MUP and the underworld: Mick Gatto’s autobiography

Rebecca Starford

Hot on the heels of Colin McLaren’s Infiltration: The True Story of the Man Who Cracked the Mafia, Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) is releasing underworld identity Mick Gatto’s autobiography, Mick Gatto: My Story. ‘After many years of resisting media attention,’ the press release reads, ‘Mick Gatto has decided it is important to tell his own story.’

We’re sure he has. The autobiography marks a departure from MUP’s more scholarly list – but Louise Adler, CEO and Publisher-in-Chief of MUP, has confidence in the publication: ‘It is the story of a kid with a passion for boxing, the illegal gambling rackets that brought huge wealth to so few and ruin to so many, and it is the story of Australia’s very own violent underworld.’

The book, co-authored with crime writer Tom Noble (of Neddy: The Life and Crimes of Arthur Stanley Smith fame) will be published in October.

ABR hits America!

Rebecca Starford

Thanks to conscientious ABR reader, Lisa Hill, the magazine’s annual reviewing competition, worth $1000, is now listed on the National Book Critics Circle blog, ‘Critical Mass’. NBCC member Janice Harayda, of the ‘One-Minute Book Reviews’ blog, hopes that ABR’s Reviewing Competition ‘might encourage a sponsor in the US to start giving out prizes like that, too. This prize differs from the Pulitzer and NBCC prizes for criticism in that it’s for an unpublished review’. The first prize for the ABR Reviewing Competition is, after all, a big one: Harayda notes that when she was the book editor of the largest newspaper in Ohio, ‘we generally paid $100, on rare occasions $150.’ Operating in a small and indeed recessionary Australian market, it is heartening to see ABR as a forerunner in the recognition and appreciation of robust literary criticism.

Entries for the 2009 ABR Reviewing Competition are now welcomed – click here for more information.

From here to eternity: the filming of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Peter Rose

Publishing schedules are tight – ‘nasty, brutish and short’, some editors might even say. Books, often several years in the writing, are usually turned around in a matter of months – weeks even, if the topic is sensitive or controversial enough (David Marr’s The Henson Case, published by Text Publishing last year after a gestation of just two or three months, exemplifies the celerity with which author and publisher can move when the need arises).

Issues of ABR happen fairly quickly. Timeliness is important – we endeavour to furnish readers with cogent reviews as soon after publication of new books (simultaneously, if possible) – but we eschew those onerous deadlines that are the bane of literary hacks’ lives: ‘800 words by the day after tomorrow, thanks, Ed.’, to paraphrase George Orwell. Wherever possible we give our critics four or five weeks with a book. ABR contributors are busy people. Almost all of them have other careers, many of them senior ones. We want our writers to be comfortable with their articles: to reread the book if need be (always advisable), to allow it to ‘draw’, as it were, before sitting down and crafting the review (the hard part).

Once an article reaches ABR the Editor edits it, then several other people have a look at it, too. Once changes have been finalised we return it to the reviewer, so that she can see what we’ve done to it and make further changes, if she wishes. Then we page the article, which is subsequently proofed by about half a dozen people before that particular issue goes to proof. This in-house process takes anywhere between a week and a month – rarely longer. A week later, the new issue is ready to hit the news-stands – or subscriber letterboxes. And so it goes.

Film, notoriously, is very different, obeying its own mysterious and ostensibly dilatory principles. Few people in the publishing industry, I sometimes think, would be suited to this leisurely and enigmatic industry. It seems like years since we first heard about the filming of J.M. Coetzee’s Booker-winning novel Disgrace (1999). It was always an appealing prospect. Coetzee’s final twentieth-century novel is one of the great novels of the past two decades, as compelling and necessary now as it was ten years ago.

Now, at last, the Australian première of the film – an Australian–South African production – is imminent. Steve Jacobs is the director; Anna Maria Monticelli has adapted the novel for film. John Malkovich – always watchable and chameleonic – plays Coetzee’s embattled protagonist, David Lurie; newcomer Jessica Haines is his afflicted daughter. Judging by the stills, the cinematography is outstanding.

ABR stalwart Brian McFarlane (who frequently turns around books in a few days, and, endearingly, needs little editing) reviews the new film in our June issue, and is impressed by the adaptation. ‘Jacobs has taken a masterly novel and made an uncompromisingly brilliant film from this source.’ McFarlane admires Jacobs’s fidelity to Coetzee’s ‘curious tone of objectivity’: ‘There is perhaps a Brechtian denial of easy emotional involvement in favour of a tougher engagement with tough matters.’

Interestingly, McFarlane compares it with another new film, Isabel Coixet’s Elegy, which is based on The Dying Animal (2001), one of Philip Roth’s David Kepesh novels. Elegy stars Penélope Cruz in one of her most tense and intelligent roles. Opposite her is Ben Kingsley, playing another David, another ageing academic, another ‘disgracefully’ libidinous man of words.

Icon Film Distribution is distributing Disgrace in Australia, and the season starts on June 18. Icon has generously made lots of free double passes available for those who subscribe to ABR, so be quick.

Meanwhile, you can read Brian McFarlane’s article in its entirety when the June issue of ABR (about to go to print, as I write this) hits the news-stands on June 1.

And there’s more. In September, Random House will publish J.M. Coetzee’s new memoir, Summertime, the sequel to Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Boyhood, for this reader, is one of the great books about childhood – of any era – so Summertime (even in winter) is a superb prospect. We’ll review it in the September issue, of course.

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Joining ABR: Our new Editorial Intern reports on his first week

Mark Gomes

Beginnings like the one I have experienced as nascent editorial intern at the Australian Book Review are the stuff of dream fiction and inspirational memoir. Only a week has transpired of my six-month, Australian Publishers Association-funded placement at the magazine, and already I am irrevocably changed in terms of self-recognition and editing knowledge. I am by no means a fatalist, but the feeling I have is of uncanny arrival at a place I am meant to be: of shapeless aspiration made flesh, or rather, made stacks of review pages to be copy-edited. Out of hours have passed in an unreal fug as the realisation of my appointment and what it means in real terms of opportunity sets in. To be plain, this has been one of the best weeks of my life, and I envisage with great joy how I am to be ultimately transformed by the internship.

Allow me some biographical and publishing industry context to explain what may sound like hyperbole. I have spent the better part of ten years looking for a break in the world of Australian letters; first as a freelance writer and then, like so many editing and publishing graduates, lingering in trade publishing divisions other than editorial. Work has been constant and diversionary – detours in science publishing, the visual arts matrix and music criticism included – but with each new hustle the carrot of literary involvement telescoped away, or so it seemed. Try as I might, publishers’ and magazines’ editorial and proofing services, I learnt, are inevitably sewn up in-house or provided by long-serving freelancers, retired staff or those on maternity or paternity leave. Thus, I could only steel myself in wait for serendipity’s embrace.

ABR is a lean and exacting operation and the ideal place to learn editing and publishing procedure. Peter Rose, Rebecca Starford and Lorraine Harding have welcomed me as one of their own, and immediately set me to work across all aspects of the magazine’s production. I have everything to learn about commissioning, editing to house style, proofing, layout, administration and the magazine’s esteemed family of contributors. So far I have been most impressed by the sheer efficiency of planning required to publish to monthly deadlines, and, as a corollary, the general pace at which the publishing cycle unfurls. With luck and some serious mental grist, six months will be time enough for me not only to master the refined ways of ABR’s production, but also to creatively contribute to its future.

Extra and interesting certification of having arrived at the perfect place to conduct my internship was further provided last Thursday, when I attended an ‘Introduction to Australian Publishing’ seminar run by the Australian Publishers Association. This marvellously informative day featured presentations from an array of established industry professionals, each one an expert in their chosen discipline and running the gamut from commissioning editorial through marketing, publicity and retail book selling. Some of the major publishers were represented, and although I loved every minute of their racy anecdotes about big money deals, celebrity authors and company machinations, in the end they fortified my uncanny feeling that there is no better fit for me than ABR in terms of sensibility, publishing content, mission ethos and personnel.