This is bliss! There’s a library across the courtyard, there are shelves of good books behind me and above … & … & … & … I have a coffee to sip on that’s mellow and smooth. A quote from Anthony Trollope is painted on the silvery-grey wall of the stairwell. “What on earth could
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
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
The Biggest Estate on Earth has won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage (Allen & Unwin) also won the Nettie Palmer Prize for Nonfiction and previously won the $80,000 Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History and the history book award at this year’s
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