Looking for a rundown on current and future Australian crime fiction releases? Then look no further than the "Crime Down Under" weblog, where Damien examines what's been released so far in May and what we can expect to see in the next few weeks.
In "The Walrus" magazine, Lisa Moore compares literature from the ends-of-the-earth, namely Newfoundland and Tasmania. "Despite all the differences between Newfoundland and Tasmania, there are also compelling similarities. The most tragic similarity is that both of the islands' aboriginal populations were decimated as a result of European settlement. We are also both islands off the coast of a continent; we are both ridiculed by our respective mother countries. Newfoundlanders are lazy and stupid and Tasmanians are inbred, the story goes. The joke is that the Tasmanians are so inbred that they're born with two heads. In the Salamanca Place market, in Hobart, they sell T-shirts with two necks, just as you can find miniature models of Newfie outhouses with two floors in some joke shops around St. John's. "Most importantly, both islands have gone through a burst of astonishing literary production in the last twenty years that has caught the attention of the world. Just as Newfoundland author Wayne Johnston put the province on the literary map with his novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, so Richard Flanagan made the world aware of the rich cultural heritage of Tasmania with his novel Gould's Book of Fish."
HipWriterMama has been captivated by Justine Larbalestier's YA "Magic or Madness" trilogy, and powered through all three books over one weekend. It would be nice to have the time.
