Cate Kennedy says stories are living, breathing entities that refuse to be corralled by aphorisms. There are 15 short stories in her latest book, Like a House on Fire, and all live and breathe deeply. I’d read a couple of the stories before in other contexts but was pleased to read them again and to
Start the presses! The e-book is losing ground and printed books (especially hardbacks) are proving their resilience according to the Wall Street Journal. This news vindicates my late-adopter-Luddite tendencies (it’s true I have no Kindle or other e-reader) and makes me feel smugly hopeful that all those little bookshops that have hung in there in
Not an exhaustive list but a pretty good summary. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Bloomsbury) What a smashing first sentence. “I was born twice: First as a baby girl on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again as a teenage boy in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan in August of
Books of the year vary, of course, depending on where you reside. This can be seen in Stephen Romei’s summary for the Australian. Highlighted are Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (Text), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate), Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Random
Robert Colvile notes reports that the number of bookshops in Britain has halved in seven years and says something radical is required if main street outlets are to resist the digital revolution. With reference to the “unmatchable advantage of serendipity” and the age-old joy of being able to lose yourself in a good bookshop, he
“The attachment of writers to the old, tangible media is not just about money. The physical book seems like a fitting reward for the labour of writing a book.” Andrew Martin, in the Financial Times, reviews Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times by Andrew Piper, Paper: An Elegy by Ian Sansom and The Missing
There’s a longstanding tradition in our office that if a staff member goes on leave they must pen the other staff a postcard (or ten!) so we can vicariously share their adventures. Much more than receiving their emails, the handwriting of these colleagues moves me as it conjures each individual and their enthusiasms, quirks and
Journalist and broadcaster Ramona Koval presented the Book Show on ABC Radio National from 2006 to 2011. It was the world’s only daily radio program devoted to books, writing and publishing. Koval launched By the Book: A Reader’s Guide to Life, in November. Here she talks about how reading shaped her life, her relationship with
The 2012 winners of the “reinvigorated and strengthened” NSW Premier’s Literary Awards have been announced. The Christina Stead Prize was awarded to 2011 Miles Franklin winner, Kim Scott, for That Deadman Dance (Pan Macmillan) (also picking up Book of the Year). The judges said, “Compassionate and lush, this is a novel which unsettles and displaces the
Reading By the Book is like spending a leisurely day at a friend’s house browsing her bookshelves, dipping into paragraphs here and there, asking this friend how she discovered certain authors and picking her brains about what she remembers of their writing and their lives. Actually, no, it’s even better than that! Imagine this friend
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