reeling and writhing

manuscripts on the way at LiteraryMinded

Recently I have added Angela Meyer's blog, LiteraryMinded, to my roll down there on the right, but have not yet subscribed to her feed. That's due to change right now - Lisa Dempster from Locus has alerted me to Angela's series of posts there, The Best Unpublished Books (the freshest at the top), on books which she knows are in progress but which for all kinds of reasons have yet to find the right publisher.

This kind of news feature is something blogs are eminently suited to, and it's great to see someone as well informed as Angela delivering her tips on who's out there, and what they're working on.

Lisa posted recently on articles about book reviewing and a whole bundle of other interesting publishing news, with an emphasis on independent presses and fresh publishing ideas.

While a Google Reader of 120 odd feeds is the nicest customised news reading you could possibly have, especially if you have mates' news and thoughts scattered throughout,  I struggle sometimes to remember what I've read, and got a big shock at a family function a few weeks ago when I added ten years and a new identity onto a young relative, simply because she had changed her hair (very becoming, but the alteration was significant, and the rellies numerous and fast-growing): so some of the filtering service I offer here from time to time with these links posts will inevitably become recommendation and referral only.

There are quite a few people out there doing this web-monitoring thing much better than I am currently, 'specially with my computer doing the Dying Swan like it is at present.

So I'm offering my strong recommendation for Angela's LiteraryMinded and for Locus, where Lisa Dempster and Emily Clarke of Vignette and Aduki presses write regularly on Oz publishing and writing, and read far more widely than I can on my lonesome here.

Check these blogs out: if you are a writer with published work you would like reviewed, think about whether Angela is someone you might send it to (see the bottom right hand corner of the homepage for details); and check out the eclectic and growing blogroll at Locus while you are there.

faber finds - a new audience for out-of-print books?

In breaking news over at The Guardian, Faber launches an exciting print on demand project tomorrow. (There will be is more coverage in the Guardian Review.) This article provides a brief summary of the emerging market in POD and Amazon's attempts to get a slice of it in the US, among other things.

writing Australian (with a Virago segue)

I loved Antonia White's Frost in May when I first read it about fifteen years ago, but I did not know it was the reason for the start of the Virago imprint. Carmen Callil recalls the early days in this story from The Guardian.

Oh WOW.
From 2008, articles for inclusion in the latest Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) will be available online as they are finalised, for study and comment. 
Web 2.0 hits the study of Australian lit. And jolly good too. (Members of ASAL, of course, continue to receive the journal twice a year in print form.) To sample what's currently available online (volume 7, 2007), see here.
ASAL has a conference coming up in June-July, its thirtieth, with a theme to suit - Australian literature in a global world. The final program will be available soon.

Brian Castro, author of The Garden Book, Shanghai Dancing and other works, is moving from the University of Melbourne to teach writing at the University of Adelaide, replacing Nicholas Jose, who will be based at the University of Western Sydney before taking up a chair at Harvard in 2009.

In this report, from the Higher Ed section of The Australian, Bernard Lane reports that as chair of the creative writing program, Castro will seek to introduce regional fellowships, to raise the level of debate over Australian literature, and to hopefully produce a school akin to the renowned East Anglia program in England. He will be joined at Adelaide by award-winning Sydney poet Jill Jones.

new Australian songs in a book near you

From Giramondo Press comes news of the launch of Alan Wearne's latest book of poems.
The Australian Popular Songbook, 'a collection where Wearne has tapped deep into our musical culture',will be launched by Melbourne poet alicia sometimes at Readings Carlton bookshop tomorrow evening.

Thursday 10 April, 6 pm start please, at Readings, 309 Lygon Street, Carlton. (Readings advises that no bookings are required.)

a constellation of editors and publishers

First Lisa Dempster and Emily Clark of Vignette and Aduki Press, and Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe Publishing - now, Sleepers editor and publisher Louise Swinn and Readings (and former ABR editor) Jo Case, are all down in the right column for you to seek out and add to your feed readers.
Jo has kicked off with five terrific posts here at Read All Over.
Her story of Germaine is a beauty; surely someone will do a roundup of anecdotes like these one of these days.

Now if Peter Rose would just write a few more posts over at the ABR blog, we'd have close to a Pléiade of blogging editors.

I can haz a book with train ticket?

Tom Cho reports on his blog that he has a book of stories coming out with Giramondo next year.

If:book reports that the first of Penguin's interactive fiction publishing projects is complete. Charles Cumming has produced a mashup of sorts of John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps, entitled The Twenty-One Steps.

David Prater, poet and Cordite founder and editor, is now ensconced in the Netherlands and has the buzz on a terrific prize awarded if you buy a book in National Book Week. One free day's travel on the train!! 200,000 Netherlanders can't be wrong. David also has an article in the Weekend Australian on self-published poetry where we are told that Walt Whitman wrote his own reviews to his first, pretty much self-published and very famous book, Leaves of Grass - a song of himself, indeed.

Missed the inaugural Booktown event at Clunes last year - but I am going to try to get to this one.
Link via Louise Swinn, who also broke the very good news that Delia Falconer is editor of the Black Inc short story collection for 2008.

I really enjoyed Margaret Throsby's interview with Germaine Greer on ABC Classic FM the other week - but I think it will be off their website soon and we'll have to wait for a repeat. In the meantime, there's always the podcast of her evening at Readings to enjoy.

Finally, fighting words from Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe in the Age on Monday, over UK publishers' neo-colonial attitude to "Commonwealth" rights for US titles. Contentious, what? He's posted a shorter version of the article on his blog, where comments are currently closed, unfortunately.

overland prizes new novels

Please note that Louise Swinn, one of the publishers of the excellent Sleepers' Almanac, has joined the literary bloggers of Oz (and the even more select group of Australian editors who blog) and is excited about the following news too.

To wit: Over 2008 another initiative to foster new writing is to join the ranks of Australian lotteries for writers, but in a very good way.
Overland magazine, long a champion of marginalised and/or progressive writing, has announced an inaugural novel 'prize' consisting of publication of the winning novel as an issue of the magazine.

Aiming to build on a distribution model it established in its early days as the journal of the Australasian Book Society, when it "created an alternative literary infrastructure that, at one point, was publishing half of all novels produced in Australia in a particular year", Overland wants to support new fiction as it did in the fifties.

The editors will be accepting submissions of novel manuscripts throughout 2008, with an announcement of the selected novel in early 2009 and publication towards the end of that year.

The website announcement stresses that "This is not a competition and there is no deadline as such. We plan to read manuscripts throughout 2008; we will, however, accept an appropriate novel whenever we find it."

The selected novel will have a guaranteed readership exceeding that of most literary novels in Australia, by virtue of Overland's subscription base.

Interested? read here for further instructions.

writers' occupational hazards list - prams, chairs and electricity bills

The idea of a chair merited further exploration in Dan Green's first post - Maryann Burk Carver raises a dissenting point of view about the Lish-Carver editing relationship here. She and Raymond Carver's upcoming biographer Carol Sklenica can also be read at Pinky's Paperhaus commenting on the New Yorker article about Tess Gallager's release of unedited material by Carver.

And this latest memoir of Ballard's sounds like something I will definitely buy. As a single parent after the death of his wife, he was apparently never in the least bit fazed by the pram in the hall.

There are some nice remarks about Gerald Murnane and Chris Koch's latest awards over at Susan Wyndham's blog at the SMH:

Murnane, 69, lives in "modest, frugal comfort" in Melbourne and this award is "a release from anxiety". Royalty payments, he says, have usually matched his gas and electricity bills. A few years ago he decided to stop writing his poetically repetitive prose but several recent awards and rediscovery by Indyk's Giramondo Publishing have encouraged a new outpouring.

A 20,000-word story has grown into an 80,000-word book, Barley Patch, still in the rewriting phase, and Murnane has plans for another "20,000-worder" that might also become a book. He is equally pleased by Giramondo's reissue this month of his first book from 1974, Tamarisk Row, to be launched at Adelaide Writer's Week.

where content is king

From Jessamyn West, this link to a post by Rochelle, a librarian in the States who is asking some very sensible questions about the download system on the Kindle, and how its digital content management affects lending between family members, or in libraries.
Bud Parr reports that a Brooklyn bookshop employee has won the Brooklyn Public Library's startup competition grant of $15,000 to start her own bookstore.
On visiting Jessica's blog to read about this happy news, I find she's added a section to her links list of bookseller blogs.
(In usual Blogger style, the links list is not visible on separate post pages, only on the home page.)
So if there are bookshops out there wondering how they do it in Brooklyn, I recommend you start on this page, on the right, and work your way down.

in case you're still thinking about 2007 and all the coffee you drank - corrections

From a terrific looking blog for Chin Music Press comes this link, which I wanted to post a while ago, to the top business report of 2007.

(The following scrambled post is a very good example of how not to blog when your handicapped son is drying dishes loudly and would really like some attention...)
Very pretty, personalised and highly detailed. The Feltron chart is the personal activity report for 2007 (including coffees, taxi trips and burglars confronted) NOT of Henry Sene Yee, Picador book designer, as I reported erroneously earlier, but of this guy. And he's written a few of them before too - see his site index.

My apologies to Mr Feltron, who has taken the trouble to pay for his own domain and does not deserve such misappropriation of his fine work.
The category of 'Literary Things and Otherwise' at Chin Music Press is worth checking on a regular basis - actually I reckon nearly all their categories are worth following.

And serendipitously, as I opened Google Reader and subscribed tout de suite to their feed, I found a link to local news on one of their latest publications.

jesus don't want me for my pizza

It's that time of year already: here's Sleepers No. 4:

Could you ever really love a guy who speaks in comic sans?

What does survival mean when the whole world has cancer?

What happens when the relationship with your lecturer begins to echo the short story form he's teaching you?

Would it be fun to have Jesus round for beer and pizza?

What's the best way to kill a mouse?

How do you memorialise a hunting-obsessed father when you're a vegetarian?

Is marrying into a family of lawyers really a good idea?

Where do you find the most exciting, the funniest and most moving short stories in the country collected together in one tight volume?

Sounds enticing, doesn't it. This is where you need to be to hear Max Barry read, and to launch the fourth collection from Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner's Sleepers outfit - there's poetry and cartoons as well as fiction involved.

At: the Bella Union Bar, @ the Trades Hall, cnr Lygon and Victoria Streets, Carlton
On: Wednesday February 6
Time: 6pm for 6.30

Otherwise, do pick it up from a good bookshop soon.

in the beginning was Tamarisk Row

I don't know if this is news to anyone else or not, but Giramondo Publishing has begun a Classic Reprints imprint, kicking off with a reissue of Gerald Murnane's first novel, Tamarisk Row, which has been out of print for quite some time (almost twenty years, according to the website.) The recent success of Alexis Wright's prize-winning novel Carpentaria, which has sold over 25,000 copies in Australia, seems to have left the small independent publisher buoyant and optimistic.

Last year saw no less than eight titles from this house, run in his spare time, it would seem, by academic Ivor Indyk, including four collections of poetry, a book of essays and three novels. 2006 saw the publication of Carpentaria, poetry and essays, and 2005 was even busier. 

And I haven't even mentioned HEAT magazine, have I - my favourite Oz litmag has gone from two to three issues a year. What excitement. But back to Mr. Murnane's reissue.

Murnane's most recent collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, was published by Giramondo in 2005. He spoke about memories connected with Tamarisk Row in this article, 'A Detrimental Education', published in The Age last June.

I assume there will be more reminiscing and media coverage of this happy event happening around release time in March, though I doubt any of it could top the poignant account of Murnane's first exposure to seventeenth-century French music recorded at the very end of this article:

When Mr R learnt that our school lacked a library, he generously brought some of his own books to school and made them available as background reading for his students of history.

He did more. Having implied politely that our education had been previously somewhat narrow, he took his dozen or so students of modern history one afternoon to his home to learn what our textbooks could not teach.

Mr R was unmarried and lived with his widowed mother in an inner-suburban terrace house. We students saw no more than the large front room, which was Mr R's study. Two sides of the room were lined with books. Against another wall was a device that would seem primitive in the extreme today but was the first of its kind that I had ever seen: a three-speed record player. Mr R owned not only hundreds of books but dozens of long-playing records. I had never suspected that one person could own such a treasury.

Do read it all - I feel bad stealing this silver thunderbolt from the end of a measured, spare and desolate reminiscence which will have to serve for now as an introduction to Murnane's singular body of work (which has an international reputation) if you haven't read him before.

summer interregnum: in which Australia's Best Small Publisher discovers Web 2.0

Well, speaking of holidays, I'm certainly having one. No action here until late January. Come what may, I am going to wrestle this To Read tag in del.icio.us to the ground. Either it goes, or I do. (Well, half of it, anyhow. Half of me....ecch.)

We have a camp for oldest son planned, and some time down the beach without him - bless my in-laws for having a house, and keeping it nice for us. In the meantime, there are links, here, here, here - all down in the right sidebar too. Have a great holiday season, everyone.

And even if you are not a Victorian, don't forget the State Library's Summer Reading program. Here's a post on their blog by Michelle de Kretser, author of The Lost Dog, on Kris Hemensley's truly great poetry shop, Collected Works, well worth a visit, on the first floor of the Nicholas building in Flinders Lane. It's right next to the Victorian Writers' Centre's current offices, at least until some time in 2009, when the VWC will move to the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas at the State Library.

Not quite sure exactly where I'm starting with my summer list (which contains the De Kretser title), but my daughter tells me I must watch Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep. And I am telling myself that I will read youngest son's gift of Best Australian Poems 2007. And mebbe some French lit, now that Figaro's warmed me up. And The Orphan Gunner, since Jo Case gives it such a glowing review in the summer edition of ABR that I've put in a Christmas request for it. And and and....

BTW, there be some busy fellows at the best Small Publisher for 2007, Black Inc. Wouldja just look at this! all the Web 2.0 goodness hitting Oz Publishing! Jeeminy. (Incidentally, this was recorded at Collected Works in early December or thereabouts.)

It's only a small request, but in addition to this amazing development (first vlogged Melbourne publishing event, isn't it?), links to individual catalogue titles would also be good, guys. I really enjoyed Helen Garner's speech at the Newcastle launch of Best Australian Stories, too, and you can watch that here.

Not sure if it's just my computer struggling with the visuals, as we do have some kind of passive-aggressive relationship with Media Player - but the sound is all good, and I look forward to seeing more Black Inc launches publicised in this way, if just for the sheer joy of being able to listen to an appreciative audience lap up the words of Oz lit luminaries like Rose and Garner. If you want to find the text to the bulk of Peter Rose's launch speech, most of it appears in his introduction to Best Poems '07, which he reads to the audience in confident (and totally unwarranted) apprehension that they will inevitably fail to do so. He ends with a passionate call for wider reading of new poetry, not simply in the 'sleek digests' of annual anthologies:

    We delude ourselves if we say that Australian poetry has never been so robust. When was the last time you heard a poem being discussed around a dinner table? New films, plays, novels, biographies, exhibitions, magazine profiles - they crop up all the time. But a poem? Inconceivable.

What is going on here? Why has the public lost faith in contemporary poetry - all poetry perhaps? Why is so little said and written about this defection? Poetry is the great fillip and inheritance. A culture that is indifferent to poetry is deficient and derelict. No young person's education can be deemed complete without a rich and active appreciation of poetry, but how can they hear about it if we don't voice it and feel its force - if it is not a potent feature of the culture in the first place?

I encourage readers who enjoy the poems in this book to seek out the collected works of the poets that interest and speak to them. Anthologisation, despite my resistances and frettings, is a reward for poets, but a wide, intelligent readership is a much greater one.

birthdays and panels (and novels) and webisodes, oh my

Constance informs us that the word weblog will have its tenth birthday on the 24th (or thereabouts). Goodness. More on that here from one of the big guys.

Someone is taking a real holiday from blogging. A big decision from a formidable presence in US litblogging, who fortunately will continue to run his podcast interviews with writers over at the Bat Segundo Show (and, one assumes, to write for US papers on matters literary.) Goodbye Ed, and thanks for all the kind advice and interest in my own stab at MSM down here - both the blog and the correspondence were appreciated.

Wow. Who'd a thunk? There will be a panel on litblogging at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York in February.
After a year in which US bloggers have often been in the news, a panel will examine some of the following issues:

From web sites that trade in publishing industry gossip, to blogs that teach you how to get published, literary bloggers have created a whole new world online that is quickly proving as indispensable as its traditional print-based counterparts. And now that they’re here to stay, what can we learn from literary bloggers? How are they not only participating in the publishing discussion, but changing it? And what effect are these bloggers having on the industry (not to mention its content)?

And Mr Gomez, after all, says Print Is Dead. I must remember to pass this link on to some US bloggers. The session with writer Alison Norrington, on blogging fiction, looks fabulous.
Ben Vershbow, from the Institute for the Future of the Book, is also presenting.

Prior to the announcement here, I received news from Mark Sarvas that Text Publishing is delivering Harry, Revised to Australia in June next year. Harry is certainly bursting forth from some impressive stables....first Bloomsbury, then Canongate and our own (simply terrific) Text. Congratulations are due as the world opens up and welcomes the first novel from one of my favourite US litbloggers.

And finally, Hammer Films will ride again in cross-media format, with a series of four-minute 'webisodes' on MySpace for its new film, Beyond The Rave.

from 800 items in the Google reader...

From AWM Online, there's notification of a Digital Futures in Publishing forum to be held on December 12th (that would be Wednesday!) at 1pm AEST, featuring writer Sherman Young and publisher Dr. David Reiter:

Sherman Young is a Media Studies lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney and author of The Book is Dead, ‘a provocation designed to further the conversation about the future of books’. Check out Sherman’s excellent blog and companion to the book at:  http://shermanfyoung.wordpress.com/
Interactive Publications publish books, e-books and multimedia under four imprints and is now in its 10th year. Specialising in quality Australian literary work, it is a leading publisher of digital titles as well as conventional books. Director Dr David Reiter is also well known for his published works of poetry and fiction. See more at the IP website www.ipoz.biz

You will need to obtain a quarterly subscription (at least) to participate in this forum, at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online.

If you write spec fic, don't delay to consider this new national program, set up by Hachette Livre Australia and the Queensland Writers' Centre. Applications close January 23.

Stephen Mitchelmore has read Gabriel Josipovici's review of Peter Gay's book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, and is in agreement with his view that the book is 'appalling'. Elsewhere, in fact written a whole year ago, he has a remarkable essay on Richard Ford's Bascombe trilogy that I am quite taken with, especially this kind of thing:

The implications of Bascombe’s abandonment of creative writing have themselves been ignored by the experts. Recently, James Wood said “the major struggle in American fiction today is over the question of realism”, yet from the reception of the trilogy one would imagine the struggle is over already. Writing is a report from the real world directed through the craft of fiction. Richard Ford has written such a book. That’s it. Frank Bascombe, however, isn’t so sure, and Wood’s question is thereby placed not over realism, nor even over fiction, but writing iself.

The essay, for ReadySteadyBook, tackles the seamless reflexivity of these books in an impressive fashion. Also Mitchelmore is uncomfortable with the intrusion of shootings and faux action set-pieces in at least two of the books - in one case I agree with him, at the end of The Lay of The Land I was mightily annoyed. At first. Why, I ask, didn't I find this piece earlier? Shoot.

Dymocks kiosk for books, not muffins

From The Australian, a few days ago - Dymocks is to offer e-books, boosting its catalogue to more than 4.5 million titles. (Its largest store, in George Street, Sydney, can hold about 350,000 hard copy books.)
The e-book project has been in development for two and a half years, with Dymocks management keeping a close eye on what has happened in the music industry and recognising that Internet sales are slowly eating away at shopfront distributors' figures. At present it is claimed that 'many...titles would be sold at a discount to their hardcover cousins.'

Update: There is more news on this over at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online, at their Speakeasy blog - it looks as though Dymocks are claiming a world first on this one.

slightly cool news, or slightly warm?

Okay, Perry and HorrorScope have pipped me with this one, which was going to read last week:
"And hot on the heels of my last post on the Sleepers Salon which featured alumni and students from RMIT's Creative Media program comes" news of a new literary journal to hit Melbourne streets next year courtesy of the RMIT Professional Writing and Editing department.

It's called harvest, (probably lower-case is intended there), will be published quarterly, and is seeking submissions before November 30 for its first issue.

See here for more information and to join the mailing list - provisions for subscriptions are still under arrangement. That will teach me to sit on hot news, won't it.

In other secondhand but noteworthy Australian writing news, not only Debra Adelaide has a six-figure deal for her next novel, but Melbourne writer Toni Jordan has snagged one as well. Susan Wyndham has all the details at the excellent Sydney Morning Herald bookblog, Undercover, here.

And graphic novelist Eddie Campbell is enjoying Thurber's biography, particularly the 'begat' section.

To finish, two things that (frankly) stink.

Of sleepers, writers and Napoleon

I got my act together and finally went to my first, and the last, Sleepers' Salon for 2007 on Thursday last, at the Trades Hall bar. I've yet to visit the refurbished corners of Trades Hall (that was, admittedly, quite a few years back now): suffice it to say that the one I visited has yet to have its makeover. (Must go back and visit the International bookshop sometime, though).

Creative writing courses in Melbourne were the focus of this salon, presented as usual by Sleepers publishers Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn. Antoni Jach, writer and Creative Media lecturer at RMIT, did a session with Sonia Orchard, a published writer who is also one of his students and is close to finishing her first novel, work on which comprised part of her studies at RMIT for a master's degree in creative writing.

Second half of the night consisted of readings by writing students from an array of courses across Melbourne, and was savoured by an appreciative audience of about 120.

I did take some notes when Jach and Orchard were having their parley - I will be looking out for Orchard's novel, as her research involved talking to music industry veterans from '40s and '50s London, and sounds terrific. However I will confess I took a lot more notes when Jach was talking about his latest novel and his experiences with the publication of his other works.

today Melbourne, tomorrow magazines conquer the nation

Well, I guess it's all horses for courses in the book marketing game - Justine Larbalestier tells it like it is but nonetheless makes it sound pretty enjoyable whilst touring with husband Scott Westerfeld, while over at ReadWriteWeb, making the net side look like damn hard work is J.P. Kenyon, with this guest post on Internet novel marketing.

There's a good roundup of Australian independent magazines in today's M Magazine in The Age, including the new 'mook' from Vignette Press (there's a sneak preview to download at that link). Editor Michelle Griffin gives print a lusty plug in her column this week, all power to her!

As someone who loves magazines in all their myriad forms, it's quite thrilling to see the form enjoying such a vigorous revival right here in my hometown. And we're not talking about amateur productions here, even if so many of their talented creators do it for love rather than fat profits. Magazines such as Is/Not, Sneaker Freaker and Wooden Toy are coveted and collected all over the world. And it makes sense. We've got a thriving cafe culture. A great creative scene. Melbourne needs mags to complete the picture. Internet kill print? Hah! There's still something about magazines that your BlackBerry will never give you.

(Hear, hear. I bought a 4ft by 212 cm bookcase last weekend. It's not only full, but I can put all my journals and magazines in mag files in a smaller bookcase now. And God, they look pretty too.)
Let me just say how much I enjoy this Sunday paper lift-out (in fact it's the only bit of the Sunday Age I read), and full marks to Griffin for steadily turning it into a showcase for all that's interesting about Melbourne, including the recently introduced Eco Life section, the only feature of its type across the MSM in Melbourne to my knowledge. It's turning into something I could happily keep reading for almost as long as I've read Epicure and the EG.

Finally, Eddie Campbell's posts on composition in the last week have been quite riveting stuff, and I give you the link to a couple there, where you'll find the lowdown on the creation of a page from Alan Moore's graphic novel, From Hell.

publishing first for Oz from Aduki in November

Aduki Press is about to become the very first publisher in Australia to give a book away online, in addition to selling it in hard copy. Tristan Clark's Stick this in your memory hole is due for release on November 1st. Its publisher, Emily Clark, wants to see it read and freely quoted:

The book employs biting satire and insightful critique to engage in a discussion of Australian politics and society. It comprises thirty-seven essay-style chapters covering a range of topics including politics, economics, consumerism, media, food, oil, logging, water and transportation.

Stick this in your memory hole carries a strong message in support of free speech and launches an unprecedented attack on an atrophied political system and those who comprise and support it. The title is a reference to George Orwell’s 1984, the ‘memory hole’ being a hole into which documents deemed to be conflicting with ‘official truths’ were placed for disposal.

She also hopes that if overseas experiences with free downloads of published material are reflected here, some mainstream publishers will one day take the plunge. Read more about the Creative Commons licensing arrangements for this publication at Locus, here.

in other news, the laziest blogger on the planet posts even more links

Alex Ross calls this 'a magnificent and generous use of digital technology'. And it is. And I'm going to tell my brother to get broadband so he can spend more time there.

At BoingBoing back in July (yes, I've been saving this one up), Cory Doctorow is wild for the wikified library at the Internet Archive:

I think this project (which right now seems to point to almost half a million books) is very cool -- it's going to be a major addition to the world's open cultural infrastructure. I have a hunch that it's going to be the primary way many if not most people access books, and I see it becoming an always-open window on the desk of every librarian.

(Please note that the BoingBoing link is to the demo version only, which will give you the full story on how this project has been built from the ground up. You can also follow this link instead to the current Open Library, which really deserves a post all on its own.)

Wandering further down the page at TechMeme, this report from TechCrunch40
led me to "U"vatars. They look a bit dull to me - I thought avatars were supposed to be imaginative, not just dressup dolls. (Also thought I'd seen a few of these around before). Check them out in beta at befunky.com.

And as you can see I have been spending far too much time reading feeds and collecting links instead of reading and writing my own stuff. Such is life. I do have plans for some longer pieces, but I have to reconcile myself to writing them in pieces first - and then putting the pieces together. I also have plans to read over 100 articles I've saved on del.icio.us - so if any of those are any good, you can't count on me giving up on linkdrops anytime soon. There used to be a "sorry" category here somewhere...

One original piece of reporting I do have to make, however, which is published here as I left it too late to send a letter to the Editor, is that Peter Craven claims in the September Australian Book Review ("No Jude Law, No Money") that Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is out of print.

Not so - during this month I did two checks on Global Books In Print, the industry database available through most public libraries in Victoria, and found that only the 2006 Australian Scholarly Publishing edition of this trilogy (published here as one volume)* is unavailable at present, as of yesterday to be exact. The 1998 Penguin edition, however, is alive, kicking and ready to be ordered.

* And the reasonable explanation for ASP's slowness is to be revealed in editor Clive Probyn's letter to ABR, which Rosemary Sorensen has read and reports on in today's Australian, and which I won't see till it hits my mailbox sometime next week. The scholarly edition is in three volumes, and Vol. 3 will be ready next month, when all three will be released. (Doesn't explain why the entry in Bowker's shows 2006 as a publication date, but I'm sure there's a reason for that too.)

all together now

Those lucky youngsters at the National Young Writers Festival have a great panel happening on collaborative writing, here.
What a timely idea - the sites mentioned here are probably worth a gander.
NYWF is on in Newcastle this weekend ( see here for venues, more info.)

A US initiative launched online brings booklovers, shops and writers closer and closer together. Link via the Speakeasy blog, at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online.

Hey, did you know that the used and antiquarian bookselling site ABE Books has a bookclub? with a good moniker too. Very much a one stop shop - join the club, find a bookstore that can sell you the book secondhand, get reading and talking.

in case of vanishing journals

Here's another report at Critical Mass, the National Book critics Circle weblog, this time by Jane Ciabattari, about literary magazines going electronic in large libraries.(An earlier post giving some essential background on what's been going down in academic libraries with regard to this appeared about a month ago, from K.G. Schneider of Free Range Librarian fame.)

A  September 13 NBCC panel, "Literary Magazines Go Electronic: Now Where's the Print Edition in the Library," cosponsored by Library Journal is the subject of Ciabattari's report. Susan Thomas, a librarian on the panel, suggested that the dissolution of print journals into electronic databases can be halted by lobbying librarians and academic staff to ensure a supply of literary journals on the shelves for browsing. One panel member, Kevin Prufer, the editor of Pleiades, was inspired to set the evening up after he went to the University of Central Missouri library to catch up on poetry reviews and found that several important journals had vanished from the shelves.

Literary journals are not always easy to absorb as screen based artifacts: it can be done if needed, but it's more pleasurable to handle the magazine in paper if that's how it was designed to be handled. (Some of course are online productions, and their design is a different concern altogether.) 

Susan Thomas notes in this post, "Reading a literary magazine is such a relief after hours at the computer screen," she said. "My job is to encourage young people to become lifelong learners. They lose interest in reading on the computer. If I can put an exciting literary magazine in their hands, it can be important."

keeping that drowsy emperor awake

Three things I really enjoyed reading over the past couple of months, and have only noted here now:

Delia Falconer's beautiful essay in the August ALR on the spaces we cannot afford to lose within our classics, here.

Richard Neville's terrifying piece in the September ALR on the future. I don't know how I managed to read anything else after this. It was like being dipped in a pool of fire; reading outside on a beautiful spring morning, I looked around at the trees and wondered why I was still there when I'd finished it. Dick's in fine form, building from a quiet start to a relentless elegy for the planet that he dares to top off (as only he can) with a savagely ironic question. That takes some nerve.

The last was from Text Publishing's founder, Michael Heyward, was in last Saturday's Age and is on Australian writing and publishing. Unfairly characterised by the editor as a 'lament', it is more correctly read as an unerring and surprisingly positive analysis of the state of Oz publishing with some very useful recommendations for the future (of publishing, that is) which I seriously hope the Government adopts:

The next step is to invest in our editors. A program with a five-year life to help publishers hire and train a dozen editors would cost less than $1 million a year. It would be a great investment.

It would soon enough allow 100 or more books to be published each year that either aren't published now or are brought to market too soon. Given that each year a maximum of about 50 novels enter the Miles Franklin it is easy to see the potential.

If those 100 books sell 5000 copies each at about $22, each will generate $10,000 in GST. Taxpayers will not only get to live in a cleverer country but they will get their money back.

And if you want to make more money overseas you need to build your publishing capacity.You can't sell international rights in books that don't exist or aren't good enough.

Back in 1990 it wouldn't have made sense to propose a scheme like this. We have spent a couple of decades assembling a publishing infrastructure and it's time to finish the job. The writers are waiting for us.

I could stand some rain on my windowpane...

Laila Lalami offers a summary of some figures on literature in translation from the NYTBR (and a good perspective), here.

Running alongside the upcoming Sydney Writers' Festival, the programme for the two-day symposium, 'Remembering Patrick White,' is ready to roll, here. ( I would go to SWF to gape at Richard Ford, but I'm better off putting my money into a rainwater tank. As you do in Melbourne. To keep it dry.)

In the US, there's news of the loss of more book review inches in mainstream publications, and John Freeman is urging critics and reviewers to complain from the NBCC's blog, Critical Mass. Link via Mark Sarvas, who has a fuller report here. Though we are not losing whole book sections, I'm scanning our Age and Australian lit supplements at weekends with similar concerns regarding reviews of Australian fiction - they do seem a bit light on the ground at present, and I hope it's my imagination.

And this sounds bad enough to be worthy of attention.

publishing in the digital age

Just a quick reminder that Annette Barlow, senior publisher at Allen and Unwin, and author Susan Johnson will be in conversation online tonight at the Australian Writers' Marketplace Online, kicking off at 7pm AEST.
Annette and Susan will be discussing the author/publisher relationship, the writing process and current issues affecting the publishing industry.
Subscriptions to join AWM Online is required (entry level is $19.95).

ned, ned, there's more to be said

Plagiarism can now be uncovered, up to a point, using Google Book Search, according to this post at LISNews.
The companion piece to Paul Collins' article for Slate magazine is an earlier essay by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books (which he quotes) on the nineteenth century practice of 'anti-plagiarism', here.

All of this is a good fit with the book I read this weekend, Peter Carey's Theft: A Love Story, an absolute ripper of a book which I enjoyed enormously and will write about at a later date. (Now for My Life As A Fake, and maybe even a revisit of the less digestible Illywhacker.) When Mr. Carey gets voices right, he is unputdownable.

Both the Bones were completely on the money for this reader, especially Hugh, the idiot savant, even in spite of his savant condition which was carelessly but effortlessly manipulated to suit the plot. I had a similar buzz during the first reading of Ned (as I have christened it). I could hear and smell him, it was a truly compelling reading experience. (Must reread that too. A personal CareyFest is on the way. Might even have another go at Illywhacker before I die, if only to see why it is not as good as these two.)

sleepers awake, Shaun Micallef wants to meet you

If you live in Melbourne, Victoria, then you are invited to a 'massive bash' this Thursday.
Sleepers Publishing are holding a salon to launch Conceived on a Tram: A
Book of Cartoons, Illustrations and Graphic Stories Done in Melbourne.

'Illustrations connect with people instantly: maybe that's why I've always
adored books or magazines with pictures in them ­ if Jonathan Franzen had
whacked a couple of cartoons into The Corrections, I might've actually
finished the bloody thing.'
-- Danny Katz

Andrew Weldon is there. As is Trudy White and Mandy Ord.
AND, funnyman Danny Katz has written a cracking essay on illustrators, and
comic genius Shaun Micallef chucks in his two-bob's worth when he re-thinks
(and re-draws!) a stodgy old Punch cartoon.

The Salon will feature a Draw-Off! involving Andrew Wheldon, Anthony Woodward and Trudy White; a live slideshow of artworks from the artists themselves; books, a raffle, chocolates; not to mention the fabulous likes of Shaun Micallef, our celebrity launcher.

* Date: Thursday 5th April 2007 (the night before Good Friday)
* Time: 6pm ­ 7.30pm
* Where: The Trades Hall ­ cnr Victoria and Lygon Streets, Carlton

small publishing grows in spite of...well, everything, really

From Mark Sarvas again, this link to a newish site in the States which is picking up on several threads I've noted here from time to time about publishing (Mark keeps a much better eye on these things though.) Mark was interviewed for their blog recently, here.

Why are we doing this?

In the last few years there has been enormous publicity about two separate but related trends - the demise of the independent bookstores and the apparent decline of reading in the U.S. Some critics accuse the temptations of the Internet, television, and video games. At the same time, the number of independent local booksellers in the U.S. has declined from over 5,000 in 1991 to only about 1,800 today. Unable to compete with the convenience of Amazon.com and the sales and distribution efficiencies of Borders and Barnes and Noble, the local independent bookstores have been going out of business.

We see a different world. Where others see an industry facing gloom and doom, we see an industry ripe for re-invention. Where others see a downward spiral for reading, we see reading leaping forward in innovative directions with a new generation of internet savvy readers and writers; new reading formats like e-books and audio books; and new opportunities for self-publishing.

Among the things that give them optimism, they include '60 million people writing their blogs on the Internet and developing their reader base with a do-it-yourself approach'.

Andrew Burke, poet and producer of the Hi Spirits blog, has pointed us in similar spirit to the Small Press distribution homepage working out of Berkeley, California.

From little things, big things grow. (Now if I called this post by that name, there'd be a lot of disgruntled searchers out there.)

The poets have a nice meme up, and I'm counting myself tagged by Andrew, just because it's there. Here's the drift, from his blog again:

'Tom Beckett tagged Jill Jones with this meme:

"I now propose a new tag: Things which one has read and has been influenced by which are not confined to those paper-bound vessels of the printed word we refer to as books. Let's call these Non-Books. Or maybe Impossible Books. Or Limen Books? It's up to you."'

And here's my take on it.

1. my youngest children running around our small house with great energy some years back whenever the James Brown number from The Blues Brothers came up on the cassette player, while I cooked dinner.

2. walking into a pediatrician's rooms in Warrandyte Road, Ringwood, eighteen years ago, with a tiny, adored, apparently perfectly formed blonde three year old boy who would be a different person when he came out again, labelled like a virus, a jamjar, a conundrum, but still a little boy in his best red and blue French wool jumper that he never got dirty.

3. saying to myself, I am 46, that's not very old is it. And alternatively, "I could go at any time" (Arnie Grape).

4. wanting to fight and to run away all in the same moment

5. learning to care and not to care, learning to sit still

6. at about ten years of age, driving around the Dandenongs with a carfull of bouncy, wrestling siblings, longing for quiet.

7. singing, many songs, most of them well-worded, quite a few less so.

Tagging - anyone else who cares to take it on.

how can you tell me that you're lonely

Lynne Hatwell of dovegreyreader goes from strength to strength - don't miss her interview here with Ralph McTell, talking about the inspiration he has drawn from the novels of John Steinbeck and the songs of Woody Guthrie.
Make me a bed right down on his floor, anytime. I am too late this year, but I've registered myself for the Port Fairy Folk Festival, where he is visiting as part of his last world tour later in March.

This blog, from the Kenyon Review, comes highly recommended by Kim of Reading Matters. From there, it's an easy jump to here -Armavirique is the blog of the New Criterion, I did but see it passing by, and managed to find my way back.  Not an easy task when the blogosphere continues to expand.

And wow - I rejigged my bookmarks in Firefox to include the Britblogs' excellent  headlines page, and look what I found on Peter Stothard's blog at the TLS - an early modern philosophy blog! just the thing to keep Alzheimer's at bay for a few more years, and it has a great moniker too.

The British Library's amazing London:A Life In Maps exhibition is also available in a Google Earth format. What a blast.

Found quite by chance on Technorati - TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home, a website and blog 'advocating well-stocked national digital libraries.' Tele-Read is coordinated by David Rothman of Virginia, Monica de Leon of Mexico and Vivek Bhagwatkar of India. Wow. There's one very good article here, admittedly eight years old, by a reference librarian from Tampa, John Iliff, on the implications for libraries of affordable e-books, prompting me to ask, are they simply a good idea that will never happen?

From the Patrick White Readers' Group comes notification that a conference will be held in conjunction with the Sydney Writers' Festival on the man with the beanie. "Patrick White Remembered" will be held on the weekend before the festival, 26-27 May 2006.

Finally, in speaking of those passed more recently, two lovely reminiscences of Elizabeth Jolley have been posted over at Sarsaparillla, by Meredith Jones and Kerryn Goldsworthy.

a book, a glass of wine and thou

One of our leading independent bookshops is starting a trend that this blogger hopes will take off elsewhere as well.  Aviva Tuffield, the fiction editor at Scribe, is the host of Readings Bookshop's new Australian Book Club, instigated to meet the needs of those 'interested in reading more Australian literature and meeting new people in order to talk about books and writing.' 

The inaugural meeting will be held on 22 February upstairs at Jimmy Watson's, in Lygon Street, Carlton, to discuss Cate Kennedy's collection of short stories, Dark Roots.
The author will be in attendance, and if you see what you like and like what you see, as our friends from Fountain Gate might say, you can join the club for an annual fee of $30, plus 10% off the purchase of books selected each month.

Expressions of interest should be emailed forthwith to avivatuffield@yahoo.com.au.  
I have to say it's heartening to see a special interest group of this kind taking root so close to home, especially one that kicks off with a short story collection. I wish it a great deal more success than the State Library's Literary Speed Dating sessions (Text Appeal - last one is next week, so best get a shimmy on, or it'll be all over.) Perhaps I'm just jealous - my speed-dating days are well and truly over, and no one ever tried to win me over with printed matter. The odd political missive for distribution, but nothing really exciting.

More wine to be drunk on Thursday this week for literary causes as the third Sleepers' Almanac - The Family Affair, is launched at the Trades Hall bar from 6 pm onwards. Editors Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn have been pestered endlessly for a submission brief for 2008's issue of this exciting annual collection of short fiction, which provided three stories for a particularly classy Best Australian Stories 2006 from Black Inc. Sorry, folks, you have to wait till April for full details, best to join the mailing list if you're especially keen to start writing straight away. Sleepers Publishing also bring salons to various spaces around Oz in the name of Australian writing, so check their website for details of a Sleepers Salon near you in 2007.

* And the news of this great interview should have been in the last post - sorry. Over at Articulate the ABC's culture blogger Gary Kemble has spoken at some length with Sydney writer Ben Peek, who has published a novella that started life on his blog. Link via Arts Hub Australia.

what's in, what's not

Congratulations are due to Will Elliott whose first published novel, The Pilo Family Circus, has won the Golden Aurealis award at the annual Australian awards for genre and young adult fiction, held this year in Brisbane. The Circus also tied for the Aurealis award for best horror title with Prismatic, written by three writers who pass collectively by the name of Edwina Grey.

The ABC and Telstra have joined the stampede to Second Life. Constance of LINT and Ruminations will be able to tell us if this is good news or not. New media services in both organisations will not be simply advertising, but will be building online facilities in this increasingly popular virtual community.

Germaine Greer talks up Ten Canoes for The Guardian, and does a great job of it in my opinion.

Susan Wyndham is blogging up a storm at the SMH, with 88 comments on this post on best sellers. This blog is a good source of Australian lit news, and Wyndham seems to have a better grip on developing a relationship with her readers than some other Australian newspaper bloggers (Tim Dunlop excepted, of course.) She has made a real effort to engage by starting an online book group, and has a good grasp of how to pitch to a book group readership. You will find plenty of interesting snippets and more than a bit of analysis here.

So, online collaboration on work documents getting you down and you'd rather write a book? NaNoWriMo looks a bit too much like hard work? Try the Penguin online writing project, A Million Penguins (which is a bit crowded to my way of thinking, but that's just me. Link from Australian Writers Online).

Finally, this was so delicious I just had to save it - from the Time archive, link via Flop-Eared Mule. Things to do in 1959 when you've finished your Rhodes scholarship but not your novel.

summer rain, summer links

Cordite 25 is now online - 25 Generations of Zeroes, edited by Alicia Sometimes. This poem by Joel Deane, 'Hansard', reads like a sombre rerun of Glass House montages. I also liked Carol Jenkins' 'Dispossession'. Cordite has notched up 10 years this year, as has HEAT magazine, and congratulations are due to both.

Jill Jones has done some welcome research on the smell of rain. And having had our first substantial drop for several weeks, and only the second downpour in many months, I had to remember to note it down to mention here, after I went outside and sniffed that sadly elusive vapour and said to myself; what an AMAZING smell rain (whoops I mean petrichor) has.

More on poets under the fold...

we live to hack and hack to live

Is this a first? Mark Sarvas has been allowed to publish the whole first chapter of this book , Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris, on his blog, courtesy of Little, Brown publisher Reagan Arthur.

In other book press news, the Lifehacker book( published out of Gina Trapani's wellknown and loved blog) got to the punters before the author got her own copy.

Icky acky --- not sure about this. Writers in a CAGE? Where's a nice Martello tower (or the bunkers just out of Sydney featured in biker film Stone all those years ago) when you need one, huh? (Google hits there, David.) Link from Bronwyn at WRB.

And Carrie Frye is back from a few months off, reading Stephen King and musing over men in hard suits. A welcome renaissance.

My husband has spotted a snotty old copy of Gravity's Rainbow on the coffee table, not conicidentally after the new Pynchon was reviewed in the weekend papers. Not too shabby when you think about it - I'm reading old Pynchon and he's reading the book reviews. Could be worse. And to make life easier for me, there's a lovely illustrated web guide to GR, here. Even if I don't get past the opening banana fest, future trips to the fruit shop will take on an added dimension. (I've only bought kidneys once, and not for frying either.)

Following Kerryn's example, I sampled my bookpile on the bedside table for the odd one out -  Eagleton's After Theory, a Quarterly Essay and HEAT 7 jostle a recent excellent addition to the kitchen bookstack, Penelope Stack's Natural, Nourishing Recipes. I could make it easier by asking you to guess which ones I haven't read yet...

My last bit of news (till I get some better ideas, hopefully soon) is that the family is in uproar over my purchase of a planner, and tickled at me reading my own copy of Australian Best Essays in David Jones this morning and promptly tipping coffee over it. (But not on Nicholas Gruen's contribution, which I'm saving for later. Congratulations Mr. G.)

That's it for a few weeks, depending on how much GR I get through and how many plans I carry out. See you later in January.

speaking is easy - online at AWM

The Online Writing Festival on Monday at the brand spanking new Australian Writer's Marketplace Online was host to several very welcome presenters and a good time seemed to be had by all. Online literary agent Miss Snark was complimentary towards her inquisitive audience, noting there were 'very few nitwits'. How 'kind of you, KIInd of you' to let me come, one might have said.

Viking and Firebird children's editor Sharyn November was taken with Penni Russon's suggestion that gamers were reading their own complex highly rendered 'choose your own adventure' books when playing online, and noted that as the writers and publishers of the future would probably come from this generation, it was worth recognising that some genre writers were gamers as teens, and that 'some still are'.  She also mentioned a rise in interest in Australian YA authors in the US, and that there was a  gap in the 8-12 market there.

John Marsden was mobbed by questioners after technical hitches were overcome - to my question about online writing festivals compared to the face to face variety, one of which he hosts himself at his property, Tye Estate, he answered whimsically that 'writing is so solitary, that these forums can make a big difference to writers' emotional health. And writers all have emotional health issues, don't we?'

australian writers- online and marketing NOW

It's official - the Australian Writer's Marketplace Online site is up and running, as well as the blog, Speakeasy.

Parts of this great new space are subscription based, however the blog is open to all comers to read.
This version of the print Australian Writers' Marketplace,  the bible of Australian writers looking for all tools of their trade,  is produced by the Queensland Writers' Centre.
There are forums on the site which will be put to good use tomorrow, as the inaugural AWM Online Writing Festival (9am-8pm, AEST), featuring guests from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, goes to air.

The program for tomorrow can be found here - Darren Nash and Kate Forsyth's editorials will be available on the blog, but other sessions are limited to subscribers, with a special minimum subscription available of $19.95.

According to the press release for this venture, ABS statistics show that 556,500 Australians engage in writing as a creative or leisure activity; 185,500 Australians have paid involvement in writing; and more than 5,000 manuscripts cross the desk of an editor or publisher in a year. And I promise myself a visit to the Australian Bureau of Statistics online tomorrow, to winkle out that report for closer inspection - sounds like an awful lot of creativity's going down there per capita. I also hope to get some lurking done around the Online Writing festival forums, for reports back here later in the week. We'll talk again.

e-write, e-read, e-publish

I was intrigued by Monica Dux's article, 'Bound To Please', in The Age last week on electronic books and readers. (Aaargh, the link has drowned under subsequent Writers' Festival coverage. You'll just have to take my words in good faith today.)

There was no suggestion anywhere in her rather upbeat piece that Dux had actually test-driven e-readers or had a good look at the software - I'm in the position of being able to make some comments on that simply because I'm studying electronic publishing as we speak, and have been looking at a few of these things in the last few weeks.

I' d really like to see a Sony Reader: unlike the Hiebook which is now almost defunct, it doesn't come with an MP3 player of sorts, however it appears you can 'download' blogs and RSS feeds onto it to read (ahh, but how do they update without an umbilical connection to the desktop? Stored feeds? what kind of feeds be those?) And photographs can be stored and viewed as well.

Of Oz, where they do the moderation quick-step

There's been plenty of soul-searching on Australian weblogs this week regarding what's said online and how it's managed - that's right, the ole defamation and moderation two-step has been in full swing.
Firstly, a very fine post and discussion on writing and blogging appeared on Sarsaparilla early in the week - Georgina Hibberd had found a post on BuzzBalls'n'Hype about writers being expected to blog as a marketing exercise and posed some useful questions to some of the usual suspects at said space, who acquitted themselves magnificently. Writers as Bloggers is full of great small posts (so to speak) on what writers do about the online/offline thing, and showed how Australian blogging can really hit its straps, to the surprise of this reader who has been somewhat critical of her regional area of the blogosphere for some time. The Sars crowd gave a great demonstration of what blogging is all about - some were journos, some poets and novelists, others critics and writers of fine polemic, and one has done just about everything.

Signs that the literature blog is being read by those 'in the know' have been on the increase in recent weeks, and during this post just one link to a writer's work was sufficient to bring him into the conversation to discuss the all-consuming concern of the online flaming of public figures.

not that anyone reads them anyway

You can thank  Slightly Bluestocking for finding this snippet from the Observer's "World of Books" . Robert  McCrum is out to warn the unwary visitor to the airport  bookshop with a summary he calls "The Observer's Guide to What That Blurb Really Means".

A language known only to copywriters includes 'ribtickling', 'rip-snorting', 'pulse-racing' and 'Pynchonesque'. For those whose ribs don't tickle, whose rips don't snort, whose pulses tick over nicely, and who have never got beyond the third page of Gravity's Rainbow, none of this is, frankly, much help...
Books that come with 'perhaps her darkest book yet', 'perhaps her masterpiece', or 'perhaps his finest to date' should all be approached with a 10ft pole.

There has to be a best seller  made up of weasel blurbs in there for some enterprising person, surely. And perhaps the worst thing is that the use of "Pynchonesque" makes me wonder if this is a reprinted article. It's got that stink about it, hasn't it?

tell it how it is

I've been revisiting the website of  Walleah Press,  home of Tasmanian literature journal Famous Reporter, and found that this organ now includes 'e-texts' on a regular basis. I first came across Famous Reporter in the Victorian Writers' Centre library, naturally in what is still quaintly known as hard copy. The weblog posts they have collected so far are mainly by Australians, though the first few were from further afield.

The very first blogposts they collected to publish were from Ron Silliman's and Sheila O'Malley's blogs respectively - both high points in anyone's link list, this in July 2003 (scroll down)...

Australian novel not quite dead yet - feeling rather better

Two things, no. 1 being:
In the Saturday  Australian, that tired old chestnut about the dear departed novel rears its ugly head again. Some of this article is useful, some of it is just bloody annoying really. After all, at least four new independent presses have put up some great new stuff for 2006 (I'm after going to the shed right now to look in the family Age archive for the list, given I won't be able to link to the online list at all.) Plus Jane Palfreyman of Random House assures us again that they have t