tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:14:10 +0000Welcome to the official blog of <i>Australian Book Review</i>, Australia's leading literary magazine. Contributors include Editor Peter Rose and other <i>ABR</i> staff and guest bloggers from the world of letters. Enjoy!http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)Blogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-2207675268119240620Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:10:00 +00002011-01-27T14:23:53.569-08:00Peter Rose, Editor, Australian Book ReviewPeriodically I am asked what I look for in new reviewers. Sweetness and grammar, I’m tempted to reply. On reflection, though, it may be helpful to pen a kind of desideratum for those who are interested in writing for Australian Book Review. Though not comprehensive, this list does encompass the main prerequisites for a sound working relationship with thishttp://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-literary-editors-seek-in-new.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-8691072265030219428Mon, 04 Oct 2010 06:09:00 +00002010-10-03T23:33:06.824-07:00Mark GomesThe Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards were presented by Arts Minister Peter Batchelor last Tuesday night, 28 September, 2010, at Federation Square, Melbourne. ABR was in attendance and can proudly report that David Hansen, co-winner of this year’s Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, was awarded The Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate, worth $15,000, for his http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/dont-be-shame-be-game.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-6365421457318282023Tue, 16 Feb 2010 03:32:00 +00002010-02-15T19:51:29.371-08:00Mark GomesAssistant Editor of ABR Historically, books and music have readily exchanged stylistic inventions – the latter glaringly stealing from the former for narrative, conceptual and aesthetic direction in pop since the 1960s. Perhaps on account of this, and considering its performative and ephemeral dimensions and base populist overtones, music published for the mass market has been thought http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/digital-revolution-publishing-in-twenty.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)72tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-6759239369457100414Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:41:00 +00002009-10-25T20:13:31.503-07:00Mark GomesGood books demand rereading, and the best speak differently through time. Like memory, literature works selectively as ‘an imaginative expression of a culture’ – as Jack Hibberd put it in The Weekend Australian, 10–11 October 2009 – and books can fall in and out of favour spectacularly with readers. New work revives the concerns of old or purposefully sidesteps it; changing mores favourhttp://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/abr-fan-favourite-australian-novel-poll.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-4355247370633749239Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:02:00 +00002009-08-02T20:12:33.687-07:00Mark GomesLast week ABR received a query from two Mentone schoolgirls regarding the newly announced Young Calibre Prize. What exactly, they asked, was ‘creative non-fiction’, as referred to in our media release? Google told them ‘non-fiction’ was writing based on facts, so wasn’t our barrelled genre descriptor impossible by definition? Could we please explain the confusion so they might enter http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/creative-non-fiction-and-jm-coetzee.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-6180537471844330584Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:06:00 +00002009-06-29T16:03:08.609-07:00Mark GomesIn researching his new survey of the Australian novel, Panorama du roman australien, Frenchman Jean-Francois Vernay noted that in ‘a lot of Australian literary criticism … there was the complaint that Australians preferred film adaptations of Australian novels to the books themselves’ (The Age, 14 February 2009). Whether or not this statement is true, there can be no denying that film http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-preferring-films-to-books.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-3481455515097473558Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:45:00 +00002009-06-28T18:39:19.946-07:00 Mark GomesSelecting a new body font for Australian Book Review has required many of the same skills involved in good editing. Both jobs call for a general attitude of service, rather than expression, and both demand sensitive reading above all else. Like an effective edit, a good typeface should interpret text – working from within, not without – and hold itself back as far as possible from http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/vintage-of-human-mind.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-1651778815837109551Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:06:00 +00002009-06-02T23:15:14.603-07:00Peter RoseSoon after learning of the appalling Air France disaster over the Atlantic Ocean, I was seated on an Airbus, with even less leg-room than usual and no manuscript to edit, which was most unusual. Looking through the window, I saw one of ABR’s senior contributors strapped to the wing and quite supine. She had placed herself there voluntarily for the windy heck of it – rather like J.M.W. http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/marcel-proust-and-windy-heck.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-5103442724402516813Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:28:00 +00002009-06-02T16:35:20.608-07:00Rebecca StarfordLocal television drama is about to get a much-needed boost: Matchbox Pictures has purchased the rights to produce a television adaptation of The Slap, the recent winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Award-winning director Tony Ayres, one of five partners at Matchbox, hopes the series will unfold over eight episodes, just as Christos Tsiolkas’s novel is told over eight http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/slap-snapped-up-christos-tsiolkass.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-6860156515945804847Thu, 28 May 2009 01:34:00 +00002009-05-27T22:50:00.021-07:00Rebecca StarfordHot 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 http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/mup-and-underworld-mick-gattos.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-4585095153581898050Mon, 25 May 2009 22:38:00 +00002009-05-27T22:50:13.974-07:00Rebecca StarfordThanks 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 http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/abr-hits-america.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-5480657603770844084Wed, 20 May 2009 06:57:00 +00002009-05-20T18:31:14.609-07:00Peter RosePublishing 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 http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/from-here-to-eternity-filming-of-jm.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-7228655593899246149Tue, 12 May 2009 03:29:00 +00002009-05-24T14:29:17.837-07:00Mark GomesBeginnings 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, http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/joining-abr-our-new-editorial-intern.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-5566783980992871824Thu, 30 Apr 2009 03:45:00 +00002009-05-21T18:46:26.741-07:00Peter RoseTo Adelaide for a week: another sojourn at ABR’s second office, at Flinders University. It’s been a busy time on the east coast, on several fronts. Earlier this month we presented both winners of the 2009 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay in Sydney and Melbourne. Fittingly, the two State Libraries provided the venues. Large audiences heard Jane Goodall and Kevin Brophy introduce http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/160-applicants-for-apa-editorian.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-2729292351881104632Thu, 28 Aug 2008 05:41:00 +00002008-08-27T22:49:37.397-07:00Rebecca Starford Deputy Editor, ABRHow much would you pay for a paperback book?When Allen Lane, then a director of The Bodley Head, waited on the Exeter station platform in 1935, he was – the story goes – appalled at the selection in the bookstall (the quality of the interior of cheap paperbacks tended to replicate their exterior). Lane believed that high-quality contemporary fiction should be http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/popular-penguins-price-of-books.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-4820144590872727632Thu, 25 Oct 2007 03:59:00 +00002007-10-24T21:08:27.437-07:00Rebecca StarfordDeputy Editor of ABRDuring October, Radio National broadcast Elisabeth Holdsworth’s reading of ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’. This essay, which won the inaugural Calibre Prize, describes Elisabeth’s return in 2005 to Middelburg in the Netherlands, and her family’s vicissitudes during World War II. In its printed form (ABR, February 2007), the essay had generatedhttp://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/some-subliminal-airing-of-my-own.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-7774214617784832231Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:43:00 +00002007-09-04T19:01:58.147-07:00Andrew Burns, ABR Editorial AssistantThere is a seven-hour avenue of scribbly gums and wheat fields between Melbourne and Mildura – if you include a lazy lunch in Bendigo. It is a beautiful drive, if rather long.Recently, a party of university friends and I enjoyed it all the more for the fact that we were racing towards our first Mildura Writers’ Festival. The music was up loud, the conversationhttp://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/at-mildura-writers-festival.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-989883775466283054Thu, 28 Jun 2007 23:23:00 +00002007-06-28T16:42:41.221-07:00Rebecca StarfordDeputy Editor of ABR Back in May, I was first alerted to the UK publisher Orion’s plans to release abridged versions of classics such as David Copperfield and Moby-Dick on the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club. Shocked as I was by panellist Peter Goldsworthy’s claim that ‘none of these texts [Eliot, Gaskell, Thackeray] are sacred …[y]ou can take great slabs our of Tolstoy without http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/what-dickens-compacted-classics.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-6847593900604859103Mon, 23 Apr 2007 02:43:00 +00002007-05-03T19:26:49.083-07:00Rebecca Starford,Assistant Editor of ABRI tell you, we just don’t react to a murder like we used to.Who likes reading about grisly murders in the newspaper? Does the report of a double homicide titillate you? Does your pulse quicken when ‘Killing Spree’ is screamed across your computer screen? Come on, be honest – you’re among friends here. (Not that I am trying to gauge the psychotic urges of http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/yarra-murder-mystery-repeats-itself.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-2773396527125465617Mon, 05 Mar 2007 21:30:00 +00002007-03-05T13:47:11.723-08:00March 1, 2007Dan Toner, ABR Editorial AssistantIt was in June 2005 that Hunter Stockton Thompson, one of my heroes, was scattered ceremoniously to the four winds, six months after his death by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Actually, ‘scattered’ may be too polite a word for it. About half of Thompson’s remains were boomed skywards from a 153-foot cannon erected on the Woody Creek property that http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/hunter-stockton-thompson-one-of-my.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-2936215976110297375Sun, 03 Dec 2006 23:24:00 +00002006-12-03T15:45:57.152-08:00Friday 1 December, 2006Jo Case, Deputy EditorAnother year is grinding to a close. The signs are everywhere. Christmas party invitations are jostling for attention in my inbox. (All three of them.) The last of my favourite television shows has departed from the screen, leaving me with a renewed resolve to read more, watch less. Yesterday, I saw my first ‘real’ Christmas tree, hanging its head in http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/best-books-of-2006.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-2381391179882149816Fri, 17 Nov 2006 05:24:00 +00002006-11-19T19:54:36.290-08:00 Rebecca Starford, ABR volunteerNovember 16, 2006It must be that time of the year again: the time of epiphanies. I have become something of an epiphany junkie. In fact, I have had so many epiphanies lately that I’m considering beginning my own festival in celebration. Most of them have been trifling revelations involving proposed fitness regimes, healthy eating and a realisation that Neighbours http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/week-of-epiphanies-for-publishing.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-6015605585202894486Wed, 08 Nov 2006 21:49:00 +00002006-11-08T14:24:53.177-08:00 Jo Case, Deputy EditorThursday, November 27:45amArrive at work in the ABR office, painfully aware that I have my bimonthly book review segment on Triple R at 11 am. Just over three hours away. (Peter Rose and I share this monthly gig.)7:50 amOutside, the sky is the colour of charcoal, smudging from dense black clouds to a solemn grey. Sheets of rain attack scurrying commuters, grim-faced below http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/confessions-of-radio-novice.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-335975846183524284Wed, 01 Nov 2006 00:35:00 +00002006-10-31T17:01:56.971-08:00Peter Rose, EditorOctober 30, Monday Return to ABR websiteI’m back in Adelaide, not, as some might wickedly suggest, to escape any fall-out from Peter Craven’s review of Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (our lead article in the November issue), but to co-present another lecture – and, well, heck, because I live here some of the time.I flew over last Saturday, a day of unseasonably cold http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/abr-gets-artistic.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36468147.post-8537872750951318531Mon, 23 Oct 2006 04:58:00 +00002006-10-22T22:21:52.927-07:00 Monday, 22 October Dan Toner (editorial assistant, ABR)Return to ABR websiteI am brain-deep in the creation of my first novel at the moment, the imaginary memoir of a decayed Australian with an Irish memory. Paddy is the name of the man who is telling the story. He does so via a peculiar, idiosyncratic and highly confused version of the English language that I have come to think of as Irishish. http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/shiny-bits-of-language.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Australian Book Review)2