Charlie Brown Gets the Blues

Charles M. Schulz drew “Peanuts” for nearly half a century, and the comic strip became a touchstone for the baby boom generation: an epic meditation, at once rueful and barbed, about the disappointments and existential quandaries of life, a funny-sad-wistful portrait of a recognizable world in which love goes unrequited, baseball games are always lost, and the Great Pumpkin never shows up.

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS
By David Michaelis
Illustrated. 655 pages. HarperCollins. $34.95.

The ever hopeful, ever rejected Charlie Brown; his cynical, rage-filled nemesis, Lucy Van Pelt; the philosophical and self-possessed Linus; the fanatic pianist Schroeder; and Snoopy, that bumptious beagle with the extraordinary fantasy life: these were characters who resonated with a generation that came of age during that perplexing period of transition as the country lurched from the somnolent ’50s into the psychedelic ’60s and ’70s.

And they were characters, as David Michaelis observes in his revealing new biography, deeply rooted in their creator’s own life. It’s not just that Charlie Brown embodied Schulz’s own melancholy temperament and insecurities; it’s not just that Lucy represented his first wife’s bossy impatience.

It’s that all the characters represented aspects of the deeply conflicted artist himself. As Mr. Michaelis writes, Schulz “gave his wishy-washiness and determination to Charlie Brown,” his sarcasm to Lucy, “his dignity and ‘weird little thoughts’” to Linus, his “perfectionism and devotion to his art to Schroeder,” his sense of “being talented and unappreciated to Snoopy.”

Full review in New York Times today.

GREAT PHOTO FROM NEW YORK TIMES OF DORIS LESSING ON HER FRONT STEPS TALKING TO MEDIA AFTER ANNOUNCEMENT OF HER NOBEL PRIZE

WRITERS ON MONDAYS - For Wellingtonians

15 October: Life Class - Brenda Niall

Brenda Niall is one of the very few writers to be awarded an AO (Order of Australia) for ‘services to Australian literature, as academic, biographer and literary critic’. She is the author of four award-winning biographies including a five-generation study of the Boyd dynasty of artists, and a life of the Sydney painter, Judy Cassab. She has also written on children’s fiction and edited the Oxford Book of Australian Letters. Her book reviews appear regularly in Australian journals and newspapers. This year she published Life Class, in which she retraces her literary footsteps to discuss the pleasures and pitfalls of biographical discovery.

She talks with Harry Ricketts.

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

For further information see http://www.vuw.ac.nz/modernletters or email modernletters@vuw.ac.nz or ring 463 6854.

Wikipedia Brenda Niall website.

Brisbane Writers Festival website on Brenda Niall.

An invitation from David Hedley:

HEDLEYS 100 YEAR FESTIVAL

Join us to celebrate the publication of David Yerex's memoirs WORD PERFECT this Sunday in the bookshop from 3pm. To be launched by Kate Harcourt.

What an interesting life he has had. A graduate of the famous US university Notre Dame,the years there a gift from his uncle Lowell,a multi-millionaire pioneer of Central American aviation, David has been a journalist and author of over 20 books. From his many experiences including as editor of The Journal of Agriculture and front person for TV's Country Calendar he will have some interesting insights into the farming world.

RESERVE YOUR AUTOGRAPHED COPY NOW OF WORD PERFECT.

HEDLEY'S 100 YEAR FESTIVAL CONTINUES

DAVID HEDLEY64 6 3782875

BOOKMAN BEATTIE GOES WALKABOUT IN LONDON

Today the sun is shining, there is no wind, and with a temperature of 14C, it has been a perfect day for walking.

Today I walked to the Museum of London where one could spend several days but in order to avoid cultural fatigue syndrome I confined myself to Medieval London 1066-1485.

I learned here that in those days there were more than 25 monasteries, nunneries and friaries in and around the city with the spire of St.Paul’s Cathedral dominating the skyline.It was not a big place, in 1300 you could walk across it in 20 minutes. Then in 1348 came The Plague and the population was decimated reducing to a mere 50,000.

On from there to the Guildhall which is where the Man Booker Prize event is being held on Tuesday next, and of course my reason for being in London. I’ll be writing more about the Guildhall after the event so suffice to say here that it is an enormously impressive building, the headquarters of the City of London Corporation, the local authority for the City of London.
The Court of Common Council, the city’s decision making body meets here in the Great Hall, in fact they were about to meet when I was there so my visit was rather cut short. This is also the place where they hold the installation of the Lord Mayor, state banquets, various civic and state ceremonies and of course, the Man Booker Prize Gala Dinner.

The building dates back to the 15th century but was extensively damaged in the Great Fire in 1666 and again in 1940 during the Blitz.
The Guildhall has a wonderful library that I also visited. Divided into three sections – Manuscripts, Prints & Maps, and Printed Books I headed for this last mentioned section and with the assistance of a most helpful librarian did a little research on the Guildhall.

Leaving the Guildhall I stooged around the Smithfield Market area where I stumbled on to the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great, which proved to be London’s oldest remaining church having been established in 1123 during the reign of Henry 1, the third son of William the Conqueror. Interestingly for such an old church they had two very modern pieces of art – a painting of the Madonna & Child by the distinguished contemporary Spanish artist Alfredo Roldan, and Exquisite Pain, a sculpture by Damien Hirst which I noted is on loan from the artist.

Interesting pubs noticed while walking today:

Fullers Ale & Pie House

The Butcher's Hook & Cleaver

The Bishop's Finger

Betsy Trotwood

Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
from the New York Times overnight; author pic also from the NYT.
Doris Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her deep feminist engagement with the major social and political issues, won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature today.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” The award comes with a 10 million Swedish crown honorarium, about $1.6 million.

Ms. Lessing, who turns 88 later this month, never finished high school and largely educated herself through her voracious reading. She had been born to British parents in what is now Iran, was raised in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and now lives in London. She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, non-fiction and an autobiography. She is the 11th woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature.

Ms. Lessing learned the news from a group of reporters camped on her doorstep as she returned home from visiting her son in the hospital. She declared herself totally surprised.
“I had forgotten about it, actually,” she said. “My name has been on the short list for such a long time.”

Rest of NYT story.

Also visit http://www.dorislessing.org/

And Lessing Wikipedia website

And for a British view here is The Guardian report.

“Flying Boats” Airborne Today

Alex Frame’s book, “Flying Boats: My Father’s War in the Mediterranean”, was launched Thursday beside the Solent flying boat inside the Sir Keith Park Memorial Aviation Hangar at MOTAT.

The honours were done by Mauri McGreal who flew with Alex’s dad in WWII and invited guests included other former pilots and crew who flew in both peacetime and war. There’s huge interest in these extraordinary machines. MOTAT’s got the only restored Solent Mark IV Flying Boat in the world and there’s also a Sunderland like the one that’s the real star of “Flying Boats”.

Flying Boats: My Father’s War in the Mediterranean
Alex Frame
published by Victoria University Press
$40 pb
52 photographs and maps

“Flying Boats: My Father’s War in the Mediterranean” is a blend of personal memoir and war history. Alex Frame’s father was a flying boat pilot in war and afterwards in peace, and the roots of this book are the logbooks he kept over his 30 year career, the first covering early flights in 1938 and the war years, the second flying in Sydney and then Tahiti and the surrounding islands of French Polynesia.

This book concentrates on the years of World War II, and the star of the story is the Sunderland flying boat T9046, while under the command of Alex’s father from November 1940 to June 1941. During this concentrated period of setbacks and disasters for the Commonwealth and British forces, the crews of the large, graceful flying boats were both saviours and victims in the struggle against Hitler’s war machine.

Short shelflife for booksellers, industry figures claim

From the issue of October 10, 2007Guardian Unlimited

The book will still be with us in 50 years time, but the high street bookseller may not be. That, at least, is the verdict of the top book industry professionals surveyed at the start of this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, the key annual book trade event which opened today.

Almost a quarter of the 1,324 industry professionals who took part in the survey predicted that the high street bookseller would no longer exist in 2057, while only 11% thought that the printed book would be obsolete. However, nearly as many - 10.5% - also thought that the electronic reader would be superseded. The respondents, of whom nearly half were at senior director level or above, were not asked to look into their crystal balls to predict what might replace the book and e-reader, but 44% identified the use of e-books as a key area of growth for the industry. In an increasingly globalised world, 27% saw books in translation as a growth area, and nearly a third saw China as the future dominating market in the publishing industry.

Read the rest.......

THE TIMES CHELTENHAM LITERATURE FESTIVAL

The Festival kicked off yesterday and continues until Sunday. I was interested to learn that in addition to being one of the world's largest literature festivals it is also the oldest literary event in the world. The Times are the major sponsor with Waterstone's also being heavily involved.

Have a look at The Times Festival website.

Festival highlights include Michael Palin talking about his new book, New Europe (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), and his adventures while travelling, along with fiction authors Michael Ondaatje and Yann Martel.

Lucy Hawking will be with her father Stephen Hawking to discuss their new children's book, George's Secret Key to the Universe (Doubleday hardcover).

The Festival also incorporates The Book It! Children's Festival.

Full details on the Festival website.

TWO MATTERS TO REPORT FROM LONDON TODAY.

1. I bought the one Man Booker shortlist title I haven’t read, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton), published price pds.14.99 but discounted pds.2.00 at Borders. I’ll read it in the next few days and report back. I read the first few pages coming home on the tube this afternoon and was quickly hooked.
Interestingly Lloyd Jones told me when the shortlist was first announced that this title was his pick to win.

2. I visited the Victoria & Albert Museum to see an exhibition that was on my list of must-do things while over here, The Art of Lee Miller.
I have known of and admired Lee Miller’s art for many years but my interest was really quickened after hearing her biographer Carolyn Burke talk about her at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival earlier in the year.
This Exhibition marks the both the 100th anniversary of her birth and the30th anniversary of her death and comprises several hundred photographs making an impressive retrospective.
As usual with such exhibitions I paid extra for the audio tour which proved to be excellent value and gave the exhibition so much more meaning.
The photographs were divided into six groupings: Surrealist Paris:1929-32;

New York Studio:1932-34;Travels in the 1930’s; War 1940-45; Post-War at Home.

Excellent. How I wished my NZ photographer friend, Harvey Benge, had been with me, he would have loved the exhibition.

Bookseller of Kabul extends his trade with a mobile shop

By Arifa Akbar, Arts Reporter writing in The Independent his morning, 10 October

The Bookseller of Kabul has a new literary ambition: to take a bus across the rubble-strewn roads of his war-torn homeland offering a "mobile" bookshop service to those living in the most remote regions.
Shah Muhammad Rais gained fame after the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad wrote a bestselling novel, The Bookseller of Kabul, on his life running a bookshop in the Afghan capital after the fall of the Taliban.

Mr Rais, who regards himself as a books missionary, told the BBC World Service yesterday that he is seeking to satisfy Afghans' voracious appetite for books and reading, even in the midst of conflict and poverty. He said he had recently returned from northern Afghanistan after selling almost all his books in 40 days.

He is preparing his converted, second-hand bus – the seats and toilet have been ripped out – for another journey north, and beyond, and is filling it with books. "Afghans love books, actually, but they don't have any... The war destroyed everything. Not only their houses and their irrigation systems but their soul is also damaged. Books will educate Afghans to live happily in Afghanistan and forget their sorrows and their tragedy and misfortunes.

"A new generation is thirsty for knowledge and we have a very good future, hopefully. I want to repeat my journey, to the northern part of Afghanistan with new experiences and new books which many people asked from me, and also I want to go to Tajikistan as well," he said.
Mr Rais has managed to keep his business afloat since 1972, despite Afghanistan's turbulent recent history, which has included the Soviet invasion in the Eighties and the Taliban's hardline approach to literature and learning. He has since become the country's leading bookseller with unique access to importing books from across the world.

In Afghanistan, he is respected for having risked his life to promote literature, being imprisoned twice by the Communists, then again by the Taliban who forced him to watch as some of his most precious books were burned. When he was freed, he hid the books in attics across Kabul and smuggled some to Pakistan. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the world's press sought to interview Mr Rais, who became known as "the man who saved the books", but Seierstad convinced him to grant her intimate access into his world.

Her book described him as a man whose love of literature had exposed him to great risks over 30 years in the trade. But it also depicted him as a committed Muslim with uncompromising views on the role of women, with the reader being introduced to his first wife, Sharifa, after she has just learned that he is taking a new, 16-year-old bride.

When published, it was an instant worldwide success. But Mr Rais, who had invited Seierstad to live with his two wives and five children, regarded her documentation as a betrayal and a gross misrepresentation, and he began legal proceedings against her as well as writing his own book to vindicate himself.

RIBBONS OF GRACE Maxine Alterio Penguin $35

A new novelist, one with significant talent, and of whom I have no doubt we are going to hear a great deal more, has been launched on the New Zealand scene by Penguin Books. Congratulations to Maxine Alterio for a superb historical novel set largely in the goldfield town of Arrowtown during the Otago goldrush of the 1860’s.

Among the many Chinese attracted to the area is Ming Yuet, a young, resourceful Chinese woman who takes on the identity of her brother after he is killed by water pirates while planning to leave China for New Zealand.
She travels to Otago where she lives and works as a man for several years living a tough life as a goldminer in order to send money to back to her family in China. Her secret is known to only a few but eventually she meets Conran, a stonemason from Orkney and so begins a secret love affair which inevitably ends in disaster.

With a strong plot and superbly drawn characters this is a great read, one I found difficult to put down. Goodness knows how much research has gone into this book but the author’s acknowledgements suggest it has been extensive. Her skill in blending factual historical information into her fiction is impressive and gives the story great credibility.

It is a story above all else of love, but it also deals with family tragedy, alienation, hardship, displacement, bigotry, forgiveness and valour. It is a fine first novel that can justifiably be compared to Jenny Patrick’s hugely successful Denniston Rose. I offer my admiration and congratulations to the author.

A handsome paperback volume, superb cover too.Well done Penguin Books.

LOVED THESE TWO PIECES FROM THE GUARDIAN


The digested read
Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth John Crace
Publisher: Cape
Price: £16.99

I hadn't been in New York in 11 years. Other than for surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I'd hardly left my rural retreat in the Berkshires. But now I was on my way to Manhattan to see a urologist who specialised in treating incontinence problems. I'd been alone all these years, apart from occasional visits from my housekeeper, Larry. And he killed himself a year ago. I don't take an interest in anything. I just write, read and wet myself.

Save yourself a lot of time by reading this clever digested treatment of Exit Ghost. The rest is here.

AND THEN THIS

An audience with Philip Roth

Since his debut in The Ghost Writer in 1979, Nathan Zuckerman has become Roth's most celebrated alter ego. To mark the publication of Exit Ghost, in which Zuckerman takes his final bow, America's foremost novelist talks to Hermione Lee about his life and work

This conversation about Exit Ghost began in April 2007. I was in New York for the publication of my biography of Edith Wharton, and Philip was in town to receive Italy's Grinzane award at the Italian Academy at Columbia. We met to catch up (we've known each other since the early Eighties, when I wrote a short book about him and did his Paris Review interview), and to talk about Exit Ghost over a few meals. This is not as simple as it sounds. Going out with Philip Roth in Manhattan is like going out with Louis XIV in Versailles: the king is in his kingdom. ('Only as far down as West 69th Street,' he says, when I put this to him.) As you stroll to your destination, little old men come out of nearby doorways and say to him fiercely: 'Aren't you somebody famous?' Strange women walking their dogs stop to say hello as if they were old friends.

Read the full interview here.

Bookman Beattie reviewed Exit Ghost with Maggie Barry on Radio New Zealand National this Monday past and his review can be read here by scrolling back through the blog.

REMEMBER ME

“Sometimes the best intentions can bring you undone. To this day I’m convinced that I did nothing wrong, yet I still managed to bring the world tumbling down around my head and the heads of those nearest and dearest to me.”

An essay innocently written by a 12-year-old boy is the catalyst for a shocking chain of events that rips a community apart forever.

Set in 1956 in Auckland, this is a story from best-selling author Derek Hansen inspired by his own boyhood, pieced together through a young hero’s essays that captivated and amused his school mates. Hansen vividly paints a portrait of a boy’s life in the fifties that tells a poignant and bitter sweet story.

The boy and his family migrated to what they thought was the land of hope and freedom, the peaceful, idyllic country of New Zealand. All was not as it seemed, though, as Hansen’s writing cleverly captures the essence of a post-war community that is strong but not unbreakable.

Hansen’s inspiration behind Remember Me.

“I have written four novels with the word “lunch” in the title, but this is the first time a lunch has actually inspired a novel. Three years ago I attended a mini-reunion with old classmates from Richmond Road School. The lunch was organised by the current Governor General – then ombudsman – who along with others had the wit to bring old school photos. Having left New Zealand forty years earlier (for a two-year working holiday in London) the experience was overwhelming.

I’d consigned my past to the furthermost reaches of my memory, rather like stuffing old photos into a shoebox and then forgetting where I’d stored it. Everything changed over the course of that lunch. Long neglected memories resurfaced, slowly at first and then in a tumult, so sharp and clear it was as though the shoebox had been hermetically sealed to preserve the contents. There was my childhood spread before me like a feast upon a table, every dish tempting and offering possibilities. There was enough material for several novels but the story that emerged was by far the most insistent, demanding to be told.”

(Derek - I LOVE your cover! Well done to whomever created it. Perfect.)

Derek Hansen was born in England, raised in New Zealand and now lives in Australia.

He began writing novels at the conclusion of a long and successful career in advertising.

I remember his first novel as if it were yesterday, brilliant, Lunch with the Generals, it was an immediate bestseller and I can recall the storyline to this day even though I have read mnay hundreds of novels since - I think it was first published in the early 90's (?).

Anyway its success provided all the encouragement he needed to continue so that today Derek is the author of eight novels and three collections of short stories.

He is married with two grown-up children, and currently divides his time between his homes in Sydney and the Sunshine Coast, with as many diversions to New Zealand, Central America, North America, Europe, Asia and the UK as time and budget allow.

See: http://www.derekhansen.net/

Derek will be touring extensively throughout the North Island as below:
26-27 November: Auckland

28 Nov Thames, Tauranga,
29 November: Te Puke, Gisborne

30 Nov: Napier, Waipukurau, Masterton
1 December: Wellington

Release Date: 16 November 07 $34.99

For further information, please contact:
Lise Taylor
Senior Publicist at HarperCollins Publishers
TEL 09 443-9246 MOB 0275 855 543

lise.taylor@harpercollins.co.nz

http://www.harpercollins.co.nz/

WASHINGTON POST STARTS BOOK BLOG - SHORT STACK

If Your Marriage Is on the Rocks

We kick off our blog with a short list of five books that might be tonics to marital troubles.

If only because they'll make you feel better! Tell us what books you'd gently press on a friend. And feel free to weigh in on these.

1. Anna Karenina, by Leo TolstoyBored wife falls for dashing bachelor. No less than the classic on the question. So provocative and controversial in its time, that when it was originally published in serial installments in the Russian Messenger, the magazine editor pulled the last chapters and refused to publish any more. Read it as salve. Things couldn't get much worse.

2. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwanA throwback to the early '60s, on the cusp of the sexual revolution. Reading it now -- sly move by McEwan -- we realize how simple the solution might have been had this young bride and groom postponed their big night for a decade: All they needed was a bit more openness, more talk. It makes you wonder how enlightened minds in the future will see current myopias.

3. The Awakening, by Kate ChopinBack

to the 19th century, and our heroine, alas, was born long before her time. She is dreamy, artistic -- a mother of two in the staid, mid-century city of New Orleans. She has sex with a younger man when her husband is out of town, and, suddenly, all her repressed creativity is released. Society will make her pay a high price for it.

4. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

Some will say that this story is all too similar to 1 and 3, but, since the characters are French, that would be impossible. Love here is nothing like Anna's harrowing love for Vronsky, nor is it about a woman led to the depths of her own soul. It's Emma, having a good roll in the hay with Rodolphe, and then with Leon -- all of it out of sheer appetite and vanity. In the end, romance doesn't live up to her hyperinflated illusions, nor, for that matter, does her grand exit.

5. Rambling Rose, by Calder Willingham

A rural Georgia household is turned upside down when an attractive, seductive young woman comes from the city to be the family maid. But despite all temptations -- which prove considerable -- the husband remains true to his wife. Who knew virtue could be so entertaining?
-- Marie Arana

The Book World Blog
About Short Stack:

Short Stack is a blog by book lovers for book lovers. Every week a member of our staff recommends a list of five favorite books on a particular subject -- fiction or nonfiction. We invite our readers to agree, disagree, free associate, and post their own favorites. In this way, we hope to spark conversation, share ideas, learn a thing or two.
-- Marie Arana, Book World Editor

BOOKMAN BEATTIE IN LONDON

Tuesday 9 October and man did it rain. It bucketed down all day and I came home after a day of bookshop visiting looking and feeling like a drowned rat. It had been fine for over a week and will apparently be fine for the next few days but today..........

In spite of the weather I covered a fair bit of territory getting around a number of bookshops noting in particular many recently released titles that we haven't yet seen in New Zealand and also the astonishing amount of author visit activity.

I missed Bill Clinton (Giving) by 4 days, bugger (!), but others around this week and next include Jeanette Winterson (The Stone Gods), Douglas Coupland (The Gum Thief), Mike Carey (Dead Men's Boots), Alice Sebold (The Almost Moon), Ken Follett (World Without End), Marianne Faithfull (Memories, Dreams & Reflections), and Ronnie Wood (Ronnie), there is lots more but that will give some idea.

Re-read Mister Pip overnight on the plane and enjoyed it all over again. Fingers crossed. It has great display in all the shops I visited today.

I'll sleep well tonight.

Digitalization Seen as Top Industry Challenge

From Publishers Weekly, 10/8/2007 7:50:00 AM

With the Frankfurt Book Fair starting later this week, show organizers have released results of a survey that asked publishing professionals worldwide their views on the biggest challenges and threats facing the industry as well as predictions on the future. More than half of the 1,324 respondents called digitalization the biggest challenge facing the industry, while competition from other media was picked as the major threat to the health of book publishing. The three other major industry threats were overpublishing, piracy and illiteracy.
Following the issues represented by digitalization, the survey found the other major industry challenges to be increased globalization, more user-generated content and the battle over territorial rights.

Respondents were generally upbeat about publishing’s long-term prospects, with only about 11% predicting that the book would be obsolete in 50 years. The gloomiest prediction was for the fate of High Street booksellers, with 23% predicting that the general bookstore would not exist in 50 years. (Although the survey received responses from 86 countries, 85% of the responses were from Europe, where bookstores, particularly in the U.K., are facing more problems than in the U.S.)

The top growth area was identified as e-books, followed by audiobooks (including digital downloads), translated editions and educational publishing.

THIS FROM THE BOOKSELLER - 9 OCTOBER:

Nobel Prize in Literature announced this week

The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday, Oct. 11 and odds-makers are trying to figure out who will take home the prize, which is worth 10 million Swedish crowns. The 2006 Nobel Laureate in Literature was Orhan Pamuk.

Ladbrokes, the company that takes bets on the Nobel Prize in Literature, has listed five possibilities for the award, according to Reuters, with Italian novelist and essayist Claudio Magris as the favorite. The others are Australian poet Les Murray, American novelist Philip Roth, Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer and Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis.

"We have a number of experts who really have their ear to the ground when it comes to Nobel prizes," said Ladbrokes spokesman Nick Weinberg, according to Reuters.
"They keep track of newspaper headlines, speeches of previous winners, any trends that become apparent—people of a certain age win in a certain year or whatever."

Gaza's Christian bookseller killed - report from The Indepedent 8 October.

The manager of Gaza's only Christian bookshop, who was abducted on Saturday by suspected Muslim extremists, was found dead yesterday. Medical officials said Rami Ayyad, 31, had been shot and stabbed. He was the father of two small children and his wife is pregnant with their third.
He is reported to have received several death threats since his Protestant bible shop was fire bombed six months ago, destroying shelves of books and pamphlets. He told friends that bearded men in a car stalked him and looked at him strangely after he locked up on Thursday.
The killers seized him as he left the shop on Saturday night. Suhad Massad, the director of the local Baptist bible society which runs the shop, said friends called his mobile phone when he did not arrive home. He told them he was running late.
Mr Ayyad's mother, Anisa, said he phoned his family. "He said he was going to be with the 'people' for another two hours and that if he was not back by then, he would not be returning for a long, long time." She added that Mr Ayyad, who was born into a Greek Orthodox family but worshipped in a Baptist congregation, had "redeemed Christ with his blood".
About 3,000 Arab Christians live among 1.4 million Muslims in the Gaza Strip. Attacks on Christians and their property are rare, but more than 40 video cassette shops and internet cafes, identified with Western values, have been bombed in the past year. So was an American school. A shadowy group calling itself the Righteous Swords of Islam claimed responsibility.
Up to 300 Muslims and Christians attended a memorial service for Mr Ayyad in a Greek Orthodox church in Gaza City yesterday. The mourners were reluctant to point fingers or to open a rift between the faiths.
Ms Massad said: "We don't know who was behind the killing or why. Was it for money, or was it because he was selling Bibles?" Describing him as a man with a warm heart, a smiling face and no enemies. "We try to show Jesus' love for all people, but without evangelism."
Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, maintained: "This ugly act has no support by any religious group here." Nicholas Issa, a 50-year-old Christian, said: "Today is a black day for Gaza. We hope he was not killed because he was a Christian."
Another Christian, Jan Sa'ad, 42, said: "This has never happened before in Gaza. If somebody thinks this murder will make Christians leave, they are mistaken. This is our homeland. We are as patriotic as anyone."

Sir Howard Davies: Throw the book at him

Daggers have been drawn and the backbiting has begun. Ciar Byrne meets the man who is leading the judges of the Man Booker Prize, and discovers that he's not afraid to speak his mind

Next week, the Man Booker judges meet for a final dinner at Sir Howard Davies' house. It will be their last meeting before the day of the Booker Prize itself, on 16 October, when in the space of a few hours, they will be forced to come up with a winner for the most prestigious literary award in the calendar. And this time, he might even cook for them.

At their first informal dinner, Sir Howard's wife cooked. At a second gathering, they ordered food in. Sir Howard is a busy man, currently overseeing Freshers' Week at the London School of Economics, of which he is director, as well as chairing the panel of Booker judges.
Imagine the scene: Sir Howard, the actress Imogen Stubbs, Giles Foden, the obligatory contemporary novelist without a book on this year's list of entries, the poet Wendy Cope and the academic and critic Ruth Scurr, engaged in impassioned literary conversation over steaming plates of something to ward off the autumn damp.

Full story from The Independent here.

BIOGRAPHY OF CREATOR OF "PEANUTS" SHOCKS FAMILY

David Michaelis first contacted the family of Charles M. Schulz seven years ago about writing a biography of Schulz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. It turned out that Schulz had read Mr. Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth, and that Schulz’s son Monte also liked the writer’s work. He ended up helping persuade the rest of the Schulz clan to cooperate with Mr. Michaelis, granted full access to his father’s papers and put aside his own novel writing to help him.

In December, members of the family were shocked by the portrayal of a depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after different women.
“It’s not true,” Monte said. “It’s preposterous.”

Link here for full story from the New York Times.
Posted at Bangkok Airport en route London.

BOOKMAN BEATTIE OFF TO LONDON - CAB DUE IN 15 MINUTES

Farewell for now, next blog from London.

Did anyone happen to read Paul Holmes inane column in the Herald on Sunday yesterday regarding New Zealand authors and New Zealand books? If he had deliberately set out to display his own arrogance and ignorance he couldn't have done a better job.
My advice to him is to stick to broadcasting and forget his writing attempts.
I don't have time to reply to him now but if anyone else read it and was offended please feel free to add a comment to the blog.

EXIT GHOST
Philip Roth Jonathan Cape $55

I reviewed this on Radio New Zealand Natioanl this morning with Maggie Barry.

This is the ninth novel in Roth’s Zuckerman books, the first ,The Ghost Writer, having been published almost 30 years ago.
In that first book Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter-ego, is a young writer who has enormous admiration for the famous but reclusive writer E.I.Lonoff whom he regards as his role model.
Now in this latest book, with Lonoff long dead, and Zuckerman, after a spectacular writing career, and having become something of a recluse himself living in a remote corner of rural Connecticut, is required to go back to New York for the first time in 11 years. The reason for his visit is to see a urologist at Mount Sinai Hospital who specializes in a procedure to help men left incontinent by prostate surgery.

He is only in the city for a few days when he sees an advertisement in the New York Review of Books in which a writing couple in their early thirties wishes to swap their Upper West Side Apartment for a quiet rural retreat. He finds himself tempted by the idea, and against his better judgment he contacts them and agrees to swap homes for a year. When he goes around to meet Jamie and her husband Billie, he is smitten with Jamie. She is a beautiful, happily married woman 40 years his junior but hopes and fantasises that she will leave her husband for him. And remember, following his prostate surgery, he is both impotent & incontinent.

While in New York he meets up again with Amy Bellette, Lonoff’s former mistress, who is recovering from brain surgery. She is being hounded by a young writer who wishes to write a biography of E.I.Lonoff and soon Zuckerman is also being pursued by this young man who turns out to be a friend of Billie and Jamie.

So in chapter one, which runs to 67 pages, we meet the characters who occupy the story – Zuckerman, Billy & Jamie, Amy Bellett and the would-be biographer Richrd Kliman.

It is a pretty slender plot built largely around Zuckerman’s lust for Jamie. This is largely pretty sad stuff about aging and mortality and loneliness with the typical Roth theme of an older Jewish writer desiring a decades-younger woman. There is also a strong link between the novel and real life and one wonders how much of it is at least partly auto-biographical. Zuckerman and Roth are both in their seventies.It is set at the time of the US presidential elections when Bush beat Kerry and there is a great deal of Bush bashing which one assumes is Roth putting across his own views.

Zuckerman starts writing a dialogue between He and She in which he imagines conversations between Jamie and himself. Readers of earlier Zuckerman novels will know that this is a habit of his – complicating his life on paper while continually regarding his readers and everyone but himself a fool.

Roth is one of the great contemporary American writers, that goes without saying I guess, he has won the Pulitzer Prize and many other awards, he is probably the most decorated writer of the last quarter of the 20th century , and as much as I wanted to like this book I have to say it disappointed me.
I recall some years ago reading a memoir by the British actress Claire Bloom who lived with Roth for nearly 20 years in which she described him as a depressed and manipulative man, a serial seducer of women who had no time for anyone who didn’t rate him as a master writer.
Reading this latest novel one has to wonder how close Zuckerman and his creator are in real life.
Roth has many fans who will welcome this new book but for me it is a largely sad and melancholy work. The way the book ends one imagines there will be no more Zuckerman novels to come. I will not be especially sad about this. Zuckerman has run his course.

THE SOUND OF BUTTERFLIES
By Rachael King
Morrow. 338 pp. $24.95

Coffee, cork, cotton and more: If we stopped to think about the origins and labor involved in harvesting our quotidian raw materials, we might find ourselves sitting mutely in a darkened corner, lost in a funk of guilt, shame and indecision.

That's how we find young Englishman Thomas Edgar, the protagonist of Rachael King's novel The Sound of Butterflies. Recently returned home from a long expedition to the Amazon (in search of butterflies), Edgar now haunts his parlor, refusing or unable to speak to his young, adoring wife, Sophie.

It's easy to assume that the author wants to examine those old colonial obsessions: civilizing foreign natives and pillaging their lands for flora and fauna. At first, King's novel appears to be an intriguing but slight historical mystery: Will Edgar ever speak again? Will Sophie leave him and run to the arms of an accommodating military captain? Will the rare Papilio sophia specimen be found in Edgar's collecting trunks?

But King, who won the New Zealand Society of Authors award for best first novel, is after more serious things. She quietly skewers the refined British naturalist for a variety of failings -- everything from his squeamishness about insects to his willingness to ignore a colleague's pedophilia. But her mesmerizing combination of narrative, diary pages and letters reveals the true terror that Edgar experienced in the Amazon, where he witnessed one man's inhumanity to his own people.

The raw material at the center of this evil enterprise is rubber. We may not use it as much as we once did, but think of its 20th-century dominance: tires for motorcars, airplanes and tanks; elastic for girdles that replaced whaleboned corsets; and pencil erasers and rubber bands for the kind of office work occasioned by wars and global expansion. The man sponsoring Edgar's expedition is Mr. Santos, whose rubber harvests have allowed him to build the city of Manaus, a jungle-bound copy of great European capitals, where mimicry of genteel habits overlays a sinister enterprise.

King's book has flaws: Sophie's progressive best friend is a lively character with too little to do, and a side plot involving the accommodating military captain and Sophie's father goes nowhere. However, these are small irregularities in a captivating story.
-- Bethanne Patrick writes the Book Maven blog for Publishers Weekly.

This review appeared yesterday in the Washington Post.

Cover image on left with one large butterfly is the US edition.

SCORPIA
Anthony Horowitz Walker Books

“Go to Venice, find Scorpia and you will find your destiny” were Yassen Gregorovich’s last words to Alex Rider. Alex is a 14-year-old teenage spy, recruited by MI6 after his uncle Ian Rider’s death. He has always been told he looks just like his father, who he never knew. He just recently learned that his father could have been an assassin for one of the most powerful and dangerous terrorist organizations in the world, Scorpia. Alex is crushed. Then his whole world comes tumbling down when Scorpia wants him to join their side. After a while Alex changes his mind and decides to join until he learns about their latest plot “the invisible sword” which will result in deaths of thousands of people all around the world. Alex has to decide whether to go along with the plan or prevent a worldwide disaster.

Anthony Horowitz is the author of the Alex Rider series, which includes Stormbreaker, Point Blanc, Skeleton Key, Eagle Strike, Scorpia and Ark Angel. He is the New York time’s best selling author and has written more children’s series books including The Diamond Brothers Mysteries. Besides writing books Horowitz also writes screenplays for film and stage. His first novel for adults “The Killing Joke” was published in 2005.

This book is one of the many thrillers by Anthony Horowitz and will have you at the edge of your seat wondering what will happen next. This is one of the books that you can’t put down; it’s action packed and sure to please.

Review by guest reviewer Isabelle Bigio who has her eleventh birthday next month.

Plot thickens in book chain sale

Dymocks is now said to be interested in buying Borders.

Whitcoulls' plans to buy all the Borders stores in New Zealand and Australia are by no means a sure thing, with Australian book chain Dymocks now emerging as another serious contender.
Although Dymocks Group chief executive Don Grover will not confirm that his company has its hat in the ring - KPMG, which is handling the Borders sale, is frowning on companies talking to the press about their intentions - he says if Dymocks is looking at the deal, it will be the better company to buy Borders as far as New Zealand is concerned.
"It would strengthen the level of competition in the market rather than place more into the dominant hands," he says.

The application to purchase Borders, being considered by the Commerce Commission, would trigger "quite a bit of public debate", he says.
"In New Zealand it would potentially give us that growth that we have been looking for."
There are 20 Borders stores in Australia and four in New Zealand. Dymocks has five stores in New Zealand, and will have seven by the end of the year, plus another couple in the new year. It is aiming for 20 stores within five years.

For the full story by Gill South in the Herald on Sunday use this link.

Still Pinteresque
By SARAH LYALL writing in the New York Times.

Photo - Steven Forrest/Insight-Visuals, for The New York Times

Harold Pinter wrote the script for the remake of “Sleuth,” and he briefly appears in it, too.
At 77 and with a new screenplay for “Sleuth,” the Nobelist Harold Pinter hasn’t lost his righteous rage.

Full story here.........

LOOKING FOR DARWIN
Lloyd Spencer Davis
Longacre Press $40

Lloyd Spencer Davis can be fairly called a writer of creative non-fiction. He could become New Zealand’s own Bill Bryson if Looking for Darwin is anything to go by.

He has spoken twice in Auckland in the past week or so. First at the 2007 CLL Writers’ Awards where he was the guest speaker and again this evening at the launch of Looking for Darwin held in the Atrium of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. One could not help but be impressed by his entertaining and engaging addresses.

He is articulate and funny, informed and irreverent and his audiences were charmed, not the least Bookman Beattie who many, many years ago had coached Davis in debating and public speaking when Davis was a highly promising student at Napier Boys High School and Beattie was a young bookseller in that fair city.

In Looking for Darwin Davis sets “on a quest for insight and meaning in a world that still pitches theories of evolution against belief in a Creator; the science of natural selection against a faith that asserts our world was crafted by Intelligent Design”.
Don’t be put off however by this description because the book is one of the funniest and most entertaining non-fiction titles I’ve read in a long while.

It is largely a travel book, and a memoir with a biography of Charles Darwin thrown in for good measure. Davis not only visits the places Darwin visited on his marathon 19th century five year journey around the globe on the Beagle but he goes to many other places as well including Canada, Disneyland, Antarctica, New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, India, Venice, Los Angeles, Charleston, Rome and Edinburgh. It is an unforgettable tour.

Dr. Lloyd Davis is best known as a zoologist, a world authority on penguins, an academic administrator, and a natural history filmmaker with numerous academic publications to his name but I suggest with the publication of Looking for Darwin he could become a very significant populariser of the scientific world; I see him as a cross between Bill Bryson and David Attenborough.

Congratulations to both author and publisher for a unique book.

Footnote:

Great launch event at the Auckland War Memorial Museum with Barbara Larson introducing Ruud (the Bugman) Kleinpaste who entertained us with an amusing & thoughtful address in which he claimed he was an especially slow reader, "I read slower than the Continental Drift", before launching "Looking for Darwin".

The author followed and was clearly moved by the unexpected attendance of his mother and two brothers. A wonderful warm Sunday evenbing event and such an appropriate venue with the Charles Darwin Exhibition currently showing.

Photos below taken at launch & they include:

Publisher Barbara Larson of Longacres Press with Ruud Kleinpaste.

Bookman Beattie with author

Author, launcher & publisher
Kevin Ireland buying a copy from the author.

Talking outside the box

Deborah Cameron is impressed by The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker's accessible study of semantic meaning; this story in the Saturday Guardian.

The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature

by Steven Pinker499pp, Allen Lane, £25 NZ$65(H/C) NZ$40 (Pbk)

Would you feel better about paying your taxes if they were renamed "membership fees"? The US linguist George Lakoff thinks you might. Lakoff believes that political debates are essentially contests between different metaphorical frames. He has criticised the Democrats for jumping on George Bush's "tax relief" bandwagon during the 2004 presidential campaign, on the grounds that "tax relief", which frames taxes metaphorically as an affliction or a burden, is an apt slogan for neoconservatives, but a self-defeating one for their opponents. If the Democrats want to win the argument, what they need to do is reframe the issue using a different metaphor - for instance, taxes are what we owe to society in exchange for the services it provides to its members.

The full review here. New Zealand publication 29 October.

Announcement from Takapuna independent bookstore, The Booklover, pictured left.

Opportunities present themselves at the most uncanny of times

Three years ago, after extensive careers ‘on the other side’ of the book trade, the chance to escape the corporate world and become one’s own boss in a well-regarded independent bookshop, located close to home, became a reality with the purchase of The Booklover in Takapuna Beach. The immersion into the retail reality twelve weeks out from Christmas in a shop with no computer inventory, or point of sale, is now a blurred memory.
Three years on, plans were well afoot to slide into a well-prepared “relaxed” fourth Christmas trading season in Takapuna Beach when a second opportunity that could not be ignored suddenly appeared. After The Booklover, our most favourite independent – Dear Reader in Grey Lynn – was on the market: relatively close to home [read that as easy to get to and from Takapuna], unique environment, growth apparent in a rapidly changing neighbourhood. Justification balanced in the mind and not being ones to shirk a challenge, we have proudly adopted a sister for The Booklover.

Pic shows Helen & Tom at their wonderful bookstore, The Booklover in Takapuna.

Bookman Beattie wishes them & their extended family well. The life of an independent bookseller is not an easy one and to see people as capable and clever as these two expanding thier family is very good news for the reading public.

Writer riding high with children's pony stories

By Cathrin Schaer writing in the New Zealand Herald today.

Stacy Gregg's first two books of her Pony Club Secrets series are due for local release on Friday.

Photo / Paul Estcourt

For much of her career, Stacy Gregg has written about fashion. But she is about to show another side to her professional life that may surprise a few of this country's more ardent fashion followers.
Gregg has become a children's fiction author. Her Pony Club Secrets series, aimed at 8-to-12-year-olds, launches here on Friday.
The series is being published by Harper Collins UK, which has made it one of their lead children's series for the year.

It is already doing well in the UK, where the first two books have already made it on to one major chain's children's best seller list. Gregg has also sold the German rights to the eight books and interest has been expressed in the film rights.

All of which - plus the books' combination of pre-pubescents, magic and horses - have led to locals asking the question, could Gregg be the next J. K. Rowling, the British author whose Harry Potter books have made her a household name?
Gregg doesn't think so. "For one thing, she [Rowling] is an anomaly - her sales figures obliterate every other children's book out there, put together," Gregg says. "So there's absolutely no chance of me being her. If I can just be a successful children's pony book author, long term, I'd be happy."

FRONT COVER STORY NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWS THIS WEEKEND

It’s hard not to like a book that expounds on Marilyn Monroe on one page and the Monroe Doctrine on the next. When Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ruminates on the realm of hemispheric affairs, the transition from one Monroe to the other is seamless, as is the slide from Bosnia to Bianca Jagger and from Alexander Hamilton to Angie Dickinson. His diaries are a Tiffany’s window of name-dropping. This is not history so much as historical trail mix.

JOURNALS
1952-2000.
By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger.
894 pp. The Penguin Press. $40.

The old-school, bow-tied liberal and Kennedy courtier had a weakness for cafe society and Century Club martinis served by Arthur the Barbadian drinks waiter. He was just as happy talking about NATO enlargement or celebrity enlargement, fastidiously jotting down when Elizabeth Taylor, Norman Mailer and Robert Bork — and himself, “alas” — looked a bit fat. And heaven help poor John Kenneth Galbraith’s wife, Kitty, the night she showed up amid the “notables affably circulating,” as our diarist likes to say, “dowdily dressed.”

Read the full review......

Wide support for Bookstart day

BORDERS, BLACKWELL'S and WHSmith are all supporting today's (Friday) National Bookstart Day, which celebrates the programme that gives three free packs of books to every child in the UK. A designated website, www.nationalbookstartday.org.uk, gives details of more than 1,500 Booktrust events taking place around Britain.

The Bookstart PoS displays, stickers, posters and bookmarks have been designed by The Gruffalo (Macmillan) illustrator Axel Scheffler, while over 250,000 copies of John Prater's Busy Bear (specially commissioned by Booktrust) are being given out free in 33 cities across the country today. Elsewhere, Booktrust launched its nationwide reading programme last week, Booktime 2007. Copies of Janet and Allan Ahlberg's Funnybones (Picture Puffin) are being distributed free to 700,000 schoolchildren across the UK. This initiative follows Booktrust's recent Booked Up initiative, which is giving a free book to every 11-year-old child across the country by Christmas. The selected books, from which the children are allowed to choose, include Sally Gardner's I, Coriander (Orion) and Unbelievable! by Paul Jennings (Puffin).

Booktrust has also released its shortlist for the Teenage Prize 2007, which includes Marcus Sedgwick's My Swordhand is Singing (Orion) and Just in Case by Meg Rosoff (Penguin). The winner will be announced on 31 October. Booktrust Director Viv Bird told PN: “We cannot underestimate the link between poor reading and social inclusion: boys with poor reading skills at aged 10 are likely to be socially excluded by the age of 35. Similarly, if 15-yearolds are reading for enjoyment, there is a direct link in their future success.

“We couldn't deliver what we do without the goodwill and support of publishers. But I'm looking for ways for us to do more. Quick Reads, for example, is a very interesting initiative and I'm keen to get into a dialogue with publishers about how we can support and develop them.” For more information, visit www.booktrust.org.uk.

Debut author scoops Guardian children's fiction prize

Jenny Valentine: no intention of giving up her day job.
A wholefood shop owner from Wales has won the 40th Guardian Children's fiction prize with her first novel.
Jenny Valentine, 37, scooped the £1,500 prize with Finding Violet Park, the story of a "friendship" forged beyond the grave between a teenage boy and the elderly woman whose ashes he discovers abandoned in a taxi office.
Valentine, who recently took over a wholefood shop in Hay-on-Wye and has no intention of giving up her day job, has also been selected for the Richard and Judy Best Kids Books Ever programme, to be screened on October 28.

To read rest of story from The Guardian 4 October link here.

Link here to read review by Jill Murphy which appeared in The Bookbag.

Two items of news that particularly caught my eye from the 115th in a series of occasional newsletters from the Victoria University centre of the International Institute of Modern Letters.

For more information about these items, email modernletters@vuw.ac.nz .

You will be able to read the newsletter online at: http://www.vuw.ac.nz/modernletters/activities/newsletter.aspx

after Monday 8 October 2007.

Major international prize for literature won by New Zealander

All eyes may be on Lloyd Jones and the Man Booker Prize at present, but another New Zealand writer has just quietly picked up a major international award that is equally significant, if not quite as energetically promoted.

Novelist Patricia Grace was selected as the 2008 laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, announced at a ceremony at the University of Oklahoma in the United States late last week. The Neustadt Prize is awarded every two years and is regarded as one of the most prestigious international prizes after the Nobel Prize in Literature. The only other New Zealander ever to be nominated is Janet Frame, and Patricia Grace is only the fourth woman to win. An international jury representing ten countries selected Grace as the winner of the US$50,000 prize, which is administered by the University of Oklahoma and its international magazine, World Literature Today. She was nominated by the US poet and musician Joy Harjo.

Craig Cliff wins with Another Language

Our congratulations to 2006 MA (Page) graduate Craig Cliff, who is winner of the novice (previously unpublished) writer category in the 2007 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Awards announced in Wellington last night. We hope this may represent the beginning of a tradition, as Craig’s fellow workshop member Emma Gallagher took the award in 2006. Craig Cliff is currently travelling in Europe: his winning story is aptly titled ‘Another Language’.

MESSAGE FOR WELLINGTONIANS

WRITERS ON MONDAYS

8 October: Comic timing - Dave Armstrong

Dave Armstrong has twice won the Best New New Zealand Play at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards, as well the Best Comedy Script award at the 2003 AFTA Television Awards.
King and Country has played to sold-out houses around New Zealand, and Niu Sila (co-written with Oscar Kightley), was performed at the 2007 Pasifika Styles Festival in England.

Armstrong’s TV credits include Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby, Skitz, Shortland Street, Spin Doctors, and Bro’town. The event features actors presenting extracts from his plays, and Armstrong will also read from his work in progress as the 2007 Victoria University/Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence, and talk with Ken Duncum.

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

For further information see http://www.vuw.ac.nz/modernletters or email modernletters@vuw.ac.nz or ring 463 6854.

Armstrong pic for NZ Book Month website

HUIA SHORT STORIES 7 - Contemporary Maori Fiction Huia $35

This collection of short stories and novel extracts follows the 2007 Pikihuia Awards for Maori Writers. The biennial awards and their subsequent publications have become well-known and much-anticipated as they bring more undiscovered gems to the attention of the New Zealand public. This year’s awards were judged by James George, Barry Barclay, Kelly Ana Morey and Wena Harawira.

Stunning cover image by Sandy Adsett, Manawa.

What a great thing Huia achieve with this annual collection, giving voice to Maori, young & old, published and unpublished. The stories make great reading and cover a wide range of themes from drink spiking, trips to the dump, forest foraging, family relationships, love, death, betrayal and more.

Storylines Fundraising Auction

Storylines is running a Literary Limelights auction to support its activities in promoting New Zealand children's literature and literacy among young people.

Exciting auction items donated by authors, artists, illustrators, publishers and friends of Storylines - a cornucopia of delights - all with a literary theme.

We'd love to see you at the Live Auction on 31 October, where you'll be able to enjoy fine food, good wine, excellent company and great entertainment. However, if you cannot attend the Live Auction on October 31, you can bid online for any of the items.

Our Online Auction will start on 8 October.

A full list of auction items will be online soon.

Details of how to buy tickets will be available in the next few days.
For more information contact Storylines Executive Officer christine@storylines.org.nz