James Bradley is rather pleased to see that Steven Amsterdam's novel Things We Didn't See Coming has won the Age Book of the Year Award and remembers doing something similar with his novel The Deep Field.
And Stephanie Campisi sees some similarities between Amsterdam's cover and one used for Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller.
The "Overland literary journal" weblog points out that a recent "Australian" newspaper article by Carmela Baranowska was originally published in their journal, reprinted with permission but with no acknowledgement. Overland is a not-or-profit journal and really does need these things noted.
And the Overland blog is aiming to be all-poetry all-the-time during the 2009 Overland Poetry Festival, as poetry totally takes over their weblog: 4-13 September.
"Ripping Ozzie Reads" weblog is starting a series of posts from their author contributors about First Book Sales and then, later, on Career Planning. First off the rank is Rowena Cory Daniells's piece about how her first book, Capped!, was written and plucked out of the slushpile by Scolastic.
"The Guardian" newspaper, obviously troubled by the books on the Man Booker longlist, decided to run its own poll of its readers and have now come up with a shortlist of 6. Australia's M.J. Hyland made the cut, though you have to be aware that this list only allows for books that are currently available in the UK. Cheryl Morgan notes that only 794 people nominated in the poll and makes the point that having a free vote allows for vote-stacking.
Jeff VanderMeer has a book lined up to launch at next year's Worldcon here in Melbourne. Appropriately it is an anthology of sf stories with Australian links.
A little while back I mentioned that I had been interviewed by George Dunford for a piece he was writing for The Big Issue. That edition has now come and gone and George has now made the full piece available on his weblog.
