KIWI CONNECTION TO THE WORLD OF DOWNTON ABBEY

The BBC's TV series Downton Abbey written by Oscar Award (Gosford Park) writer Julian Fellowes, screens next week on Prime television. Attracting around 9 million viewers per session, this popular series involves the life, times and scandals of an Edwardian family, their friends and servants.

What is not generally known is that the recently published NZ biography Searching For Grace, written by Carol Henderson and her mother Heather Tovey, published by Steele Roberts, lifts the lid on this same aspect of Edwardian society, uncovering family secrets and skeletons that prove to be every bit as intriguing as the fictional goings on depicted by the illustrious Mr Fellows.

English writer and historian Edward Mayor reviewing Searching For Grace comments, “We read of an attempted kidnapping, physicians with much to hide, a glamorous social whirl involving he future King Edward V111, and finally death and burials worthy of a Wagnerian music drama. Gliding between England, South Australia and New Zealand, this book is simply sensational.”

The Tuesday Poem

Tuesday Poem hosts Pulitzer prize-winning man of poetry Hayden Carruth 
 

This week Tuesday Poem offers up three poems by US poet Hayden Carruth. Editor Eileen Moeller - a Philadelphian poet on the NZ-based blog - says of him, 

"It is impossible to represent Hayden Carruth's enormous body of work here, but I've chosen three poems that seem to capture his generous spirit, and his gift for magnifying, and making sense of, the ordinary moment.

Born in Connecticut, Hayden died in New York State on October 2, 2008, having dedicated most of his eighty-seven years to poetry. He was my teacher at Syracuse University, and my most beloved "poetry father". He was a master of poetics, who regularly received and edited manuscripts sent by his many literary friends, including seasoned poets like Galway Kinnell and Adrienne Rich." More here. 

The poems have the magnificent names of 'Little Citizen, Little Survivor', 'Secrets' and ' The Minute Difference between Birds and Leaves'. After reading Carruth - pop into the sidebar at Tuesday Poem where there are many other marvellous poems by poets local and from elsewhere selected by up to 30 Tuesday Poets.

Pakistan's Deadly Game- Salman Rushdie

Anjum Naveed / AP Photo

Are we really supposed to believe that Pakistan didn't know Osama bin Laden was living right up under its own military academy? Salman Rushdie argues that bin Laden's hideout proves Pakistan is too paranoid about India to ever get serious about dealing with Islamists—and that it's time to declare the country a terrorist state.

Read Rushdie' full story at The Daily Beast.

BNZ Literary Awards

Are you aware there is a new category to this years BNZ Literary Awards?   The BNZ Short Short Story Award is for stories of up to 150 words and you enter through Facebook on the BNZ page

http://www.facebook.com/BNZBank

There are even got inspiration pages if anyone needs a hand to find their start.  The competition ends 16 May (which is ahead of the end date for our other BNZ Literary Award categories)

Here is some exciting news on how the new BNZ Literary Awards Short Short Story competition is being promoted THIS FRIDAY.

Friday night promotion

6.30-11pm this Friday at Auckland's Aotea Square on the wall between the Playhouse  bar and Queen Street (as shown below) there will be live typing short stories taken from the inspiration of those in Aotea Square.  There will be two people writing stories and members of the public will be encouraged to write their stories and enter the BNZ Short Short Story Award.

6.30-11pm this Friday Aotea Square by the Playhouse bar.  Saturday is the rain date

2011 Best Translated Book Award Winners Revealed

By Maryann Yin on Galley Cat, May 2, 2011

The winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Awards have been revealed. Writers and translators will each receive $5000 as prize money.
Aleš Šteger’s Slovenian collection, The Book of Things, won in the poetry category; Brian Henry served as translator. Tove Jansson’s Swedish novel, The True Deceiver, won in the fiction category; Thomas Teal served as translator.
According to Publishing Perspectives: This awards ceremony was held as a part of the PEN World Voices Festival. The awards’ co-founder Chad W. Post had this statement in the press release: “This festival is the premiere festival for international literature taking place in America today.
And by highlighting two fantastic works of translated literature, the BTBA adds something special to the week-long festivities.”

7 Survival Secrets for Independent Bookstores

 

By Jason Boog on Galley Cat, May 1, 2011

At the Los Angeles Festival of Books, some of the best booksellers on the West Coast shared strategies that helped them survive during these challenging times for local bookstores. Below, we’ve collected seven tips from these innovative booksellers.
The panelists included: Vroman’s Bookstore president Allison Hill, Powell’s Books president Emily Powell and owner Michael Powell, and City Lights chief book buyer Paul Yamazaki.

1. Sell personalized children’s books. Hill said children’s books sold well at her store, and customizable children’s books were very popular as gifts.

2. Create special book bundles. Powell’s created special “Indiespensable” bundles for readers, assembling special packages of books with limited edition items.

3. Team up with other local businesses. Yamazaki explained how City Lights joined other local businesses to remind Bay Area shoppers to buy local. “Reach out to other local sellers to remind people that if you don’t support these businesses, then your neighborhood will be different,” he noted.

4. Work with print on demand companies. Michael Powell said he found success partnering with POD experts Lightning Source for some books in his store.

5. Partner with local self-published authors. Hill connected with local indie authors, helping them sell their books to the community through Vroman’s.

6. Start a membership program for your most dedicated readers. One audience member asked the booksellers if they had any sort of a subscription plan–”I pay 10 a month for NPR and I’d love to do that for my local bookstore,” he explained.

7. Treat books like vinyl. Hill said a collection of special edition Penguin Classics sold out at the last book festival, purchased primarily by teenagers shopping for stylish books the same way they shopped for classic records.

Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook and other e-readers could undermine the market for paper books, wrecking publishing industry revenue.

eweek.com

Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes &Noble’s Nook, and other e-readers might dangle the prospect of convenience for millions of bibliophiles around the world, with their light weight and instant access to whole libraries of e-books, but a new analyst report suggests the devices could eventually prove bad news for the publishing industry as a whole.

“The book publishing industry has entered a period of long-term decline because of the rising sales of e-book readers,” reads an April 28 research note from IHS iSuppli, which predicted a decrease in book revenue at a compound annual rate of three percent through 2014—a reversal from the period between 2005 and 2010, when revenue rose.

For the traditional book publishing industry, the implications of the rise of the e-book and e-book reader markets are frightening, given the decline in paper book printing, distribution and sales,” Steve Mather, IHS iSuppli’s principal analyst for wireless, wrote in an April 28 statement. “The industry has entered a phase of disruption that will be as significant as the major changes impacting the music and movie business.”

Full report at eweek.com 

  

How To Get Published When You’re Not a Cliche

Publishing Perspectives

David Unger is the US rep for the Guadalajara International Book Fair. Born Guatemala, he lives in New York, has an Anglo name and writes in English, but is more widely published in Spanish. Here he explains the paradoxes of his publishing career.

Story here.

Of Aliments, Archives & Authors

HOW DUNNITS FROM LEADING KIWI SCRIBES AT ARANZ LECTURE

When:   Thursday, May 5, 2011, 5.30pm to 7pm.
Where:  Weltec City Campus, 11 Church Street, Wellington, New Zealand

Ace New Zealand authors are set to reveal their writers' resource wizardry while they were preparing magisterial works on Kiwi comestibles.  Susette Goldsmith (Suzy's - a coffee house history) and David Burton (New Zealand Food and Cookery) will tell the secrets of their research success at this year's ARANZ Lecture in Wellington on Thursday.

DAVID BURTON is the feared/admired restaurant critic for Wellington's Dominion Post and Cuisine magazine, an historian and writer of a number of foodie books from the Indian Raj through New Zealand cheese making to colonial French cooking.  But it was his massive food and cookery almanac (Bateman, 2009) that earned him praise for "unbelievably rigorous research". 

SUSETTE GOLDSMITH chose blonde, Dutch

immigrant, Suzy van der Kwast, founder of Wellington's iconic "Suzy's" 1960s coffee bar, as the peg on which to hang a complete coffee history (Quill, 2010), praised as "a favour for Wellingtonians".  The Taranaki editor and writer has unearthed treasures of Kiwi coffee and tea cultures from Alexander Turnbull Library and other troves. 

ARANZ is the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand, www.aranz.org.nz.  The ARANZ Lecture, part of Records and Archives Week (RAW) 2011, is supported by the School of Hospitality and Catering, Wellington Institute of Technology (Weltec), Petone.   The RAW 2011 theme is "From the Hangi pit to the Weetbix kid: Recording the history of food in New Zealand".

The ARANZ Lecture will run at the Weltec City campus, 11 Church Street (off Boulcott Street), Wellington, on Thursday, May 5.  Light refreshments from 5.30pm; ARANZ Lecture from 6.00pm.
Admission is free. Catering koha will be requested.
Space is limited so, to make sure of a place, please RSVP by close of business, Wednesday, May 4, 2011 to Anna.Henry@dia.govt.nz.

Inspiring talent on tour - New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards Festival

Some of New Zealand’s most talented writers and illustrators showcase their work and ideas in May, as they take to the road in celebration of the 2011 New Zealand PostChildren’s Book Awards.

Twenty-one of this year’s finalists will visit 24 regions – from Northland to Southland – from 9th to 18th May.

They include seasoned writers Fleur Beale (left) and Ken Catran, and newcomers Evie Kemp (illustrator) and food writers Claire and Glenda Gourley.

The finalists will be entertaining children of all ages – from toddlers to teenagers – in a nationwide programme of events put together by a dedicated team of booksellers and librarians. 

The 2011 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards features activities as diverse as pirate parties, quiz nights, writing workshops, diorama and creative writing competitions, treasure hunts, Kiwiana treats and bush survival tours.

This year’s 2011 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards finalists are on tour as part of an annual nationwide festival of children’s reading and literature, now in its 15^th year. The New Zealand Post awards are the nation’s premier children’s book awards, celebrating writing and publishing for children and young adults.

The celebrations culminate with the announcement of the winners at the Auckland Convention Centre on the evening of Wednesday 18 May.

Some of this year’s highlight events are:

Northland: Sunday 15 May, 10am.The Storytime Character Hunt. Find your favourite storybook characters; once found, get your entry card stamped and receive your completion certificate from His Worship the Mayor.

Auckland: Thursday 12 May, 4pm. Who Dunnit? Murder Mystery Evening for Teens at Mangere Bridge Library. See the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards finalist characters come alive and work out who committed this murder most foul!

Palmerston North: Friday 6 May, 6pm. Stories @ 6 at Palmerston North City Library. A Kiwiana extravaganza – dress-up and readings from the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Award finalists.

Lower Hutt: Saturday 7 May, 7-8.15pm. 7 for Seven at the War Memorial Library. Story time with this year's picture book finalists. Enjoy pikelets and marmalade, and marmalade tasting, with fun activities and prizes.

Gisborne: Wednesday 11 May. High School Debates. Local high schools go head to head debating a hot literacy topic.

Hawkes Bay: Monday 16 May at Waipawa Library. Representatives from local schools to tour a local military display and hear first-person accounts about the Anzac’s on the Western Front.

Nelson: Sunday 15 May, 2-4pm. Beyond the Haystacks. Family fun at the Granary, Founders’ Heritage Park – dress in your farm gear to win spot prizes; musical entertainment, surprise animal guests, gumboot throwing and much, much more.

Grey District: Wednesday 11 May. Pirate Party evening. Dress up, party games and hear children’s poet Grey O’Connell break open his treasure chest of pirate poems.

Canterbury: Monday 9 May. The Big Read. Finalist picture books donated to low-decile Bromley School by Christchurch City, so that they can host a Big Read event and host a visit from New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards finalist, Kyle Mewburn (right).

Otago: Wednesday 11 May. Weaving ideas into a story. Talk and writing workshop with New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards finalist and veteran writer, Fleur Beale.

Southland: Friday 13 May. Editing workshops with veteran writer and finalist, Fleur Beale. And get creative by making your own fossils from plaster and other materials, to talk about and display in the Invercargill Public Library.

To find out what’s happening in your region, contact your festival coordinator. Find the full list online: http://bit.ly/festival-coordinators.

How Writers Build the Brand

By TONY PERROTTET, New York Times,

Published: April 29, 2011

• As every author knows, writing a book is the easy part these days. It’s when the publication date looms that we have to roll up our sleeves and tackle the real literary labor: rabid self-promotion. For weeks beforehand, we are compelled to bombard every friend, relative and vague acquaintance with creative e-mails and Facebook alerts, polish up our Web sites with suspiciously youthful author photos, and, in an orgy of blogs, tweets and YouTube trailers, attempt to inform an already inundated world of our every reading, signing, review, interview and (well, one can dream!) TV ­appearance.       

 

Advertisement From P. Ballantine & Sons, Newark (1951)

Gold standard: Ernest Hemingway's 1951 magazine advertisement.

 

In this era when most writers are expected to do everything but run the printing presses, self-promotion is so accepted that we hardly give it a second thought. And yet, whenever I have a new book about to come out, I have to shake the unpleasant sensation that there is something unseemly about my own clamor for attention. Peddling my work like a Viagra salesman still feels at odds with the high calling of literature.
In such moments of doubt, I look to history for reassurance. It’s always comforting to be reminded that literary whoring — I mean, self-marketing — has been practiced by the greats.

The most revered of French novelists recognized the need for P.R. “For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed,” Balzac observed in “Lost Illusions,” his classic novel about literary life in early 19th-century Paris. As another master, Stendhal, remarked in his autobiography “Memoirs of an Egotist,”  “Great success is not possible without a certain degree of shamelessness, and even of out-and-out charlatanism.” Those words should be on the Authors Guild coat of arms.

 Read the full story at the New York Times.
uccess is not possible without a certain degree of shamelessness, and even of out-and-out charlatanism.” Tho

Publishers take novel approach to advertising

• Will Pavia
• From:The Australian
• May 02, 2011

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, a Toyota Corolla and the high performance that comes with a Samsung 32-inch LCD television.   

So it might have gone had Jane Austen been writing Pride and Prejudice in the modern publishing climate, where writers struggle to find recompense and publishers seek new ways to make money from the novel.
These pressures, which may point the way towards the future of the book, have resulted in the latest work from Harry Hurt III, a prolific New York author, containing adverts for the energy drink PureSport, lobster boat tours and a range of carry-on luggage. These and many other products appear in the pages of Harry Hits the Road: Adventures in Love, Labor, and Modern Manhood. "The publishing industry was in decline, the economy was in a bad place," he says. "I just want to keep writing prose. To do that it has got to pay for itself in some way."

So his travelogue, published as an e-book, opens with a video advertisement for La Gloria Cubana cigars, which Hurt smokes throughout. "The story is about my struggle to reinvent myself . . . and my on-off romance," he says. "Whether or not I smoked Cubana cigars or another brand didn't really affect that."

Michael Norris, a senior publishing analyst at Simba Information, says such practices were bound to become more common. "Everyone is talking about how to bring content to people differently," he says.
This brave new world of publishing has been heralded by the release of a new e-book reader by Amazon, in which adverts are automatically embedded in the text of novels.
Hurt's innovation was to incorporate the adverts within the original text, but even this is not an entirely new departure.
"David Copperfield mocks characters who spend too much time reading Burke's Peerage," says Leah Price, a professor of English literature at Harvard University.
"Beside the text there were adverts for the latest edition."
Descriptions of Miss Mowcher, purveyor of wigs and cosmetics, appeared alongside adverts for "a ventilating head of hair".
Needless to say, it was a far, far better wig than they had ever donned and a far, far less sweaty head that it gave the wearer than he had ever known.

The Tiger’s Wife

By Tea Obreht
Weidenfeld & Nicolson $36.99
Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

This debut novel is getting a lot of attention partly because the author is young – only 26 – and to have written a work of such scope and complexity so early in her career is an achievement.  Obreht will be in Auckland this week to talk about her book – which has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize -  at the Writers & Readers Festival. But is it really all that good? The answer is only in parts. The Tiger’s Wife is a book of brilliant moments.

The beginning is promising. In a Balkan country scarred by war a young doctor called Natalia is setting out to cross the border to deliver vaccines to an orphanage. On the way she discovers her beloved grandfather has died in a clinic in an obscure town no one knew he was visiting. She begins to revisit her memories of him and the legends he has told her about his own life. “Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man” she explains and then proceeds to relate both those tales.

Obreht was born in the former Yugoslavia but raised mostly in the US. Perhaps this novel is her attempt to come to terms with her country’s chaotic and troubled history. It’s an ambitious and imaginative piece of fiction: she folds in folklore, superstition and legend; there is metaphor after metaphor, stories within stories.

There are poignant moments too and episodes that stay with you – the grandfather’s final meal in the town that’s about to be bombed to pieces, the elephant he and Natalia see walking through the boulevards of their city in the middle of the night, the story of the hungry but noble tiger’s escape from the bombed zoo.

Obreht knows how to make a sentence sing but while her writing is beautiful and very clever The Tiger’s Wife reads too much like a short story that has been worked up into a longer fiction. Obreht has told interviewers she didn’t write in any sort of a linear way, instead working on the chapters and passages that interested her most and then putting them all together. The trouble is you can see the joins - the main threads never weaving themselves properly into the fabric of the story. And however brilliant the parts that make up the whole might be, however compelling and striking the writing, I found it difficult to get past this flaw.

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino, a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction, The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009, Recipe for Life was published in April, 2010, while her latest The Villa Girls, was published three weeks ago and is riding high on the NZ bestseller list.

She is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 1 May, 2011 as was the Booklover column below.

Booklover

Tanya Moir is a Southland writer who recently published her debut novel La Rochelle’s Road (Random House, $39.99)

The book I love most is...........Illywhacker, by Peter Carey. It’s one of his earlier works, but still my favourite – a real tour-de-force, full of fire and magic. Carey’s a writer who can make you laugh and break your heart in the same sentence, and this is a fearless, angry, glorious novel – one that grabs a nation’s idea of itself by the throat and gives it a good shake. For anyone who has ever wondered what the point of historical fiction is – read this.

The book I'm reading right now is.........Charlotte Randall’s new novel Hokitika Town, and I’m finding it really difficult to put it down. I love her work – she’s a razor-sharp observer who isn’t afraid to push boundaries, and, like Carey, she manages to be devastatingly funny and moving all at the same time. This one’s got a cracking setting in the 1865 Gold Rush, and the child narrator, Halfie, is an absolute joy.

 The book I'd like to read next is........John le Carre’s Our Kind of Traitor. Well, you have to, don’t you?

The book that changed me is........Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was the book that first made me begin to think I might want to try to write fiction, so I guess you could say it changed me.

It was my first encounter with magical realism – such an explosion of colour and form, like a Gaudi building made out of words. It took my breath away. I thought, so that’s what can be done with language. Cool.

The book I wish I'd never read is...........I can’t actually remember the title, but a horror novel I read as a teenager – my first and last foray into that genre. It involved a particularly nasty vision of what happens to you after you die… I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say there was a lot of decomposition and zombies, and not in a funny Shaun of the Dead kind of way. Once those sort of images are in your head, it’s hard to get them out again. Death is hard enough to handle. Why make it scary in that way as well?

Grandfather's stories launch dream career

 

By David Larsen , NZ Herald, Saturday Apr 30, 2011

Someone has been sneaking into Tea Obreht's house and stealing her notes. Actually it's worse than that. Someone has found the door to her private Narnia, and they're selling tickets. "It's very strange. I mean you write alone," she says. "My experience of writing The Tiger's Wife was that I worked from 8 at night til 4 or 6 in the morning, every night. You're in absolute solitude. You've invented this world and you visit it every night and then you go home. And now - people have been extraordinarily generous - when someone says, 'The deathless man was my favourite character, can we talk about that?', my gut reaction is, what? Where have you heard about this? Who gave you my notes?"

Obreht is 25. The Tiger's Wife is her first novel. The novel crept up on her, years before she'd expected to graduate beyond short fiction. It was snapped up for publication. The New Yorker got wind of it, asked to see the manuscript and worked with her to reshape an excerpt for the magazine.

She was subsequently chosen last year as the youngest writer on the New Yorker's much talked about 20 Under 40 list: the magazine's pick of the 20 most promising writers under 40 years old. Reviews of the novel have ranged from positive to raves; sales have been strong; the book recently won Obreht a short-listing for Britain's Orange Prize.

And she has had her first taste of book touring. I ask her if it's been at all off-putting.
"It's been a very difficult thing to get used to, this feeling of exposure. That being said, I've met wonderful booksellers and wonderful readers, and in reality, writing is all I've ever wanted to do. Even if my experience had been worse, and thankfully it hasn't been ... I can't imagine being put off this life. Because to me it's the ultimate."

David Larsen's full piece at NZ Herald.

Tea Obreht will be a star guest at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival next week.

The Wreckage

Michael Robotham,
Sphere - NZ$39.99

I am reading this totally gripping, somewhat terrifying, totally unputdownable novel (set in London & Baghdad) at the moment while away on holiday so I was especially interested to come across the following story in Brisbane's Courier Mail.

Walking on a tightrope

• Felicity McLean
• From:The Courier-Mail

MICHAEL Robotham once said: ``I love the freedom of writing fiction but sometimes it feels like I'm standing naked on a high wire above Niagara Falls with everything hanging out in the breeze''.
For starters, Robotham constantly finds new ways to push himself to the edge with his writing. Given he has seven novels under his belt, not to mention more than a dozen books he's ghostwritten, that's no mean feat.

``What little hair I had beforehand, I lost in the writing of The Wreckage,'' Robotham says. ``But that comes down to my desire to never write the same book twice and to constantly challenge myself to write something a little bit different. To discover my own boundaries in terms of what I'm capable of doing as a writer.''

Then there's his habit of not plotting his novels before he starts out.

``The Wreckage was a really difficult book to write because of its multiple storylines and global setting (the novel spans four countries, at least three major plot lines and multiple investigations),'' Robotham explains.

``It was a very complicated piece of plotting. And because I don't plot in advance it just all had to unfold . . . it was a bit like playing three dimensional chess. It's a scary way of writing but it's incredibly organic and very exciting. It means that if I don't see the twists coming then the reader shouldn't see them coming either.''

Despite winning every crime award from Australia's Ned Kelly to the UK's Steel Dagger, Robotham continues to boldly explore the genre; prodding it and stretching it from atop his high wire.

``To begin with, I regarded myself as almost the accidental crime writer because I sort of stumbled into it. I didn't realise I was writing a crime novel when I wrote my first 117 pages,'' Robotham explains.

``I do regard myself as a crime writer now, although, what I love most about the writing process isn't the crime. It's the characters.

``Ultimately, if you ask even the most diehard crime fan to name their favourite novel and then ask them to tell you the plot, they won't be able to tell you. It's the characters they remember.''

Given his head for heights, it's surprising Robotham says his desire to write is motivated by fear.
``I'm firmly convinced that I'm a writer that's driven by the fear of failure rather than desire for success. And that every time I deliver a book but particularly when I delivered this one (The Wreckage) I was convinced this was the book that was going to prove I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and expose me as being a total fraud.'' Rather than expose him, The Wreckage only confirms Robotham's reputation as a skilled high-wire artist. It's based on an article Robotham read in the UK's Observer newspaper in 2009, in which the UN Office on Drugs and Crime revealed western banks accepted $352 billion in cash from drug cartels and organised crime gangs during the global financial crisis, to stay afloat.

Fans of Robotham will be pleased to hear The Wreckage brings favourites Vincent Ruiz and Joe O'Loughlin back. But Robotham also introduces a new character into his stable of regulars: Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Luca Terracini.

Full piece at Courier Mail.

About the Author

Michael Robotham was an investigative journalist in Britain, Australia and the US before becoming a full-time writer. He has ghostwritten twelve best-selling non-fiction titles, involving prominent figures in the military, the arts, sport and science. This meant collaborations with the likes of Rolf Harris, Lulu, Geri Halliwell, Tony Bullimore and Ricky Tomlinson.

He has won the Ned Kelly award twice and been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger and many other awards. 

Death made into a pause: How fans may get to read Stieg Larsson's fourth book

by Shane Dingman -  Globe and Mail

Reports continue to emerge about what might be in the so-called “fourth book” of the literary phenomenon known as The Millennium Series. It will include a cameo for Canada (it's set partly in Canada's Northwest Territories). It will feature the twin sister of the series' bold protagonist (hacker Lisbeth Salander).
But will it ever actually be published?

As die-hard fans already know, since Millennium author Stieg Larsson died in 2004 – just before his books became mega-blockbusters – what's alleged to be his remaining manuscript has become a bargaining chip in a legal row between Larsson's family and his long-time partner Eva Gabrielsson.
If the parties can't agree in a timely fashion, at least one Larsson observer – his friend John-Henri Holmberg, who received details of the fourth novel in an e-mail from Larsson before he died – fears it may turn into “one of those idiotic things like The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

He's referring to Charles Dickens's unfinished final work, which many other writers tried to complete after his death. Capping a literary legacy has proved problematic for the publishers of posthumous works from J. R. R. Tolkein to Ernest Hemingway to David Foster Wallace. But with due respect to Larsson, well, he was no Charles Dickens.

The challenge of continuing the Millennium books is more about brand coherence than maintaining a masterpiece at hand. And for that, the best case study might be what fantasy and sci-fi imprint Tor Books did when it lost the author of the Wheel of Time series, its most successful line of fiction.

Full story at Toronto's Globe and Mail.

broadsheet, No. 7

broadsheet, no. 7, May 2011, edited by Mark Pirie, featuring Anthony Rudolf (UK) is available now at:

http://broadsheetnz.wordpress.com

 Also included is new work by Emma Barnes, Sarah Jane Barnett, Janet Charman, Basim Furat (Iraq/New Zealand), Anna Jackson, Jan Kemp, Saradha Koirala, Graham Lindsay, Helen Lowe, Genevieve McClean, Harvey Molloy, Ila Selwyn and Madeleine Marie Slavick (USA/Hong Kong) and work by Bill Manhire.

The feature essay is an extract on cricket from Anthony Rudolf's new memoir. 

City of Fallen Angels author in New Zealand

Cassandra Clare, New York Times’ bestselling author of the hit series, The Mortal Instruments, will be touring Australia and New Zealand in May this year to promote the highly anticipated fourth book in the series, The Mortal Instruments Book 4: City of Fallen Angels.

With a huge following in New Zealand, having had all three books in the series break in the top ten bestseller lists nationally, and with an a-list The Mortal Instruments movie being optioned by top Hollywood producers, Cassandra’s fans will be eager to meet their favourite author at selected events around the country.

As well as an array of public events, Cassandra will also be taking part in the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival’s Secondary School program (see here for more details: www.writersfestival.co.nz).
Public events Cassandra will be involved in:

WELLINGTON

THE CHILDREN’S BOOKSHOP, KILBIRNIE

Tuesday 10 May at 4pm
Shop 26 Kilbirnie Plaza, Wellington
t: (04) 387 3905 e: childbkwgtn@xtra.co.nz

AUCKLAND

AUCKLAND WRITERS AND READERS
FESTIVAL: WORDY DAY OUT
Saturday 14 May at 10am
University of Auckland Business School
www.writersfestival.co.nz

AUCKLAND

AUCKLAND WRITERS AND READERS FESTIVAL:
FANTASY: FREEDOM ALL ROUND
Sunday 15 May at 1pm
Lower NZI Room, Aotea Centre
www.writersfestival.co.nz

Clive James's leukemia battle

Luke Slattery in The Australian, April 30, 2011

CLIVE James, the expatriate Australian critic and poet, is battling leukemia.   

For six months, as editor of The Australian Literary Review, I've been trying to extract an essay from James, only to be politely rebuffed on grounds of ill health.
It was only after the culture writer David Free submitted an essay for this month's ALR on James's recent work that a picture began to emerge, from the lines of his own poetry, of not one but several life-threatening conditions.
Free notes that in a recent poem, Vertical Envelopment, James refers to hospitalisations for emphysema and a blood clot, and a diagnosis of leukemia.
So I wrote to James asking for details of his condition. "In January 2010, in Cambridge, I got hauled in for kidney failure," he replied. "I was immediately diagnosed for everything else as well, including several lung diseases and a version of leukemia that is supposed to develop slowly but in my case couldn't wait to get started, mainly in my lungs."

He has been forced to ration his time to work on several book projects. "The big thing I am working on, and the one that needs most of the energy I have so little of, is a second volume of my book Cultural Amnesia," he says.

He is also serialising a poetry notebook for publication in book form a few years down the line - "if I am still around".

Before his illness James had started writing poems that, he tells me, "summed up themes I had been pursuing all my life". His struggle with illness and mortality served to deepen this contemplative mood. "I felt quite wise as I lay there taking pills," he offers.
Full story at The Australian.

The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright: review in The Telegraph

Anne Enright’s darkly funny tale of adultery in modern Dublin trumps her 2007 Man Booker Prize winner, argues Edmund Gordon

Anne Enright’s fifth novel, The Forgotten Waltz, is a simple tale of adultery and its consequences, told from a female perspective. This places it in an honourable if well-worn tradition. Adultery was a key subject for the 19th-century novel: such tragic heroines as Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina were defined almost entirely by their rebellions against the bonds of marriage.

In recent decades, however, with the softening of attitudes towards divorce, the subject has lost much of its usefulness for writers. The few modern novels that have successfully explored it (Brian Moore’s The Doctor’s Wife and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane come to mind) have been set in conservative religious communities, with old-fashioned strictures and sentimentalities (Roman Catholic Belfast in the Seventies and a Bangladeshi enclave of contemporary London respectively). The Forgotten Waltz – which is set in the basically secular environment of 21st-century Dublin – is a brave and unusual variation on a familiar theme.

The novel is narrated by Gina Moynihan, a Dubliner in her mid-thirties who works in IT. She is looking back from the winter of 2009 over the seven years since she first met Seán Vallely, the man for whom she has left her husband. Gina presents us with an anatomy of their affair, from their first glimpse of one another at a barbecue, through a series of assignations in anonymous hotels, to her uncomfortable relationship with Seán’s 11-year-old daughter after he has left his wife.

Enright’s interest is not, however, in the broad shape of the affair so much as in its texture, its moment-by-moment shifts of feeling and perception. She achieves her most brilliant effects at the level of the sentence (rather than, say, the paragraph or the chapter); her novels are mosaics of small but captivating details. Her physical descriptions, in particular, are compressed masterpieces of glancing insight and spiky wit, as in the characterisation (from her second novel) of a drunk “whose face was working in slow motion, as though every emotion was a puzzle to him, and its solution a surprise”.

The new novel, an advance on her earlier work in many respects, contains a refinement of this line, with its description of a woman “with the confused look that Botox gives you, like you might be having an emotion but you couldn’t remember which one”.

Hers is a style that glories in minutiae. She modulates so finely between comedy and pathos, between psychology and physicality, that she conveys a sense of the richness of lived experience, compared to which most other novelists appear to work in broad strokes. There are sentences in her work, whole passages even, that you want to mark up and learn off by heart for their warmth and humour, their sense of truth.

Read the complete review at The Telegraph.

Is the happy ending making a comeback?

From a fairytale wedding to news of an unlikely cab ride – are audiences regaining their appetite for cheerful stories?

Robert McCrum

The Observer, Sunday 1 May 2011

For a storytelling species with a narrative gene in the DNA, it's been a good week for stories. First, from America, there was news of the 3,000-mile cab ride that will have quickened the pulse of any scriptwriter on the lookout for a new angle to Taxi.

(Photograph: Stuart Dunn Travel/Alamy)
A New York cab driver, Mohammed Alam, landed the fare of a lifetime ($5,000) when two passengers, an investment banker and a friend, decided to do something "magical". John Belitsky and his pal Dan Wuebben conceived the idea of taking a yellow cab to Los Angeles, hailed the driver at La Guardia airport, and set off on a six-day epic across the US. Had the meter been running, the trip would have cost an estimated $17,000.

Taking to the road to obliterate your past, liberate the present and possibly find a better future is a truly American dream that's deep in the national psyche. Huck Finn does it when he sets off on the journey of a lifetime down the Mississippi, the greatest highway on earth. Jack Kerouac, in On the Road, created a blueprint for a generation of hitchhikers in the adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. More recently, Hollywood sent Thelma and Louise into the far west to escape from suburban anomie, and created an international hit.

Messrs Belitsky and Wuebben are good candidates for myth-making. One is from New Jersey, the other from Queens. They broke their extraordinary journey in Las Vegas and won $2,000 on the tables. Or so they say. This trip has been documented by Belitsky on his Twitter page. We know how travellers like to embellish their story. When he reports that they woke their driver "to a shower of $100 bills at sunrise", it does seem a bit too good to be true.

No matter. The dream of leaving is one of seven archetypal stories that rarely fail to capture the imagination. Expect to see a yellow cab cruising through the Painted Desert on your neighbourhood screen sometime soon. Mohammed Alam will probably be a woman and his passengers gay but – hey! – that's showbusiness.

Here at home we had our own bit of showbiz in another archetypal story – a painted coach trundling down the Mall into history. The fairytale wedding of a true commoner with bog-standard ancestors to a real prince who is heir to the throne of a "sceptr'd isle" also exhilarates the narrative gene. The global interest in the royal wedding and an international audience of some 2 billion speaks to many things but one of them is terribly simple: many little girls dream of marrying a prince.

That's not the whole story, of course. The televised wedding of a navy helicopter pilot to a former (part-time) Jigsaw employee may symbolise a country awkwardly coming to terms with the realities of the 21st century, but it also plugs the national narrative into the historical mains. Like the best fiction, it's possibly even cathartic. Princess Diana's ghost can rest quietly at last.

Actually, marriages are supposed to resolve the plot of comedy, followed by "and they all lived happily ever after". Contemporary audiences have less appetite for what Henry James, who anticipates so much modernity, used to refer to as "the time-honoured bread sauce of the happy ending". In The Art of Fiction, he scorns such contrivances. In some novels, he remarks, it is just "a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks".

Read McCrum's full piece at The Observer.

Taschen Catalogue - Spring/Summer 2011

I am always impressed with Taschen's beautiful catalogues and the latest is no exception. Taschen are represented in New Zealand by New Holland Publishing.

Above, Kate Moss on the cover, and below a shot of Paul McCartney from inside:

From The world through Linda's lens A retrospective of Linda McCartney's life and photography.

Book trailer for the remarkable story of Tupaia

Check this out. I was impressed. The Random House edition will be available in NZ and Australia nxet month.