We don’t exactly judge a book by its cover here at the Wheeler Centre … but we do appreciate a good-looking book cover, nonetheless.
The Australian Publishers' Association celebrates the best in Australian cover design once a year, with the APA Design Awards. This year’s winners were announced last week; here’s some of them.
Love Lace: Powerhouse Museum International Lace Award, Powerhouse Publishing, designed by Toko.
The Art of Pasta, Lucio Galletto & David Dale, Penguin, designed by Daniel New, artist Luke Sciberras.
Hannah Robinson for And Red Galoshes, pictured, Glenda Millard & Jonathan Bentley, Hardie Grant; The Elegant Art of Falling Apart, Jessica Jones, Hachette; Wide Open Road, Tony Davis, ABC Books; and Chasing Odysseus, S.D. Gentill, Pantera Press.
August, Bernard Beckett, Text, designed by W.H. Chong and Susan Miller.
Love in the Years of Lunacy, Mandy Sayer, A&U, designed by Emily O'Neill.
Hiroshima Nagasaki, Paul Ham, HarperCollins, designed by Matt Stanton and HarperCollins Design Studio.
Foal’s Bread, Gillian Mears, A&U, designed by Sandy Cull, gogoGinko, and Yolande Gray.
The Flight Attendant’s Shoe, Prudence Black, NewSouth, designed by Di Quick.
Alaska, Sue Saliba, Penguin, designed by Allison Colpoys.
Ben & Duck, Sara Acton, Scholastic, designed by Nicole Stofberg.
Star League 1: Lights, Camera, Action Hero!, H.J. Harper, Random House, designed by Nahum Ziersch and Astred Hicks, Design Cherry.
The full list of winners is available at Bookseller and Publisher online.
In the first of a new event series on the art of book design, multi-award-winning cover designer W.H. Chong will present an illustrated talk on how he turned much-loved Australian classics into art for Text Publishing’s Australian Classics series.
Beautiful Books: How To Design an Australian Classic with W.H. Chong will be held at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday 31 May at 6.15pm. Free, but please book.
In person, Jeanette Winterson has a somehow otherworldly appearance. Small and lithe, her short hair curling over her ears and at the nape of her neck, she resembles an elf or a pixie.
Light-footed, she strides the stage at the Comedy Theatre as she greets her audience, brandishing her book as if talismanic object. She reads – or, more accurately, performs – the first chapter in full, but barely glances at it and rarely seems to turn the page. It’s as if she knows the story by heart – and she should; she lived it.
Jeanette Winterson: ‘I was never going to be a nobody.’
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal tells the true story partly covered in her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: living with her eccentric adopted parents, devout Pentecostals, growing up with books and language as her refuge from an arid emotional life. It picks up where Oranges left off, too, with her mother discovering her in bed with her female lover and kicking her out of home, aged just 17 – and goes on to take snippets from her literary career, and to follow her discovery of her birth mother (or ‘bio mum’, as she calls her). Threaded throughout are meditations on the nourishment of books and art, the way they offer solace, discovery and growth.
But Jeanette doesn’t like to call it a memoir; she prefers ‘cover version’, as she told Salon. In Why Be Happy, she writes, ‘Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.’
She tells her Comedy Theatre audience that the book is ‘an experiment with experience’.
Reflecting on Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she channels the first chapter of the book in her hands, her memoir-of-sorts:
1985 wasn’t the day of the memoir – and in any case, I wasn’t writing one. I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about ‘experience’ – the compass of what they know – while men write wide and bold – the big canvas, the experiment with form. Henry James misunderstood Jane Austen’s comment that she wrote on four inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Those things made me angry. In any case, why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody?
Not everyone has embraced this experiment, nor her acknowledgment of the shifting border between fact and fiction.
In a recent First Tuesday Book Club, Germaine Greer called both Oranges and Why Be Happy self-serving and ultimately unfair to the characters portrayed in them, particularly Mrs Winterson, Jeanette’s adopted mother, a larger-than-life ‘monster’. Greer said the books belong to ‘a strangely female genre … the lying autobiography’. She declared that she wasn’t ‘buying’ Jeanette’s story of feeling unloved from birth, because ‘adoptive parents DO love children’.
An audience member asks Jeanette, during question time, for a response to Germaine’s comments – which she handles with dignified aplomb. She says she won’t ‘hear a word said’ against Germaine Greer, ‘mother of feminism’, but adds, almost as an aside, ‘I think it’s rather touching that she’s standing up for Mrs Winterson, who died in 1990.’
‘I think it’s a very affectionate portrait of her,’ she reflects. ‘I began to have a lot more sympathy for her, a lot more understanding.’ She concludes that her mother, Mrs Winterson, had none of the chances she did, coming of age when she did, before the 1960s changed the options available to women. ‘She was clever and she was trapped.’
Indeed, Jeanette is openly admiring as she recalls that her mother read her Jane Eyre as a child, but changed the ending, so that Jane didn’t end up marrying the dashing Rochester, with his mad wife in the attic, but her cold clergyman cousin St John instead. Jeanette didn’t discover what her mother had done until she found a copy of Jane Eyre in the library and read it herself. She’s now impressed by Mrs Winterson’s ability to make up her own alternative story as she turned the pages, fluidly inventing in the prose style of Charlotte Bronte.
Jeanette credits Mrs Winterson and her upbringing with making her who she is; surprisingly, though she has confessed both a longing to be loved and an innate inability to do so, she says she wouldn’t change her circumstances if she could.
‘I was never going to be a nobody,’ she tells the Comedy Theatre audience, with a bright confidence. ‘That wouldn’t have suited me.’ She believes if her circumstances were different, she’d have a suburban house, kids, a Range Rover, and a high-flying corporate job. ‘I’d have had the energy but not the poetry.’
Her isolation, she says, meant that ‘I thought of myself as the hero of my own life.’
‘If you think of yourself as a fiction instead of a fact, you learn an important truth: you can change the story. You can rewrite yourself.’
Jeanette Winterson, it seems, is as passionate about her chosen religion as her mother was about God. Hers is art, literature, words.
Gesturing at the audience below her, at the blue velvet curtains at the sides of the stage, Jeanette Winterson laughs and says, ‘It’s the gospel tent, isn’t it? I’m hoping I’ll have saved some souls tonight.’
Jeanette Winterson appeared in a double bill with Chad Harbach at the Comedy Theatre as part of the Wheeler Centre’s Ten series of events, presented in partnership with the Sydney Writers Festival.
A terrific new coffee table book by the art director of the New Yorker, Françoise Mouly, collects her favourite covers that were either rejected (often for being too controversial) or have an intriguing story behind them. Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See comes with commentary by Mouly – and the images range from the shocking to the hilarious, to the absurd. Here’s a taste:
At the height of the Lewinsky affair, Art Spiegelman proposed this sketch titled ‘Clinton’s Last Request.’ ‘When a word like “blow job”, which you never dreamt of finding in the paper is on the front page every day,’ he explains, ‘I had to find a way for my image to be as explicit without being downright salacious.’
Sometimes it looks like an artist is poking fun at the more sedate New Yorker covers. This was proposed by M. Scott Miller, years before Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. He claims that the inspiration for this jeté is an experience familiar to anyone who follows classical ballet.
Fans of Wire and Treme, rejoice! David Simon, creator of what is generally agreed to be the Best Television Series Ever, is now blogging. Simon was a writer of journalism (and books) before he turned his hand to television, which means that his writing is well worth reading. What’s more, he’s opinionated and loves to share his opinions. The posts so far vary from an impassioned article on journalism, prize culture and the Pulitzer to bite-sized observations from the streets of Baltimore, or his own lounge room. Bookmark this one.
David Simon, with the cast of The Wire: ‘Those who know me understand that while it is refreshing to meet people with no opinions, I am not that fellow. I like to argue … I delight in pursuing a good, ranging argument.’
A Belgian not-for-profit, Responsible Young Drivers, has hit on a brilliant strategy for teaching teens that texting-and-driving is insanely dangerous. They tricked student drivers into believing that in order to pass their driving tests, they also had to demonstrate proficiency in texting while driving. The responses? ‘I’ll stop driving if this is introduced as law’, ‘People will die’ and ‘This is dangerous’.
It’s a bit like that urban myth, where a parent catches their kid smoking and forces them to chain-smoke an entire packet of cigarettes (and they never smoke again). From the looks on these kids' faces, the message has sunk in. This video is genuine car-crash viewing – almost literally.
Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, has written optimistically for the former about why he believes ‘actual’ books will survive the digital age (as will bookshops and libraries), and will coexist with digital books:
Few technological victories are ever complete, and in the case of books this will be especially true. Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves. So will libraries, whose vast and arcane holdings will soon be available to everyone everywhere.
All book lovers are fond of the idea that books are art. Chinese artist Lui Wei has taken the idea literally, creating intricate cityscape sculptures from stacks of schoolbooks, held together by steel rods and wood clamps. His sculptures include a range of iconic buildings from the Pentagon to Saint Peter’s Basilica, and depict cities in a state of metamorphosis, a concept familiar in his native Beijing.
Spain’s Librería General de Arte Martínez Pérez, open since 1890, is one of those bookshops that looks like it’s always been and always will be. So when Ailsa Piper received word of its closure, it felt like more than simply the demise of a business.
One morning not long ago, I opened my Inbox to find an email from a favourite bookstore – the Librería General de Arte Martínez Pérez in Barcelona. There’s nothing unusual in that. I’ve received updates from them for months. They remind me of the one visit I made there, a chance discovery of a place I’ve been hoping to see again.
Yesterday’s email was unusual: a missive with no details of upcoming events, no photographs, dates or times. It contained words like dificultades and tristeza. Yesterday’s email said that after 121 years, the Martínez family’s bookshop and recital space would close.
I cried. I don’t know why it hit me so hard. I only spent a couple of hours there.
I walked in off a hot Barcelona street, enticed by a leather edition of Cervantes in the window. I had no intention or budget to buy; it was just that the shop had a ‘feel’. The wood around the doorway was polished. The metal knocker gleamed. Inside, the shop smelled of leather, musty paper and good coffee. It was silent. Cool.
Bookshelves climbed to the ceiling, and volumes of prints and old letters were stacked on tables in the centre of the room. All were in Spanish or Catalan, and beyond my conversational Español. But oh, the tug of the place.
Stay, it whispered. Run your fingers over those spines. Consider the previous reader, and the reader before them. Lift the Cervantes and let your eyes run over the copperplate print. Pretend that your simple Spanish is good enough to savour the words. One day maybe it will be…
A man appeared, wearing a grey cashmere cardigan, and extended a hand to me. ‘Bienvenida a nuestra tienda,’ he said. Welcome to our shop.
He wasn’t phased by the dirt on my hiking boots or the tear in my khaki pants. Even my bursting backpack didn’t trouble him as he took it from my shoulders, telling me the store had opened in 1890, and had been in his family ever since.
He told me that in recent times he had had to branch out to survive, but that had given him a new pleasure. His other love was music, and he had found a way to support musicians. Would I like to see the Sala – the room where he had been hosting small concerts?
We walked past his paper-piled desk, down a few stairs, and through a narrow doorway.
I gasped. He smiled.
We stood at the entrance to a space that was almost as long as a netball court. To my left was a centuries-old wooden statue of a saint. I forget which one: there are so many in Spain. Two black pillars lined up behind the anonymous santo before the space opened out, its polished concrete floor gleaming under skylights that refracted light from the hot sky I’d escaped. My eyes travelled to a heavy wooden door in the distance, opening onto ferns in terracotta pots against an ochre wall.
‘Venga,’ my host whispered. Come.
Our steps click-clacked toward a refectory table. We passed a grand piano, a floral sofa, a wooden bench-seat, and three oil paintings, all lit from wall-mounted lights.
You need rest, Senor Martínez said. And perhaps a coffee? I can play for you some music too.
At the other end of the beeswax-scented table was a painting of St John the Baptist, his lush red robe clearly of more interest to the painter than the light streaming from heaven. To my right were the door and a shuttered window opening to the courtyard. A bird trilled. I sat. Yes, rest would be nice.
Coffee came in a modern white espresso cup, with a single almond biscuit and a choice of CDs – recordings he’d made of his concerts. Choral chants, flamenco, the jazz of Cole Porter, blues, Bach and tango…
I made my choice, and as the first notes from a quartet insinuated themselves into the space, Señor Martiñez handed me the volume control, and a note on which was written the password for his wifi. If you want to write to your family at home, he said, as he walked away.
I stayed for an hour. Then another. I wrote. I listened. I read a little Cervantes, wondering who first turned those yellowed pages. I studied the patina of window and picture frames, and I inhaled the scent of polish and care.
When I left, Señor Martiñez would only accept a euro for the coffee. I added my name to his mailing list before thanking him and walking out into the day.
Back in Melbourne, I was always excited to open one of his emails. In our clear southern light I’d be transported to that mellow place, imagining myself sitting in company with thirty others as the sun set, sipping our included glass of cava as a cellist or blues guitarist warmed up for a fifteen euro concert. In my mind I wore smart clothes and spoke perfect Spanish!
His emails always radiated possibility; all except yesterday’s.
All the hard work and efforts to maintain financial equilibrium have been insufficient to ensure continuity, he wrote. It is a considered decision, taken with profound sadness.
Even that note, full of bad news, was restrained and dignified.
Of course, there are worse stories in the world. Bigger losses. Harder. But I mourn the passing of that place. With it goes something civilised and civilising: history, grace and a beauty that cannot be bought with re-issued bonds, or re-built by the next wave of developers. Some things are losses to all of us, and no bankers or politicians can ever give them back. Tradition is one such thing. Kindness to strangers, no matter how humble they may be, is another.
My Spanish is not gracious enough to reply in the style of Cervantes, or even of Senor Martínez, but I do know how to write that I’m sorry.
Lo siento.
In Spanish, it also translates as ‘I feel it’.
Ailsa Piper is an award-winning playwright and actor. She recently appeared at the Wheeler Centre’s Debut Mondays, where she read from her newly-published first book, Sinning Across Spain.
In another Friday High Five themed edition, we share five bookish videos from around the web that made us giggle, including looks at the art of pencil sharpening and the smell of old books, a quirky promotional book video featuring Hangover star Zach Galifianakis, various Go the F**k to Sleep performances and our own Unexpected Passions.
Think you’ve read everything? Think again. The latest hot how-to book is How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Art of Pencil Sharpening, by David Rees, a former political cartoonist turned artisanal pencil sharpener.
‘With an electric pencil sharpener, a pencil is meat. It’s this thoughtless, Brutalist aesthetic,’ says Rees. ‘Nobody else is doing what I do. I guarantee an authentic interaction with your pencil.’ He also guarantees to get your pencil ‘really freaking sharp’. Rees charges his mail-order customers $15 per pencil, which he sends back in a sealed tube, with with a signed and dated certificate ‘authenticating that it is now a dangerous object’.
In the above video, Rees gives a pencil-sharpening demonstration and talks through the ethos of his business, which has been called the writing world’s equivalent of the slow food movement.
This Picador book trailer made the rounds of the internet a while ago. Actor Zach Galifianakis interviews John Wray about his novel, Lowboy. So far, so normal, right? (Albeit with a sprinkling of celebrity stardust.) Galifianakis and Wray swap roles – the actor plays the writer. (It’s made even funnier by the fact that Wray interviewed Galifianakis for a New York Times profile in 1999, so this really is role reversal.)
Highlights include the visual gag of a manual typewriter with two enormous keys, a confession to playing Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 as writing inspiration (‘it’s good for morale’) and the story of having written a previous novel in alphabet pasta. (The novel no longer exists; he ate it.)
This isn’t Wray’s first claim to internet-video fame though; before his Galifianakis outing, his performance at an ultra-hip book reading was enjoyed by literary types. In this video, Wray unveils a giant back tattoo of New York Times reviewer Michiko Kukatani, with her face and the legend ‘KAKUTANI 4 EVAH’. (And no, it’s not real: it’s drawn with what the Americans call ‘Magic Marker’, and we would call a texta.)
It’s a cliche (and sometimes a truism) that fetishists of what publisher Zoe Dattner now calls the ‘p-book’ like to rhapsodise about the smell of books. This video, made by online second-hand bookseller Abebooks, goes one step further, explaining the science of the smell, which is summed up as: a ‘combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness’.
Go the F**k to Sleep is well known as the book that not only took the internet by storm, but was created by the internet: it started on Facebook as a joke circulated by novelist and tired parent Adam Mansbach, who was urged to create and publish it as a real picture book.
It’s been performed by former Play School host Noni Hazlehurst and godfather of cool Samuel L. Jackson (in his most memorable recitation since Pulp Fiction’s ‘I will lay my vengeance upon you …’). Samuel L.’s version has also been set to music.
But just as good is this one with an unsuspecting grandmother reading the book to a baby at bedtime. Watch her reaction when she realises that this is no ordinary picture book! She’s a good sport.
Sam Pang’s Unexpected Passions series is a favourite here at the Wheeler Centre. Past guests have included Noni Hazlehurst and musician David Bridie. Tonight is another (free) instalment in our series, with comedian Lawrence Mooney (on his love of Vanity Fair) and Tom Elliott on World War II fighter planes. It’ll be at the Wheeler Centre, 7pm – 8pm.
You can whet your appetite with this video of the first Unexpected Passions, with guests Kate Langbroek (on op-shops) and Adam Zwar (on cats).
Wondering what to do with your old books? It can be hard to get much (or any) cash from your local second-hand bookshop these days. If you’re a dab hand with scissors and a glue-gun, you might like to try making them into art.
Surely this only took a few rainy-day afternoons, right?
Spanish artist Alicia Martin’s Biografias project uses 5,000 books in each of her three site-specific sculptures, based in historic buildings in Madrid. The current installation is at Casa de America.
Each of the large-scaled books columns is held securely by an intricate metal and mesh framework inside. The metal skeleton gives the voluminous sculptures shape and holds each and every page in place, although the pieces appear to be flowing downward.
‘By constructing the curving towers with a rather free and disheveled exterior, while maintaining a sturdy core, the books’ loose pages are free to blow and rustle in the wind, allowing the piece to be further animated,‘ writes My Modern Met.
You can watch the installation in action in the video below.
Does it symbolise the death of the print book, or its fetishisation? Or is it simply a really cool piece of art?
Book covers are such an important part of the process of matching readers to books. The old adage ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ is balanced by another, equally telling one: ‘First impressions count’. And for most readers, a book’s cover is what makes that all-important first impression.
In the first of a two-part series, Wheeler Centre regular Cate Kennedy shares her thoughts on three different covers (Australian, UK and US) for her novel The World Beneath.
Covers for Cate Kennedy’s ‘The World Beneath’ (from left to right): original Australian edition, UK edition, US edition.
It seems to me a cover is like a promise – I actually do think people ‘judge’ a book by its cover, because they are hoping on some level that the cover accurately hints at what’s inside in terms of style, tone, atmosphere and genre.
Occasionally I’ve been reading a book and feel an odd sense of jarring dislocation that it wasn’t what I thought it would be. And what’s given me that expectation? I ask myself. Why did I think it was going to be set in the fifties, say, or be a rural love story? Because that old photo of the girl in the 1950s dress walking down a country road on the cover gave me that impression, that’s why. This is true of abstract covers as well as ‘figurative’ ones – I unconsciously look to the font of the cover text, or the design, or whatever it is, to convey a freight of meaning about the book itself.
I like a cover in which the title and the image, whatever it is, seem to work together, in tone and implication, to let me know what’s in store. So I should say I loved the first edition Australian cover of The World Beneath, because it came from an image I found myself, uploaded on Flickr by the photographer himself, of a tarn in The Labyrinth, the real place where my characters become lost. (The photographer’s name is Lee Berlin, and the designer who transformed it into the final cover is Miriam Rosenbloom).
I loved the image because it operates as a promise on a number of levels. First, it’s not a landscape we traditionally associate with ‘Australian wilderness’, which tends towards the ‘rugged desert majesty’ kind of photo – this image just oozes dampness and chill and mystery. It’s not a place you want to be lost in, but this is just what happens to the characters in the book, who become totally disoriented there. I love how lonely and forbidding it seems – in fact, there’s lots of imagery in the book about the Underworld, and this is just how I imagine it to look: distances disappearing into cold mist, an implacable and empty world. Last of all, I love the ‘matching’ of the tree’s reflection and the real tree above with the title of The World Beneath – the world that exists below, underneath everything else, the mirror image of the reality on the surface. It promised just the reading experience I was hoping to create.
I wasn’t involved in the decision-making for the second cover (the turquoise UK-based cover which was also used for the Australian second edition), but I quite like it. That mirror-image idea is still there, the idea of disorientation – you look at the people walking in the emptiness then you suddenly realise you’re looking at an upside-down world, with small vulnerable-looking human figures traversing a big lonely space.
The US cover is clearly looking for a different kind of audience, with its goth girl making dreamy eye contact and the rainforest-y image placed below her, under the grass she’s lying on, suggesting something elemental happening under the surface. The actual Labyrinth is still my favourite.
It might be true, as some designers and marketers say, that a potential reader is drawn to a human glance which compels your own attention in return, to eyes looking back directly at you from a cover, or to human figures we can immediately project ourselves into as we take a risk with a new book. But for me, the most evocative covers are the ones that demand something of us to do with metaphor – a combination of image, colour, design, font and style which acts as a set of symbolic signifiers.
Occasionally I’m stopped in my tracks in a bookshop just by the beauty of a cover image – David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars springs to mind, as does Dirt Music by Tim Winton (I see a tree preference emerging here …) and it seems so deliberate and careful; I hope the whole thing has been as crafted and thoughtful as the image which draws me in.
The World Beneath was Cate Kennedy’s first novel. She is also an acclaimed short-story writer and poet. Her most recent book is The Taste of River Water: New and Selected Poems.
Tomorrow, in Part 2 of our book covers series, we’ll hear from Kalinda Ashton and Chris Womersley – and we’ll look at four different covers for The Slap.
In a nice departure from the traditional Australia Day focus on flags and sporting heroes, The Sunday Age has marked the lead-up to the occasion with an editorial decrying our ‘tendency to anti-intellectualism’.
It lamented the fact that Australia’s ‘great writers, artists, soldiers, politicians and scientists … take second place to footballers, cricketers, swimmers and tennis players’.
‘As we approach Australia Day and make our plans for the beach or the backyard, it’s worth reflecting on what we are losing through this neglect of our classics. They are our stories written in our voices, and give us specific clues as to how we became the country we are today.’
In an opinion piece published alongside the editorial, Michael Heyward, publisher of Text Publishing, argued that while Australia has come a long way in recent decades when it comes to valuing and celebrating our homegrown authors, we ‘seem not to care’ about the great authors and books of our past, neglecting to keep them in print and to consistently teach them in our universities.
‘Those of us who choose and influence what people might read – publishers, professors, teachers, journalists, commentators, editors – have done a lamentable job of curating the primary materials of our literary history,’ wrote Heyward.
He said it will take ‘all kinds of effort’ to change both publishing and academic cultures. Increased adaption of Australian novels to film and television was one proposed solution, while he also suggested that the rise of the eBook ‘may liberate some writers from the dungeons of neglect’.
Text will release a new series, Text Australian Classics, in 2012, featuring titles such as David Ireland’s (currently out of print) The Glass Canoe, winner of the 1976 Miles Franklin Award, as well as earlier works by current favourites such as Kate Grenville and Peter Temple.
It’s not the first time Text has dabbled in resurrecting neglected works of Australian writing. In 2009, Madeleine St John’s debut novel The Women in Black (1993) – never before published in Australia, though set in Sydney – was published in a handsome new edition, packaged with accolades from much-loved Australians like Barry Humphries, Helen Garner and Clive James. The novel, a sharp-witted, affectionate portrait of a group of women working in the ladies department of a store much like David Jones, was embraced by both critics and readers; it was followed by new editions of St John’s subsequent novels.
Christina Stead’s work has enjoyed renewed interest thanks to some high profile endorsers. Watch our session The Late Great: Christina Stead here.
The endorsement of a popular writer was also integral to the recent renewal of interest in Christina Stead, after The Man Who Loved Children (1940) was given a rave review by Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times. Melbourne University Press published a new edition, with a stylish cover and introduction by Franzen, shortly afterwards. This was followed by new editions of Letty Fox: Her Luck (with a foreword by Carmen Callil) and For Love Alone (with a foreword by Drusilla Modjeska).
Stylish new editions and canny endorsements or introductions designed to lure new readers seem to be an integral (and, it seems, effective) part of the publisher’s bag of tricks when relaunching forgotten or neglected classics – literally making the old new again.
Another Australian classic, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), enjoyed a resurgence thanks to these tricks (an introduction by Peter Temple and afterword by David Stratton) when the 1971 film was restored and re-released in 2009. The film attracted a wave of media coverage and allowed an accompanying film tie-in edition (again, from Text Publishing, who had also published a 1993 edition).
Barbara Creed, head of culture and communications at the University of Melbourne, told The Age that she agreed with Heyward about the need for more Australian novels on the screen. She said, ‘Whenever a novel is adapted to screen … there is a boost in sales of the book as a result.’
Creed also said that a dedicated Australian literature course was back on the university’s syllabus this year. Last year, a group of students had started their own Australian literature studies, in the absence of such a subject. (‘An unusual situation,‘ Creed said.)
This enthusiasm from students so actively keen to steep themselves in Australian writing is, at least, a good sign.
The Wheeler Centre will run a free series of ten events entitled ‘Australian Literature 101' from next month. Details will be released, along with our February-April programme in full, next Friday 3 February.
Emerging Writers' Festival director and avid traveller Lisa Dempster reports on the growth of contemporary literary culture within and around the Sharjah International Book Fair, which in 2011 celebrated its thirtieth anniversary.
The Sharjah International Book Fair takes place over ten days and is unique in many ways. In the west we are used to our literary events looking a certain way – our writers festivals are about discussion and debate (and selling retail books); our book expos focus on publishers, distributors and agents (and selling rights); and our writers’ conferences focus on industry skills development (and selling manuscripts). The Sharjah International Book Fair is a combination of all these elements.
A book trolley from Sharjah International Book Fair. (Photo: Lisa Dempster)
Traditionally, the core of what the Fair has done is act as a large public-facing book sales outlet. Hundreds of publishers come to sell their books direct to readers, and the public come and buy books in the thousands – often buying a year’s worth to take advantage of the retail discounts. (The book trolleys are one of the best things about the Fair!) A robust schools programme has been in place for many years, with schools visiting the Fair on weekdays. And, informally, publishers and distributors have had a chance to meet and network.
But in the past two years – which I have been lucky enough to attend – Sharjah has added other elements to the Book Fair: in 2010 it featured its first literary discussions and panels, including a cookery corner, and in 2011 it scheduled a professional programme aimed at bringing publishers and agents together from around the world to sell and buy rights. The Fair also awards literary prizes, including the one million dirham Etisalat Prize for Arabic Children’s Literature, and in 2011 set up a $300,000 translation fund. But why the mixed bag of offerings?
For one, Sharjah is currently incredibly dedicated to developing a literary culture where there currently isn’t much of one, and its book fair is the centrepiece of that development. (Of course, the region has one of the longest histories of literary culture in the world – when I talk about a ‘developing’ culture, I am speaking about commercial publishing and bookselling.)
A large audience gathers during the 2011 fair. (Photo: Lisa Dempster)
In general, the writing and publishing culture in the UAE – and, more broadly, the Middle East – is far less developed than what we enjoy in Australia. Fewer publishers, less bookshops, and difficulty in distributing work due to cultural and geographic fragmentation in the market means that there are less writers and readers – and yes, less literary infrastructure. There are currently two major literary festivals in the UAE – Sharjah Book Fair and the Emirates Literary Festival in Dubai – and no writers’ centres or other institutions. Digital publishing is basically non-existent. A similar situation exists throughout the Middle East.
However, the current emir of Sharjah, Sheikh Dr. Sultan al Qasimi, in addition to being a writer himself, is a great lover of books and literature. It’s with his support, teamed with the energetic direction of Festival Director Ahmed al Amri and festival patron publisher Sheikha Bodour al Qasimi, that Sharjah’s Book Fair is diversifying and becoming larger. Thus the rapid growth and expansion of the fair, and also – I felt – the experimentation in trying out different programming elements to see what will work. There is a recognition that to sell books and get people reading, there needs to be a strong local industry in place. (Many of the books sold at the Book Fair are imports – from the Middle East, India and the West, largely – with few titles available from Emirati authors; simply because there aren’t many published.)
Sharjah’s Poetry House. (Photo: Lisa Dempster)
As a visiting Australian it was fascinating to look at the developing literary culture in Sharjah, and how the Book Fair is uniquely both creating and responding to the needs of its citizens. Post 2010, after the Fair first introduced a social media team (which I was on), there was a rise in the sense of community around book readers and writers in the UAE. On my return in 2011 I discovered that in the past year, more than one book club had been set up; at least two books had been self published; a locally-organised and very well attended 100 Thousand Poets for Change event had taken place, and through the @shjintlbookfair Twitter account, many people had connected with each other to talk books. A flow-on result was much larger attendance at the Book Fair last year – as an audience member I noticed a definite rise in the number of people attending the discussion panels to hear authors talk about their work.
Sadaf Syed’s photo documentary iCOVER. (Photo: Lisa Dempster)
Attending the Sharjah International Book Fair has been eye-opening. Excitingly, I got to meet and speak with writers from around the world, and appreciate the truly global literary outlook that the region has (in Australia I get frustrated that we spend so much time looking to the West.) It also confirmed something that I have long suspected – that, despite the doom and gloom we sometimes go on about, Australia is an unnaturally friendly place for writers.
But most vitally, it was fascinating as a festival director to see how Sharjah is taking shape as a force for literary culture in the UAE (it is an ambition I share for the Emerging Writers’ Festival!). It was refreshing and inspiring to visit a Fair that seems familiar in many ways, but has its own modes of operation, and unique ideas about what it can and should do. What is a literary festival? What should it be? What could it be? Sharjah International Book Fair is asking these questions, and shaping up to be a unique – and powerful – force for literature, in the Emirates and beyond.
When Captain Cat beseeched his deceased lover Rosie Probert to “let me shipwreck in your thighs” in Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, we truly doubt he meant anything resembling the fate of the Costa Concordia cruiseship which ran aground on 13 January. The disaster has claimed 11 lives so far, with more confirmed deaths expected.
The somewhat odd behaviour of the ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, remains the subject of widespread speculation. Was he a cowardly deserter or, as he claims, did he merely slip off the deck and into a lifeboat? And what of the heated exchange between Schettino and Port Authority commander Gregorio de Falco?
The listing Costa Concordia off Italy’s Tuscan coast, via Roberto Vongher/Wikimedia Commons.
Locally, Federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott was today under fire for making light of the tragedy on breakfast radio, remarking, “Well, that was one boat that did get stopped, wasn’t it?” He has since conceded that his comments may have been inappropriate.
David Newland, writing for Macleans.ca, has reimagined the shipwreck as an Italian opera. He casts a hero in Hungarian violinist Sandor Feher, who helped a group of children to safety before perishing whilst trying to retrieve his violin, becoming the first of the dead to be identified.
If maritime drama is your thing but you prefer your shipwrecks fictional, The Guardian’s list of their Ten Best Literary Shipwrecks may float your boat.
Some time ago, we reported on a tiny phone booth library located in Somerset, England. We even pondered whether it may be the world’s smallest. But it seems the field is thicker with competition than one might first think. In the US, Portland writers and ‘Street Librarians’ Laura Moulton and Sue Zalokar run Street Books, a library run from a bicycle (well, it’s really a tricycle) in various city locations. And in La Gloria, Colombia, Luis Soriano’s Biblioburro travels on the backs of two donkeys — charmingly named Alfa and Beto.
Colombia’s Biblioburro via Diana Arias/WikiCommons
Clearly, the Americas do well in this game, boasting the Little Free Library project (now spreading worldwide) and the Corner Libraries. But they’re also home to the library that was not only compact, but compacted. The ‘People’s Library’ that emerged in New York’s Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations was raided and dismantled after dark, its 5,000 books apparently sacrificed to the dumpster, prompting the Twitter hashtag #BloombergBibliocide and a tweeted reprimand from Salman Rushdie. It’s now smaller by necessity, its remaining volumes transported by laundry cart.
Moving away from the (small) space race, the variety of unusual libraries on offer around the world is equally compelling. The Department of Libraries, Archives and Museums of Chile has installed libraries in metro stations around Santiago, as well as Bibliotrenes (book trains) located in two city parks. Not to be outdone, Japan’s Akishima Library in western Tokyo is run from a converted ‘0 series’ Shinkansen bullet train, whilst Bangkok’s street children have also borrowed books from a train since 1999, profiled in the documentary Children of the Trains.
High design stakes its claim on the library too. The Netherlands' BiebBus is an expanding mobile library designed by architect Jord den Hollander and hosts over 7,000 books along a 100-metre bookshelf. But the coolest feature may not be its selection of books; the trailer’s two rooms can slide one over the other, with a transparent window between them. Elsewhere, Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Library is a handsome backlit bookshelf built in a shallow garage located on a busy thoroughfare.
At a build cost of €300, the less extravagant Otets Paisiy public library in Bulgaria may not dazzle the eye in quite the same way, but takes resourceful advantage of a disused trolleycar in the town of Plovdiv.
Finally, closer to home, the Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library has already opened branches in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, with plans to make books available to the homeless and marginalised in other cities around Australia soon.
While citizens took to the streets to protest around the world, there were other upheavals in 2011: not least in the world of publishing. As digital publishing consolidated its grip on the mainstream, we saw bricks-and-mortar bookstores close and online retailers swallow one another whole.
It wasn’t all gloomy news, though; in fact, the digital book industry flourished as both readers and retailers learned to adapt. While some complained early in the year of a lack of available eBooks in Australia, Melbourne-based outfit booki.sh emerged to facilitate electronic book sales for local bookstores, and digital book industry awards also surfaced.
Project Gutenberg began offering free public domain titles for download to smartphones. Seth Godin recast libraries as home of the information specialist rather than as mere storehouses for books, and predicted that eBooks would be comparable in price to Gilette razors in the future. He wasn’t the only one gazing into the crystal ball; JE Fishman offered his own account of what the future might hold for books.
Early in the year, our residents Australian Poetry launched their iPhone app. And during the Emerging Writers' Festival, Simon Groth took to the Lunchbox/Soapbox to reassure sentimental readers that their fear of electronic publishing was irrational. We continued to host Meanland events, too, including those tackling the evolution of the bookshop and the ways we write for new media.
We looked at the rise of the typo in digital publishing, while Mandy Brett argued for the enduring importance of editors, whether or not books are eventually deprecated.
Of course, it’s not yet over for the paper book – especially if you’re doing it yourself. We looked at DIY publishing more than once over the course of the year, explored DIY marketing for authors, investigated ways in which the paper book is enduring and evolving and watched with interest as mysteries appeared on the street, page by page. And as the year drew to a close, we noted Dymocks' entry into the self-publishing market with D Publishing.
As the book continues to change in our hands, there may be little we can reliably anticipate beyond further change. But as George MacEncroe reminded us, that may be as good as a holiday.
We sincerely hope that you enjoy yours.
The roll call of global literary luminaries gracing the Wheeler Centre this year was nothing less than astonishing. Let’s revisit some of the highlights of our international guests.
In March, Annie Proulx spoke about designing a “bibliothèque” in her new home, built on a property where she’s discovered obsidian fragments from Yellowstone and 2700-year-old charcoal beneath a mere inch of topsoil. Andrew O'Hagan discussed the role of the novelist against the dangerous lure of newspaper controversy and a culture that threatens to “understand less and condemn more”.
Yannick Haenel told one of the most arresting stories we’ve ever heard at the Gala Night of Storytelling (here’s the translation), and in a separate event described the challenges of writing his partly fictionalised account of a little-known chapter of World War 2 history and of the importance of bearing witness. Murong Xuecun discussed his sometimes controversial characters and explored the challenges that face an ‘independent’ writer in modern China.
In April, Jeffrey Archer talked about his first love – politics – and his respect for Margaret Thatcher, whom he described as one of three women who have profoundly affected and influenced him. Meg Rosoff confessed that she’s interested in characters rather than plots, and shared the advice she’s been given about writing novels. David Mitchell told us about his fear of being boring (not a chance). Michael Cunningham complimented Australians on our balance between “a kind of gravitas and a good joke … that’s hard to find in a lot of places”. Thank you.
Michael Connelly told us about the important editorial input of his mother, a fan of crime fiction who first introduced her son to the genre, and how she felt about his modern style of mystery writing which allows for more unanswered questions. Sir Terry Pratchett spoke on his thoughts on death and religion. TJ Clark was eloquent on the topics of art, poetry, death, truth and love. Anita Shreve described the Oprah phenomenon with Jane Sullivan.
Jonathan Safran Foer told us he had “no conception” of himself as a writer: “To me, it sounded like saying, ‘I’m a lover’. It didn’t seem like something one should say.” Finally, one of our favourite guests, Jon Ronson, told us he suspects he suffers from about a dozen mental disorders and concluded that anxiety disorders are indicative of moral goodness. Whether he succeeded in his aim “to try and make wet doubt seem attractive” is for you to decide.
The Literature Board of the Australia Council has announced the first three of eight recipients of their Book2 grants. The grants are worth $50,000 over three years and are intended to lessen the pressure on writers writing their second book. The recipients are Nam Le, Anna Krien and Favel Parrett.
In a media release making the announcement, Susan Hayes, Director of Literature at the Australia Council, says, “[F]or many writers, the second book will be the most difficult of their career … This is particularly the case for literary writers, whose first book will have attracted considerable critical acclaim but a relatively low contribution to their income.” Book2 is part of the Australia Council’s Creative Australia Artists' Grants program.
One of non-fiction’s most enduring ethical dilemmas is balancing the public interest against the interest of its subjects. The dilemma has come to the fore again following news that Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad has won an appeal that clears her of a claim that her book, The Bookseller of Kabul, invaded the privacy of its subject. In 2010, a court ordered the author and the publisher to pay about US$18,500 each to Rais.
The 2002 book of reportage – an international bestseller, since translated into 42 languages – was researched while Seierstad lived with Shah Muhammad Rais and his family for three months in Kabul soon after the Taliban government was toppled. It depicts Rais – a bookseller and intellectual – and his extended family, painting a portrait of an educated man who has suffered greatly as a result of government repression. It also depicts Rais as an authoritarian patriarch whose wives and children are obliged to lead highly cloistered lives.
Although Seierstad changed the names of her subjects, Rais claimed that locals recognised him in the book and that his family was made unsafe as a result. He withdrew his support of the book following its publication, claimed that it insulted him, his country and his religion, and flew to Europe to campaign against it. He wrote his own memoir, Once upon a time there was a bookseller in Kabul – which, predictably, was not an international bestseller – and in 2005 sought political asylum in Norway.
The case gained a great deal of media attention in Norway, leading Seierstad to admit that she harboured some regrets about the book. More recently, she’s retracted those sentiments. “There is nothing I would change,” she told The Guardian. “To change it I would have had to write a totally different book.”
A leading Australian book retailer is getting into the publishing business with the launch of an online self-publishing service. Dymocks is the first major Australian book retailer to have entered the online publishing fray with the D Publishing Network. The service offers a fully-functional suite of services for turning a standard Word document into a book and/or ebook. The service can print colour images, offers default covers for those unable to provide their own, and offers medium and high-quality print options.
Prices for a combined print and ebook option start at around $700 plus printing costs (around $3 or $4 per book, depending on several variables include number of pages and colour images). Once produced, the books can also be published with D Publishing, meaning they’ll be issued an ISBN, barcode and imprint and will be registered as officially published works so that they can be bought and sold. They’ll be available for sale on the Dymocks website as print books and/or ebooks at a price set by the author and, if franchise owners can be persuaded to stock them, they could even be sold in a Dymocks store. Here’s more.
Is it too soon? Just 11 years after it was first brought to screen, Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho is set to be remade. Variety reported last week that Lionsgate has a remake of the film in the early stages of development. The news prompted Ellis to tweet, “I have warned Lionsgate that I will not approve a new version of "American Psycho” unless it stars SCOTT DISICK or MILES FISHER.“ Watch the video of Bret Easton Ellis' 2010 appearance at the Wheeler Centre.
Meanwhile, not-so-young adults who enjoy reading young adult fiction – and there are a lot of us who do – may recognise themselves in a new film starring Charlize Theron. Written by Juno writer Diablo Cody, Young Adult tells the story of the author of young adult novels who goes to great lengths to seduce her high school boyfriend, who’s now married with a young child. Here’s a glowing review of the film by a writer of young adult novels.
What would Shakespeare’s plays have looked like had they been published as kids' books? Maybe something like this.
We’ve previously covered US President Barack Obama’s reading habits. Now Melbourne’s Grattan Institute has released a suggested summer reading guide for the Prime Minister. The thinktank has suggested Julia Gillard read books it believes “say something interesting about Australia and its future”. The books are Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay, ‘Fair Share’; Jan Gehl’s Cities for People; Michael Wesley’s There Goes the Neighbourhood; an article entitled ‘Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security’; Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist; and Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light.
You can review the full list here, with profiles on each book. The list is an annual event – here’s last year’s.
What books do you think our PM should read over her summer holidays?
A new biography of Kurt Vonnegut has invoked a ill-tempered man consumed by bitterness and loneliness, a shadow of the avuncular persona well known to his adoring fans. The biography alleges that Vonnegut was convinced his work was undervalued by the American literary establishment despite the massive impact of such novels as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. The biography raises an age-old question: should we judge a creative work by its creator?
In a recent Wheeler Centre event, literary critic Simon Leys argued that we mustn’t judge a writer by their work, nor a literary work by its creator. “The greatest creators in world literature,” said Leys, “literally do not necessarily know what they are doing. They may intend to do one thing, but what they actually achieve may be quite different.” Citing Cervantes, Gogol and Tolstoy, Leys noted that time and again writers have misunderstood their achievement.
But Leys identifies an even more perplexing conundrum, which he calls the problem of biography, citing several authors to testify to the dimensions of a great paradox. “Biography does not explain one damn thing,” wrote poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky. “Every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats, too humiliating to contemplate,” said George Orwell. The ever-controversial VS Naipaul said, “Everything of value about me is in my books only.” French poet Paul Valery wrote, “Every individual is inferior to his most beautiful work.” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “I never knew a man who was consonant with his work, when the work is of genius. When the work is of genius, he is far below it … it is not the mere man who does the thing, it is the man inspired. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent to him from outside.”
Citing two great French writers with Fascist leanings, Leys goes on to ask, “How can one ever explain this contradiction between a work and its author? Greatness of the work, mediocrity of the man; beauty of the work, vulgarity or downright ugliness of the man.” Leys cites Proust’s theory of two selves to explain the conundrum: “A book is the product of a different self from the self manifest is our habits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it there that we may arrive at it.”
In a recent story on future business models for online publishing and journalism, we quoted Maria Popova, editor of the website Brain Pickings, who advocates a pay-as-you-feel model to keep online publishing and journalism afloat.
Pay-as-you-feel isn’t exactly new – perhaps its most famous instance occurred when Radiohead’s 2007 album In Rainbows was sold online on a pay-as-you-feel basis. In the bestselling take on economics, Freakonomics, an entire chapter was devoted to a pay-as-you-feel bagel service. It’s a concept the book’s author-bloggers have continued to explore, concluding that the concept works better when it’s combined with a charitable call to action. A 2010 UC San Diego study, however, showed that the concept can be extended beyond food and charity.
Time will decide whether or not pay-as-you-feel works in publishing, and we’ve seen a report of a Roman hotel operating on a similar principle. One business where pay-as-you-feel seems to work is the restaurant business. A chain of Melbourne restaurants with the unlikely name Lentil as Anything has been running on a pay-as-you-feel basis for more than a decade. As an SBS documentary series showed last year, the business model is a precarious one, but the Lentil as Anything concept has now extended from its St Kilda origins to a trio of outlets.
A new book, Lentil as Anything: Food, Culture, Community, has been published in Melbourne by Ilura Press. The book tells the story of this trailblazing Melbourne experiment in social entrepreneurship. With contributions by Alice Pung, Arnold Zable and Tara June Winch, the book includes recipes, photographs and stories of those involved in running the restaurant, including founder Shanaka Fernando.
A new UK publishing venture is bringing crowdfunding to the book world. Unbound lets authors pitch their novels-in-progress to readers, who then decide whether or not they want to contribute to the financial costs of having the book written and published.
The website already features book projects by Monty Python regular Terry Jones and respected mid-career author Tibor Fischer, but it also plans to make room for first-time authors too, like debutant Jennifer Pickup, whose novel Unbelievable was fully funded by readers. Readers can opt to contribute to a project at several levels, each one of which offers a reward. More than an act of charity or patronage, these rewards give readers value for money. For example, a contribution of £10 to Vitali Vitaliev’s Bad Food Tales: An Anti-Tourist Guide to Italy is rewarded with ebook edition, access to the author’s shed (essentially updates on the writing of the book) and the reader’s name in the back of the book. Readers can contribute at higher levels too, each one of which has its own rewards. The highest contribution level for this title (they vary from title to title) £500, the reward for which is “Everything up to and including launch party level & spend a day with me, learning about my work as an author, journalist, editor and presenter, include a tour of Pegasus Cottage, where I do my writing, and a special Italian lunch cooked by me.”
Unbound is the brainchild of publishers John Mitchinson, Justin Pollard and Dan Kieran, deputy editor of the magazine, The Idler, and is one of several new publishing business models emerging in the digital realm – check them all out in this Wired feature. Read more about Unbound here..
In 1984, American author Chris Van Allsburg published a book called The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. The highly unusual book consisted of a series of drawings with a title and a single line. The conceit that linked the drawings together – explained in a fictional editor’s note at the start of the book – is that each drawing was taken from a different book, created by a mysterious artist called Harris Burdick. The 14 drawings, effectively, were supposed to be samples by an illustrator who, in 1984, had left them at at the office of a children’s book editor called Peter Wenders, promising to return the following day with all 14 completed manuscripts. Harris Burdick, the story goes, never returned. The drawings are intended to be finely imagined prompts for readers to make up their own stories.
Now, 14 children’s authors, including Lemony Snicket, have taken Harris Burdick’s legacy to the next level. The authors – who include Lois Lowry, Louis Sachar, Kate DiCamillo, MT Anderson, Linda Sue Park, Gregory Maguire and Jon Sciezska – have created stories to match the illustrations. The new book is called The Chronicles of Harris Burdick – here’s a preview.
The State Library of Victoria is asking Victorians to help choose a book that describes the Victorian experience and can represent the state in the 2012 National Year of Reading ‘Our Story’ program.
Using reader voting, ‘Our Story’ will select one book from each Australian state and territory to form the reading list for Australia’s biggest book group. An independent selection committee in each state and territory has created a shortlist of six titles which readers can vote for to determine the book which best represents their region.
The aim, according to State Library director Debra Rosenfeldt, is “to create a collection of books that together describe the Australian experience … Ultimately we hope these eight books will give thousands of readers a greater depth of understanding about what it means to be Australian.”
Votes, which begin today, can be registered online at abc.net.au/yearofreading or at participating libraries and bookshops. Voting continues until 6 January 2012.
The list of eight winning titles and the start of Australia’s biggest book group for the National Year of Reading will be announced on 14 February 2012, at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. After that, existing book groups, new groups and individual readers can go online and register as a member of ‘Our Story’, joining in the discussion about the books the nation has chosen.
The Victorian program is coordinated by the State Library of Victoria in collaboration with the Public Libraries Victoria Network.
Our Story Victorian shortlist:
Bearbrass, Robyn Annear, Black Ink
Sold, Brendan Gullifer, Sleepers
Well Done Those Men, Barry Heard, Scribe
Unpolished Gem, Alice Pung, Black Ink
Radical Melbourne, Jeff & Jill Sparrow, Vulgar Press
The Comfort of Water, Maya Ward, Transit Lounge
“[A]lthough the Man Booker can change a writer’s life, a prize is only a prize,” Booker Prize judge Gaby Wood has written in the Telegraph. “It’s not an investigation, it’s not a work of criticism, and it’s not the result of common-or-garden enjoyment, either. There are all sorts of other lives books can have.”
The judge’s words seem to be a direct response to unprecedented criticism levelled at the Man Booker Prize this year. The prize, worth a little over A$75,000, is arguably the highest-profile English-language literary award. For what it’s worth, Julian Barnes took the honours this year, after having been thrice shortlisted, for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. According to Michael Wood in the London Review of Books, the novel, the chief theme of which is “Englishness”, is “the story of an obtuseness that generally cannot see the damage it does, and yet in a brief moment of illumination grasps the malevolence lurking in what it took to be its quiet life.”
The Booker’s profile is matched, as Guy Rundle points out on Crikey, by its idiosyncrasies. “Everything about the Booker is bizarre,” Rundle writes, “from its name – which fuses current sponsor the Man Group, with half of the original sponsor, Booker-McConnell – to the ever-changing judges, to the degree of anguished debate it draws about the state of the culture”. Much of the Booker anguish this year has been about an alleged dumbing-down of the award, following statements by the chief judgment, former British spy chief (and spy novelist) Stella Riminton, in which she stressed that the judges had prioritised “readable” novels in the shortlisting process: “"We want people to buy these books and read them, not buy them and admire them.”
Jeanette Winterson weighed in impressively on the debate in The Guardian. Under the headline, ‘Ignore the Booker brouhaha: readability is no test for literature’, she writes that the row “is a misunderstanding about literature and its purpose. We are nervous about anything that seems elitist or inaccessible, and we apologise for the arts in a way that we never do for science.”
According to Rundle, the dumbing-down began about a decade ago (and signals the death of “reflexive humanism”). But the Booker’s been odd ever since it was first awarded in 1969. The official website says the prize is awarded to “the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.” Given the Commonwealth is an accident of history nowadays as peculiar as it is irrelevant (Mozambique, anyone?), it should be of no surprise that these two character traits are reflected in the Booker – and yet the table-thumping oddly persists. The Booker is a booster for British publishing (Barnes' publisher is printing an additional 25,000 extra copies of The Sense of an Ending as a result of his win) and, given the inwardness of US literary prizes, the English language – arguably the globe’s most fecund literary language – has hitherto lacked a truly all-encompassing literary prize.
No more, following news that a new prize, dubbed the Prize for Literature, will be set up to reward to reward “quality and ambition”. The prizemoney is still being raised, but an impressive phalanx of writers (including John Banville, Pat Barker, Nicole Krauss and David Mitchell) are reported to be backing the prize.
Its title is now a stock-standard phrase of the English language. It’s sold some 30 million copies since it was first published some 75 years ago. It single-handedly invented a new kind of book, one that now sells in the millions annually. It even inspired not one but two satirical memoirs (the first published in 1937, and the second in 2001, now an eponymous film). It’s Dale Carnegie’s self-help Bible, How to Win Friends and Influence People (satirised in the aforementioned memoirs as How to Lose Friends and Alienate People).
Dale Carnegie was the quintessential American success story of the early 20th century. As a farmer’s son, he’d dreamed of being an instructor in the Chautauqua adult education movement. After failing as an actor, the soap salesman-cum-autodidact (then known as Carnagay) found his calling as a public speaking instructor, publishing books on public speaking for business. His business thrived, he changed his name (Carnegie was the name of a well-known steel baron) and became successful by teaching the aspiring American middle classes how to be successful. At the time How to Win Friends was published, in the thick of the Great Depression, Carnegie was earning the equivalent of $10,000 a week.
Despite the faintly creepy title, Dale Carnegie’s manual took a benign view of human relationships that eventually came to be emblematic of the sunny side of mid-century American capitalism. The book espoused a win-win model of interaction grounded in a Christian, ‘do-unto-others’ moral framework, stressing that, on the whole, acting with politeness, empathy, honesty and integrity – as well as basic social niceties like listening to people and remembering their names – would encourage others to behave similarly in return.
Now, the original self-help bestseller has been reworked for the 21st century – but the results may not be either winning or particularly influential. Dale Carnegie Training, the descendant of the company founded by Carnegie 99 years ago, has re-released the book for the socially-networked era. How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age offers tips on email etiquette and how to avoid the common Twitter mistakes that can damage careers irrevocably. Bloggers are encouraged to interact with their audience and due attention ought be paid to Facebook friend updates.
So how has the book been received? Dwight Garner in the New York Times laments the loss of the original’s homespun qualities: “This new adaptation seems to have been composed using refrigerator magnets stamped with corporate lingo.” Take, for example, this advice: “Today’s biggest enemy of lasting influence is the sector of both personal and corporate musing that concerns itself with the art of creating impressions without consulting the science of need ascertainment.” This sentence, Garner opines, is “so inept that it may actually be an ancient curse and to read it more than three times aloud is to summon the cannibal undead”.
A bookshop in the Libyan capital Tripoli was among many businesses to reopen last week following the fall of the Gaddafi regime. But more than most, the owner is hoping that the inauguration of a new period in Libyan history won’t represent business as usual. As recounted in this profile, septuagenarian Mohammed Ali Al-Bahbahy’s life story is itself book-worthy. A former military man educated in the UK and USA, Al-Bahbahy welcomed the bloodless coup that brought Muammar Gaddafi to power in 1969 but fell victim to it ten years later when educated officers were purged from the armed forces. In 1995, Al-Bahbahy opened a bookstore with 200 of his own books. Over the years, he’s acquired some 12,000 more, mostly from impoverished Tripolitanians selling books to make ends meet.
Al-Bahbahy’s bookstore was spared the suppression that characterised intellectual life in Libya under Gaddafi because of its owner’s military connections and its location in central Tripoli, around the corner from Green Square (recently re-christened Martyr’s Square).
Colonel Gaddafi on a 2009 state visit to Italy, alongside one of his military advisers and Italian President Berlusconi, via Libero Liberos/Flickr
The shop also stocked many translations of Gaddafi’s signature tract, the Green Book, published in 1975 as the colonel’s answer to Mao’s Little Red Book. The Green Book, a short book of about 20,000 words, was a collection of Gaddafi’s aphorisms with no discernible logic or sense of coherence, but it was an unavoidable part of everyday life for Libyans. It was so-called because the colour green has a long-held association with nature and life, particularly in the desert cultures of the Middle East, and has come to be the colour most often associated with Islam.
Gaddafi’s book was translated into 45 languages; Libyan schoolchildren were required to study it for two hours every week; choice quotes were daily fare on Libyan television and radio broadcasts; and ‘research centres’ were set up throughout the country dedicated to its study. On one occasion the Green Book even sponsored a West German ice hockey team.
Here’s one particularly apt example among many others of the book’s almost hallucinatory strangeness: “If a community of people wears white on a mournful occasion and another dresses in black, then one community would like white and dislike black and the other would like black and dislike white. Moreover, this attitude leaves a physical effect on the cells as well as on the genes in the body.”
The fifth annual Get Reading! campaign kicks off this week, hoping to get people reading one or more of 50 books throughout the month of September. Get Reading! is a month-long, nationwide campaign – formerly known as Books Alive – to encourage more Australians to discover or rediscover the pleasure of reading books. There’s a free reading guide (50 Books You Can’t Put Down), book giveaways, author events and Get Reading Rooms in choice city locations across the country. Research suggests 25% of participants claim they will buy more books (and 20% claim they will borrow more books) as a result of their participation in the federal government-funded campaign.
The list of 50 books that form a part of the campaign is designed to offer something for everyone, from prize-winning Australian authors (like Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance and Gail Jones' Five Bells, also nominated for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards) to crime doyenne Lynda La Plante. There’s a memoir of Kasey Chambers, comedy by Fiona O'Loughlin, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and rescue, the new novel by Anita Shreve, who’s also appearing at the Wheeler Centre on 14 September.
Germans are embracing the creation of “public bookshelves”. Deutsche Welle has reported on one such scheme in Cologne where volunteer-run structures the size of a small kiosk are stacked with books of all kinds. There are three in place and 24 more in the works. The public bookshelf runs on an exchange basis and is reported to be proving popular – popular enough, in fact, to be spreading to other cities. The Cologne initiative is diversifying to include the exhibition of school art.
This weekend is the last chance residents of and visitors to East Gippsland have to take in an exhibition of book art. The Books … beyond words exhibition at the East Gippsland Art Gallery in Bairnsdale has attracted artefacts from across Australia and the world. With a theme this year of ‘evolution’, entries were received from artists as far afield as the US, France, Switzerland, the UK and Germany. All entries were eligible to win awards from a panel of judges.
The overall award, with a $5,000 purse, went to French artist Marie-Noelle Fontan for her piece, Melaleuca’s Book. The $1000 Artist of East Gippsland Award went to Janet K. Howard from Lakes Entrance for her piece, Bird Collector’s House. A $1000 Innovation Award was given to German artist Gerlinde Hofmann for Flotenrolle – Pipes Roll.
The exhibition runs until Tuesday. For those that can’t make it, images of many of the entries are available on the gallery’s website.
Congratulations to Fiona McGregor, whose third novel Indelible Ink was announced winner of The Age Book of the Year Award last night at the opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Indelible Ink also won the fiction category, while Jim Davidson’s biography of historian Keith Hancock took out the gong in the non-fiction category and John Tranter won the poetry award for Starlight: 150 Poems (more information). Congratulations to the winners and shortlisted writers.
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