens!

Published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, NZ$50.

Women writers turn to the horror story - Jeanette Winterson and Helen Dunmore among famous names venturing into the horror genre this year

2012-01-30T06:51:00.001+13:00

Vanessa Thorpe - The Observer, Sunday 29 January 2012

Helen Dunmore: hoping to scare the wits out of her readers. Photograph: Christopher Jones / Rex Features

As an icy wind blows in from the east, the grip of a good horror story is tightening its hold on many of Britain's leading literary talents. Terrifying new novels from outspoken author Jeanette Winterson and from the acclaimed novelist and children's writer Helen Dunmore are at the head of a blast of chilling fiction heading for British bookshops.
Where once an accomplished "lady novelist" in search of a change might have attempted a neat whodunnit or perhaps a cosy "Aga saga", suddenly the unholy desire to create a horror or ghost story has seized a range of established talents. Even the television book club presenter Judy Finnigan has been drawn to the genre for her debut novel, a ghost story that will be out this autumn.
Winterson, who had her first success with the novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, will try her hand at scaring her readers witless this summer with a story based on the infamous Pendle witch trials held at Lancaster castle in 1612. Dunmore, the writer much loved for her children's books, poetry and award-winning novels, has followed suit. Her first horror novel, a supernatural thriller called The Greatcoat, has been published by Hammer Books, the imprint of the now revived film studios that brought British cinema audiences a succession of gory titles from the 1950s to the 1970s. Dunmore's debut marks the publisher's decision to commission a series of original works rather than rely on the novelisations of horror films which it also publishes.
"The interesting fiction at the moment is playing with genres, slipping between them," said Hammer publisher Selina Walker. "So we're approaching all the literary or established greats to see whether they would like to write something with a paranormal twist."
This week Hammer's film version of Susan Hill's 1983 novel The Woman in Black, one of the most popular British ghost stories of modern times, is out in cinemas, starring Daniel Radcliffe as the unfortunate solicitor Arthur Kipps. But for Dunmore the work of two other women writers with the gift of instilling fear provided the chief inspiration. "Elizabeth Bowen's work influences me a lot, particularly The Demon Lover. I also love Daphne du Maurier," said the writer, who has turned to horror after writing 11 mainstream novels, including the Orange Prize-winning A Spell of Winter and The Siege.
"I was drawn to the genre because it is intensely dramatic material," she said. "To some extent it is a psychological playground. You wonder what is the match between the ghost and the person who is haunted. What is there in the past that has driven them to this point?"
The key, Dunmore believes, is to make the experiences described as "palpable" as possible, to carry the reader into the darkness: "It has got to have a lot of sensory richness."
Full story at The Observer

Beattie's Book Blog - unofficial homepage of the New Zealand book community

Waitangi Day morning with Kim Hill and Paul Diamond: 6 February 2012

Arts on Sunday - Radio NZ National

NZ Book Publishing Godfather Ray Richards announces his retirement

Saturday Morning with Kim Hill: 4 February 2012 - Radio NZ National

Four Industry Veterans Lay Out Advice at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Winter Conference

e-books enable a small publishers to compete with big publishing houses

Adventures in e-publishing Part Four – interview with Kate Lyall Grant

Maggie Stiefvater Inks Deal for 4-Book Epic Fantasy

By Maryann Yin on Galley Cat, February 2, 2012

The history of American gay writers as they emerged from the literary closet

How Gossip Became History: Eminent Outlaws by Christopher Bram

The Daily Beast - Brad Gooch

From Gore Vidal to Tony Kushner, a new book, ‘Eminent Outlaws’ by Christopher Bram, traces the history of American gay writers as they emerged from the literary closet. Brad Gooch on how gossip became history. Plus, a gallery of the most famous.

Yet most of the gossip concerned literary history, or, less grandly, the messy lives and under-the-radar goings-on of gay male poets, novelists, and playwrights.

Gay Writers from Tennessee Williams to Truman Capote (Photos)

Photos clockwise from top left: AP, Bettmann-Corbis;Betmann-Corbis; Bettmann-Corbis

Read the full piece at The Daily Beast.

Digital-only short story trails Fforde novel

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