The Bookshow Blog

Question time in festival land #SWF2010

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Like any book-lover/author-fawner/hack-writer, I honestly enjoy the sessions at writers festivals. Whether you accidentally stumbled into a great discussion on your quest to escape torrential rain, or lined up for many precious minutes for a chance to catch a glimpse of your favourite author, it’s almost always a rewarding experience.

Which is why it really grinds my gears when people ask ignorant, insensitive and just plain silly questions.

The non-question

“So, Ms Multi-lingual author, I learned a new language, and would like you to know that, and I don’t really have a question but if I add an upward inflection at the end will that suffice?”
(more…)

Tags: #swf2010, sydney writers festival
Posted in sydney writers festival | 9 Comments »

i-launchpad to a new age? #swf2010

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Another Sydney Writers Festival has come and gone, but the topics raised by the various talks are still buzzing around. I attended every session that had the word ’digital’ and ‘e-reader,’ hoping to get an insight into what books and reading will look like in the near future. It seems that the paper-book is not dead. But you can’t ignore the possiblities and potential of ebooks and other ‘multi-platforms.’

Australians are about to get a taste of this with the i-pad, a device that is meant to propel us into this digital age of books. Of course, e-readers are nothing new, the Kindle has been out for awhile. But the i-pad (and the inevitable copycat devices to follow) goes one better than just using plain text. Not only are books going to be jazzed up, newspapers and magazines are going to get makeovers too. This short video shows off the potential of what a magazine on these devices might look like. (more…)

Tags: #swf2010, e-books, e-readers, Meanjin, Meanland, Overland, sydney writers festival
Posted in Reading, e-readers, sydney writers festival | 4 Comments »

Cosmic wars and twitter revolutions #SWF2010

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

It was a politically charged  beginning to my first day at the Sydney Writer’s festival with a packed audience at Saturday morning’s session with American-Iranian academic Reza Aslan on ”How to win a cosmic war’ moderated  by ABC journalist Tony Jones. The session explored the rationales and possible solutions to conflicts fought within ‘cosmic’  or religiously charged frameworks. (more…)

Tags: #swf2010, conflict, Islam, jihad, religion, Reza Aslan, war
Posted in Social networking, sydney writers festival | 4 Comments »

Death threats and cow farts

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

The first half of this interview can be found here.

Landbø is one of those people who makes you want to know her better. Small and neat, she exudes energy and is quick to laugh. She seems to fit in here. Our conversation is interspersed by jokes and chatter as her flatmate and assorted helpers pass back and forth through the apartment. The whole thing is entertaining, switching into Spanish to search for truant words, and the occasional lapse into charades, along the lines of:
“I always feel in Switzerland that the people have, like…how you say… the thing that you… [mimes sweeping].
“The broom?”
“The broom! That they have…the long part of the broom…they have it in their ass.”
“How about we use the word ‘uptight’?” I suggest.
(more…)

Tags: Argentina, assassinations, broomsticks, corruption, dictatorships, Geoff Lemon, Honduras, horseriding, journalism, kidnapping, methane, Mexico, Switzerland
Posted in Argentina, Travel writing, journalism | 1 Comment »

New Orleans, Moccasins and Migrants #SWF2010

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

A dilemma of sorts. Conversations with Richard Fidler (interviewing graphic novelist Josh Neufeld and comic book author/novelist Richard Van Camp) was my first Sydney Writers Festival of 2010. Why, you ask? Well, between Josh’s sobering account of Hurricane Katrina, and Richard Van Camp’s talent for storytelling, this particular session was so packed with awesome that I’m not sure how the rest of the festival will really live up. I’m not gushing. Honest. You can listen to the session and judge for yourself. (more…)

Tags: alison booth, graphic novels, indigenous stories, josh neufeld, kim cheng boey, migrant stories, natasha solomon, richard van camp, sydney writers festival
Posted in sydney writers festival | No Comments »

All that Twitters…at the Sydney Writers’ Festival #SWF2010

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Relax everyone…Twitter isn’t here to kill off literature. It’s not going to dumb down communication, nor is it going reduce sentences and words into mere abbrev ‘grunts’ and emoticons.

I went to the Interrogating Twitter session today at the SWF 2010. I am a ’Twitterer’ myself and we were encouraged to tweet comments during the event, so even people who were listening outside could raise questions too! (That’s plus one for Twitter hehe)
(more…)

Tags: #swf2010, David Levithan, John Freeman, One Twitter, twitter
Posted in Online literary world, Social networking | No Comments »

Book review cliches

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

We love to hate them but can we do without them? I’m talking about the book review cliché – all those sprawling, epic, haunting yet unflinching and powerful expressions book reviewers employ to portray the core meanings of an author’s tome…

On The Book Show we speak to Michelle Kerns from the Book Examiner about her campaign to rid the world of bookreviewspeak. She’s created a book review cliché bingo game which is fun to play, especially with the weekend papers and any other literary mags in hand. Michelle is also hunting through prominent sites and publications for the best of the worst offenders. You can see her results for April here.

She began this quest because she suddenly realised her own work sounded very like the book jacket blurb. Michelle has also created a book review template, based on champion reviewer and author John Updike’s 6 Rules of Book Reviews in his Picked-Up Pieces (1975), but she admits it’s difficult. ‘I ended up unable to write anything because I felt suffocated under the burden of my own high-minded expectations.’ (more…)

Tags: book reviews, cliches, Examiner, Laura Miller, literary criticism, Salon
Posted in Reading, book reviews | No Comments »

Forever Young Adult

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Last week, Federal Arts Minister Peter Garett announced two new categories for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. This year there will be categories for Childrens and Young Adults (YA) Fiction respectively. (The Book Show actually did a story about this new category before this announcement was made). It’s recognition that’s long overdue, especially for Young Adults literature, one category that is getting harder to define. (more…)

Tags: Genre, Literary awards, Prime Minister's awards, YA fiction
Posted in Literary awards, YA fiction | 2 Comments »

A scandal of historic proportions

Monday, May 17th, 2010

For several weeks, Cambridge – and the rest of the academically-inclined population of Britain – stopped paying attention to news coverage of the general election and focused on politics of a different kind: the politics of academia and academic publishing.  Everyone was engrossed in the rather sordid saga of Russian historian Orlando Figes, his wife, senior law lecturer Stephanie Palmer, herself a Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, and a series of negative reviews posted on the online bookseller Amazon of books by Figes’ rival historians.  It was the perfect literary scandal, and everyone was talking about it, from journalists at the Times Literary Supplement to the baristas in my favourite Cambridge cafe.

So what was it all about? (more…)

Tags: Amazon, history, Orlando Figes, scandal, TLS
Posted in Online literary world | 1 Comment »