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Melbourne independent bookseller Readings is now posting reviews online, which give a fairly substantial taste of their excellent monthly newsletter, which you can have posted to your home, or your email address, if you apply on the homepage. There are feeds, so subscribe to keep up with reviews of new stock, including new Australian fiction.

There's a news tab on the overhauled, freshened up website, and here's a roundup of the events hosted by the independent bookshop chain in 2007 - over 230, with support from Asialink, Deakin University, Cinema Nova, Sisters in Crime, the Midsumma festival and the Royal Women's Hospital, to name just a few.

Here's their interview with the author of the next thing I want to buy. I foolishly flipped through the weekend newspaper review sections last week, thinking Toltz was yet another international writer - let's face it, the Australian titles hitting the papers are few and far between this time of year. And he did look remarkably like this fellow - what was Jason Steger (Age books editor) thinking, putting them on the same page? We're not all awake on Saturday morning...

I can see where Steger's objections to Kevin Rudd having a decisive influence over the Prime Minister's prize are coming from, I guess - but hey, when did we ever, ever have a Prime Minister who would pledge the time to make such a judgement? Surely that's something to crow about.

Not so good that there are no publishers going to the summit, though. Michael Heyward should have had an invite, at the very least. But looking at this, I wonder, did anyone nominate anybody? As Tony and Mick used to say, "What's that all about?"

This is one of the more sordid things book bloggers have gotten up to in recent times.

And then there's this- it started here, and then got ginormous very quickly.

In other news for bloggers, there's a new plugin for photos available on Wordpress that enables you to find Creative Commons-licensed photographs and publish 'em way quickly. Link via Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb.

$85,000 from lending rights to one Australian author is not too shabby, is it?
Susan Wyndham is enjoying speculating who that author might have been in 2007. (The Age rather drily informed us on the weekend that said author remains anonymous).

And while Max Barry certainly isn't English, he might be pleased to hear about this.
A spokesperson for MLA, the UK government's advisory body for libraries, claims that due to the cheaper prices of books,
"people who couldn't afford books before and borrowed them are now buying them on the high street."

I occasionally worry about what will happen when all the old Australian Book Reviews crumble to dust, as there is no comprehensive digital preservation policy operating for it at present. I'm not quite sure I should be so concerned after reading bits of the Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004) which has been published online.

In chapter 37, a general introduction to issues of preservation in humanities computing, Abby Smith writes:

Preservation by benign neglect has proven an amazingly robust strategy over time, at least for print-on-paper. One can passively manage a large portion of library collections fairly cheaply. One can put a well-catalogued book on a shelf in good storage conditions and expect to be able to retrieve it in 100 years in fine shape for use if no one has called it from the shelf. But neglect in the digital realm is never benign. Neglect of digital data is a death sentence. A digital object needs to be optimized for preservation at the time of its creation (and often again at the time of its deposit into a repository), and then it must be conscientiously managed over time if it is to stand a chance of being used in the future.

(Link via Grand Text Auto, where the publication of a new Companion to Digital Literary Studies is also announced.)

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.

The second Calibre Essay Prize from Australian Book Review, a new competition for non-fiction pieces which carries a prize of $10,000, is to be shared by two winners for 2008.

Judges Kerryn Goldsworthy, Paul Hetherington and Peter Rose chose Rachel Robertson's essay, 'Reaching One Thousand' and Mark Tredinnick's 'A Storm And A Teacup' from a longlist of eighteen essays. Robertson's essay is about her family's experience with autism:

Rachel Robertson’s short fiction, reviews and articles have been published in Australian print and on-line journals. She has worked as an editor, researcher, policy officer and adult educator. Her essay is ‘Reaching One Thousand’, an impressively subtle study of autism and of its consequences for the child and for the parents alike. With dry wit it also introduces readers to an eccentric family of professional and amateur mathematicians. Ms Robertson’s adroit depiction of a family recognising and responding to autism is as impressive as her anxious care for her son ‘Ben’ (all names in this essay have been changed).

Dr. Tredinnick's essay is reported to be a personal meditation on ecology and the writing life(which I'm sure is also very good, if the high standard set by last year's winner is anything to go by):

It begins in a deluge, as it were: the heavy rains that flooded parts of south-east Australia in June 2007. These falls and the general inundation fail to alleviate Dr Tredinnick’s concerns about ‘the driest continent’ and the need for a profound reassessment of how many resources we all need individually to live sanely and sustainably. Tea and its harmonising ceremonies and literature provide the key in this elegant, succinct essay, which also deals with the literary life in the twenty-first century.

Once more the narrow focus of our new Prime Minister's new literary prize is exposed - it would have been good to see some of that money going to poetry and essay writing as well. So it is good that ABR and CAL (Copyright Agency Limited) joined forces in 2007 to provide this prize to essayists. It would also be exciting to see some of the shortlisted essays online at ABR, or in hard copy, at some time - even a list of names and topics covered would be of interest, both to the public and to aspiring writers.

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.

This is how she did it. Not only that, Tracy has a grant for a second novel and companion blog in the bag. That's called creative industry, children.

Now I'm off.

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 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.

Till the end of the year you can cast your vote for a book cover at the Book Design Review blog. Some speccies there, including Marina Lewycka's latest, Strawberry Fields. Link via Chekhov's Mistress.

From Alex Ross's blog comes this extract from a book on pop which gives some background on Roberta Flack's classical training.

I would demur, however, at this writer's claim that Flack 's 'distinctively spare arrangements, predilection for spaciousness, and cool reflective tone' stem from an understanding of Lizst - spots of Bach, yes, but Lizst?

Jessamyn West will tell you here why Library Thing is the goods, and why authors should be members. (Don't go anywhere near Shelfari.)

And quickly:

Two suitable outings in post-election week present themselves to me - Wednesday night is Germaine Greer's lecture on Jane Austen and the Getting of Wisdom (booked out some time ago, but I got in early, hah.)

And Lisa Gorton's new poetry collection, Press Release, published by Giramondo, will be launched this coming Thursday, 29 November, by Chris Wallace-Crabbe. 6.30 pm at the Brunswick Street Bookstore, 305 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

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.'

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.

You know where they live - now put them on your bookshelf.
Congratulations to Australian blogger Peacay on his magnificent collection of digital images, all published with permission for that browsing we like to do outside without batteries.

Here's an exhibition worth checking out, and the quality has been vouched for by Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb.

An Australian Gothic collection will be published by Equilibrium Books in December. Link via HorrorScope.

It looks like a lot of little French Potter fans have been waiting for a while. I like the heading on this article. And I liked the pics here too.
The Guardian has been trainspotting in Paris, too. (Just in case you were wondering which nation reads more books on the train.)

Cyberjournalist.net now lists nearly 250 blogs from news sites. (Link via ReadWriteWeb, where Josh Catone also notes the release of the "Mobile Journalism Toolkit" by Nokia and Reuters.)

And finally, from the Global By Design blog, this link to an article in the Online Journalism Review on Africa's levels of Internet participation.

But who would have thought that social network would have had so much blood in it? 15 billion?? Is Facebook just a big.... blood orange, waiting for an exceptionally large set of choppers?

Analysts said Microsoft paid a steep price on a bet that the three-year-old company would be able to transform itself into a hub for all sorts of Web activity.

"The only way this works is if Facebook becomes sort of the users' operating system on the Internet -- everyone logs into Facebook every day to get in contact with their friends and use a multitude of future applications that will be developed for it," said Morningstar analyst Toan Tran.

Facebook, a social network that lets friends share information, allows outside developers to create games and other applications for its site.

The popularity and depth of knowledge Facebook has about its users makes it valuable to companies like Microsoft and Google which want to sell advertising targeted to individual preferences. (Reuters)

Presenting Doctor Grordbort’s
Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory!!!

Weta Publishing is pleased to announce its upcoming Weta Originals/Dark Horse Comics publication: Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory.
Doctor Grordbort: inventor extraordinaire! He’s got a gadget for everything! He’s also the creator of a meticulous catalogue of weaponry. Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory is a thirty-two-page catalogue that chronicles a world where chivalry is not dead, advertising is beautiful, and ray guns look too pretty to be lethal.

The stars of the show are, of course, Doctor Grordbort’s Infallible Aether Oscillators, but you will also find the shiniest new bifurnilizers, metal manservants, and automated travel loungers. Also included for entertainment and scientific education is a compartmentalised picture story (some call them comics) of the world-famous naturalist, Lord Cockswain. He was the hit of this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego, as convention-goers stopped agape at Weta’s hauntingly realistic, life-size memorial statue, celebrating Lord Cockswain and the Moon Mistress’ heroic endeavors on Venus.

Written and illustrated by Weta Workshop conceptual designer Greg Broadmore, Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory showcases dozens of arcane inventions, contraptions, and weaponry. “As a kid I was massively inspired and awed by the black-and-white serials on Sunday afternoon TV, in particular the 1930s Flash Gordon and the many sci-fi movies of that era,” says Greg. “This book allowed me to pay homage to that world of science fiction and create something new at the same time. And it’s full of guns, did I mention guns? Rayguns actually, the best type.”
This hardcover book will be available from Dark Horse Books in January 2008.

Oh my word. As the man says, please don't sue him.
Link via Christy Dena, who also provides a link to the list of the films included by its creator, Alonzo Mosely. I AM peeved I didn't pick the Blues Brothers the first time around.

There's a great review here from ReadWriteWeb of a movie recommendations site, giving you the lowdown on how to check the recommendations ghost in the machine.
And also from RWW, it seems that social networking has been part of the BBC's enterprise solutions for at least eight years.

John Freeman has a good post at Critical Mass this week introducing Sign and Sight, Europe's answer to the Complete Review, and has also been talking to people from Eurozine, a collaborative site for more than 60 cultural journals, while he's been at the Frankfurt Book Fair (all his posts from Frankfurt are worth a look).

Ho hum. Tomorrow I write (or at least start) a post without a single link in it. Treely ruly. I don't have a Caladrius bird in my yard, unfortunately, but I'll think of something.

Okay I'm a day late. The Cybils officially opened up nominations in all categories yesterday. I'm just way behind schedule on lots of things. The good news is that I have the great honor to be returning as a panelist in the graphic novel category!

Check out the cool group I landed in this year, some are seasoned Cybilers and old pals from last year and some are new and very welcome names. Talk about traveling in fine company! I expect applause. I'm listening for it. Yay!!

Category Organizer: Sarah Stevenson (Reading YA: Readers' Rants)

Nominating Panel:

Mary Lee Hahn (A Year of Reading)
Alyssa Feller (The Shady Glade)
Katie Zenke (Pixie Palace)
Elizabeth Jones
Gina Ruiz (AmoXcalli) - that's me

Judging Panel:

David Elzey (The Excelsior File)
J.L. Bell (Oz and Ends)
Anna (TangognaT)
Snow Wildsmith (My Reading Project)
Angie Thompson (Angieville)

Check out the cool article on The Guardian and then use their link to hop over and see the book.

Wonder who's in it... Read the rest of this post

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.

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.

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.

World's longest INSTALLED novel. (Link via Ben Dooley at The Millions.)

I saw Lee Miller's photos at the Monash Gallery of Art recently. Among several that were astounding, the shot of Miller in Hitler's bath, with the dust of Dachau rubbed firmly into the bathmat, was the one I returned to more than twice. Ali Smith discusses Lee Miller's photography and writing in The Guardian this week.

Speaking of light and shade - Grand Text Auto comes recommended by Christy Dena of Cross Media Entertainment, and I am really enjoying this addition to my RSS reader, especially when catching up on things like this.

The State Library of Victoria gets a mention in here, just after a shot of the Sorbonne's library.
Way to go. And yes, the crowd at Curious Expeditions do credit Candida Höfer's magnificent tome for some of these pictures (which is where I've seen them before.) As well as offering a link to a Flickr account. (Link from the ALIA New graduates mailing list.)

I'd like to see Nabs try this.

In the last of the Melbourne Writers' Festival news, David Prater covers his session with John Tranter, and the Speakeasy at AWM Online is going to be a regular reporting spot for writers' festivals down the coast -they did Byron a few weeks back, and now they're doing Brisbane. So do watch that space.

This may be the next big thing.

I enjoyed lurking at MWF this time around - highlights included David Prater's launch and Paul Hardacre's interview with Tom Shapcott, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida's terrific session with Louise Swinn, who asked some excellent questions, Victoria Glendinning talking to Sophie Cunningham about Leonard Woolf, the new media presentations at ACMI from the Story of the Future and LAMP labs, and Alexis Wright and Tony Birch discussing the genesis and publication of her prize-winning, seminal work Carpentaria. I also caught Les Murray, at a very convivial session where all listeners were content to hear him read poem after poem, only briefly stopping for a few questions before they asked him to 'read some more - read the Weeping Man'. (You can hear it there, too.) I was going to blog Eggers and Vida, but Ariel has done a much better job, and you can catch that meaty slice of the conference here.

I wasn't the only punter surprised at the size of the venue allocated to Wright's session - others remarked that a bigger crowd could easily have been accommodated elsewhere. Only 100 odd people can fit into the Tower theatre. This should have been a free session, in the Beckett. At least there was a good long signing session afterwards, as those 100 people obviously had plenty to say to this passionate and remarkable writer, storyteller and advocate.

Carpentaria will be released in the UK next year. This book is not just on the crest of the world literature wave, it is connecting the very lifeblood of our country to it, adding an ostinato to that movement that is sublime and compelling. It will be translated into many languages and read and studied for a very long time. So don't miss out. You have been told.

This festival largely had a good strong vibe, although as Lisa Dempster from Locus Press has pointed out in her constructive and comprehensive list of suggestions here, the prices still put it out of the reach of younger people and students. I get a bit sick of seeing hordes of middle-class couples, walking in a ring, myself - I don't have anything against them, it's great that people are coming with partners and friends of course, but it would be nice to see people from further afield than Camberwell occasionally.

Ian Syson has put it nicely in another context in a review in Saturday's Age, quoting a fictional character from Mont Albert saying that 'Melbourne is the city whose east I know better than its north or west'. Syson adds in a gritted dentural parenthesis that ' if there's a better 14 word critique of the Australian publishing industry than the one able to be inferred here, I am yet to read it.'

That's only going to change for Victoria's festival when the Brumby government comes good with the $250,000 needed to bring MWF's funding up to the level of the Sydney outing, and then Rosemary Cameron can continue the good job she has started of ramping up the diversity of her programming. All those devirginated middle class ladies should have enjoyed themselves at Second Life, when they were over the strangeness - I am looking forward to checking with Jeff Sparrow how that session went, having felt a bit of biblio-tech anxiety over the fact that it was held in a tent.

There's other MWF reports at graphic novelist Eddie Campbell's blog as well, including this salutary note on signing books.

I was sitting in the Latrobe Reading Room yesterday and got the vibe that prizes were in the offing when photographers snapped Alexis Wright and two other writers sitting on the desks in the row in front of me.
So if she gets in the paper with two other writers on a row of desks, I'm (hopefully invisibly)BEHIND THEM.
Decided to be an eminently sensible blogger and wait till today to write about it, though.
(Where's our picture, anyway?)
I know Perry will cover this too, but I thought this was a really good opportunity (a) to show I am not a pooper-blogscooper (b) complain about the photo, which of course could always turn up tomorrow...

Anyhow, here's the judges' report for the Vance Palmer Prize (also known as the Victorian Premier's Prize, collectively) for fiction: other prizewinners can be found here:

Alexis Wright, in Carpentaria, has created an epic centred on the town of Desperance, in the vast Gulf country of northwestern Queensland. Where lives are shaped and measured by the annual destructive cyclonic floods and the daily cleansing tides. At the novel’s heart is Norm Phantom, patriarch of his family and leader of the Pricklebush people.

Carpentaria demonstrates that Wright is an inventive writer of great reach. Indeed, it is almost audacious in its scope and ambition. In her marrying of the oral tradition with the written word Wright takes a bold stylistic risk, but it has paid off with a complicated net of stories coming vibrantly alive on the page. Wright has created a strong, confident and vivid voice with a healthy dose of sly humour.