A number of sf editors and writers are asked the salient question: "What purpose does short fiction serve?" Among those polled are Jonathan Strahan ("A lot of the great ideas in the field started in short fiction. If you want to read the best, get the purest Sfnal fix, it's often to be found in short fiction. Also, it's a great way to sample a bunch of new writers, get a feel for them before committing to novels."); and Jack Dann ("What do readers get out of a short story? They get a whole world wrapped up in a few minutes. They get that shiver down the spine real-quick. And then they can go on to another story, an entirely different world, plot, experience. It's reading novels on speed...except, of course, you don't get a novel. You can't relax for days in the experience. You get the rush fast, and a case might be made that the short form is a more perfect 'product' than a novel.")
Davey announces "I'm very excited to say that I've been successful in obtaining funding from Arts Victoria to develop a new collection of poems, based on correspondence between Australian poet Bernard O'Dowd and American bard Walt Whitman...The correspondence (which has been preserved in the State Library of Victoria and also published in Overland magazine) is notable both for Whitman's brevity (he was, after all, on his death bed), as for O'Dowd's idolisation of the man he calls 'master', and once even 'comrade'."
And it's odd that I should be skimming through a recently purchased copy of I Recall by R.H. Croll - the man who introduced C.J. Dennis to John Garibaldi Roberts - when I came across a note about this very correspondence. Croll and O'Dowd were in the same Melbourne readers' group in the early 1900s.
BookTagger is an Australian version of LibraryThing. Both perform similar functions - social networking groups for book lovers - though BookTagger has a ways to go to catch up to LibraryThing's 23 million cataloged books. Gotta start somewhere though.
