Number 3 chiller - Text Publishing

Advance Australian Literary Fare

2012-02-21T00:00:00Z

‘Australian Literature 101 is the university education in Australian literature you never had’, says the Wheeler Centre in promoting their new series of talks on classic Australian works.

Ramona Koval hosts Australian Literature 101, which runs weekly from 8 March to 17 May and covers such seminal texts as The Getting of Wisdom, Monkey Grip, Voss and The Man Who Loved Children. View the whole line-up and book tickets here.

This is a push by the Wheeler Centre to encourage greater public engagement with our literary history, all the more relevant in the context of a lack of tertiary studies available in this area—a point publisher Michael Heyward made in his opinion piece earlier this year.

Text is publishing a series of Australian Classics in May, in our contribution to this important project. See the full list here.

August shortlisted in the 2012 APA Book Design Awards

2012-02-20T00:00:00Z

Congratulations to WH Chong, whose design for Bernard Beckett’s August has been shortlisted in three categories in the 2012 APA Book Design Awards.

Part philosophical thriller, part love story, August is a compelling novel of power, humanity and desire. Trapped in a car wreck, upside down, bleeding, broken and in pain, Tristan and Grace are staring at death. As they await their fate, with only a glimmer of hope they might be seen and rescued, we discover the stories of their lives, the sequences of events that brought them together and the shocking truth behind the cause of their crash.

August is up for Best Designed Children’s Cover of the Year, Best Designed Young Adult Book and overall Best Designed Cover of the Year. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in Sydney on 17 May.

We asked our august designer a few questions about the process behind this incredible cover.

Where did the inspiration for the design come from?

As I try to do each time, I read the manuscript. The idea offered itself within two pages. So, concept follows content. (But it was the kind of book which I read all the way through.)

August was published for both adults and younger readers. Are there particular design difficulties with such a broad brief?

Yes. The past is a foreign country and young people don’t go there.

Let me put it this way: for boomers, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young still seem alluring; for slightly younger folk, they regret their days among the Sex Pistols and Depeche Mode; then we have a long gap with, eventually, even younger folk emoting to Nirvana and various shoegazers; and suddenly it’s entirely hip hop and gangsta rap. I don’t know anyone who listens to Joni and D Mode and Snoop Dogg. But then, again everyone listens to ancient Lenny Cohen, so maybe you just have to go extreme classic.

What do you think of the UK edition of August, which used the same image but turned it upside down, losing the visual pun?

(Slaps head) That’s like Tarte Tatin served with the pastry on top! Sufferin' succotash.

Are your cover designs now influenced by a consideration of how the book will appear in e-format?

Should. But it’s pitiful if we only have eyes for 120 x 150 pixels.

August by Bernard Beckett, available now from Text Publishing and at all good bookstores.

Friday Links

2012-02-17T00:00:00Z

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

“Very” “suspicious” “quotation” “marks”.

We love it when literary giants use their powers for filth.

The Composites is a tumblr of images of characters from literature, as drawn by a police sketch artist.

Movie stars love books, too.

Book marketing as she is played.

Amazingly, the Germans did not have a word for it.

5 recipes inspired by novels.

Friday Links

2012-02-10T00:00:00Z

‘Got my book out / I’m reading for fun / laughing out loud again / yeeeeaaaah / readin’ in the USA'

We know graphology is a pseudo-science at best, but Borges' penmanship still creeps me out: analysing writers' personalities from their handwriting.

Dr Text recommends you take 2 superlatives and have a nice lie-down.

The stories behind some publishers' animal logos. (FYI—this piece includes the delightful words ‘colophon’ and ‘Borzoi’.)

Matching your outfit to your book is a handy way for people to tell what you’re reading when you’re holding a Kindle.

The 20 most beautiful bookstores in the world, as judged by Flavorwire. (The Guardian parries.)

Do you smile to tempt a (book) lover, Mona Lisa?

2012-02-06T00:00:00Z

A Text bag appreciates some art in Paris.

Friday Links

2012-01-27T00:00:00Z

Will you be my valentine?

‘I wish I could say I was in a bar fight,’ confessed Sorkin, ‘but I broke my nose writing.’ Seven strange writing rituals of famous authors.

We had the legendary bad boys of literature, now it’s time to make way for the ladies.

There’s literary criticism, and then there’s this.

A beautiful clothesline qua bookshelf.

Of all the stupid reasons to ban books, I guess some are more stupid than others.

Romy Ash Glams Up for Australian Women's Weekly

2012-01-25T00:00:00Z

Romy Ash, author of the upcoming Floundering, was at a photoshoot today for Australian Women’s Weekly. Romy will be featured in their March issue, in a special on ‘faces to watch’ in 2012.

Publicist Steph took these behind-the-scenes snaps of Romy getting ready for her close-up:

Floundering is Romy’s debut novel. Find it in all good bookstores from 28 March.

A Classic is a Terrible Thing to Waste

2012-01-24T00:00:00Z

To see the full list of Text Classics, download this link:

Download document (44Kb)
Classics_fullList

Publisher Michael Heyward, in this Sunday’s Age:

Out of print, out of mind? That’s hardly the way to treat Australian literature.

For a long time in this country it was argued that there was no such thing as Australian literature. As late as 1940, J.I.M. Stewart, professor of English at Adelaide University, declared that in the absence of appropriate books he would lecture on D.H.Lawrence’s novel, Kangaroo. In the year he said that, as if to mock him, Christina Stead published The Man Who Loved Children.

We like to think all that has changed. We live in the world of the home-grown literary bestseller, the world of The Slap and The Secret River. We love our new stars, and celebrate the success of Favel Parrett or Toni Jordan or Craig Silvey. Our writers have careers both at home and abroad. We no longer expect our life-changing books to be written in isolation and despair, against the odds, fulfilling what Henry Lawson came to believe was the destiny of the Australian writer.

So much for writing now. Because it takes just a generation or two, sometimes less, for us to lose the plot. We put our books and writers on the high shelf of the past, where we forget about them. Imagine if our art galleries decided to banish the works of Brett Whiteley or Fred Williams to their darkened basements. Not for a year or two, but a decade or two. That’s what we routinely do to so many significant writers whose books are out of print.

We seem not to care. In 1963, The Reivers by US writer William Faulkner won the Pulitzer. Half a century later it’s in print. In the same year the Miles Franklin was won by Sumner Locke Elliott’s Careful, He Might Hear You. It became an international bestseller and a famous film. It has been out of print for many years.

Examples litter the place. In 1976, the Pulitzer was won by American Saul Bellow for Humboldt’s Gift. UK author David Storey won the Booker for Saville. I could buy new copies of these novels today. No such luck with David Ireland’s admired The Glass Canoe, which won the Miles Franklin that year. Ireland, by the way, was awarded the Miles Franklin three times. His books are entirely out of print.

It’s as if we think that good books burn down like candles, when the truth is that they get better and brighter. Liberated from the circumstances of their making, books become new when we read them again, more themselves than ever. ‘Literature,’ said Ezra Pound, ‘is news that stays news.’

Those of us who choose and influence what people might read – publishers, professors, teachers, journalists, commentators, editors – have done a lamentable job of curating the primary materials of our literary history.

Two reasons stand out. Our universities have failed for more than a century to create any kind of enduring tradition for the teaching of Australian literature. We are so familiar with this failure we hardly notice. And our publishing has always been dominated by British houses, which have not always felt the need, simply because a book is part of our national heritage, to keep it available.

In 2011, in not a single course in the whole country were students asked to read Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. This is the equivalent of not one Russian university teaching Anna Karenina, of Madame Bovary going untaught in France. It is a rampageous scandal, to borrow a coinage from HHR herself. If I tell you that Patrick White’s The Tree of Man was prescribed on two courses last year, or The Man Who Loved Children, which MUP recently put back into print, on just one, you start to see the extent of the problem.

Such educational poverty is consistent with the views expressed in 1935 by G. H. Cowling, professor of English literature at Melbourne University, who told readers of the Age that: ‘The rewards of literature in Australia are not good enough to make it attract the best minds … Good Australian novels which are entirely Australian are bound to be few … Australian life is too lacking in tradition, and too confused, to make many first class novels.’

The academic resentments enshrined in these views—philistine, anti-intellectual, hostile to literary achievement—run deep and strong today, though now they arise from a different set of fixed ideas. The effect is to enfeeble our understanding of our history. Our words, our deeds, our hatreds and our loves gave rise to these books. Reading and discussing them, we are part of a conversation that could never happen with the same inwardness or intensity anywhere else. We are contributing to the imaginative wealth of the place. ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did,’ someone once said to T. S. Eliot. ‘Precisely,’ the poet replied, ‘and they are that which we know.’ Well, not necessarily in this country.

It will take all kinds of effort to change these cultures. We do not adapt nearly enough Australian novels for film or TV, though the ABC is now emerging from years of slumber. The arrival of the e-book may liberate some writers from the dungeons of neglect but the problems we face are conceptual not technological. Inspired by a student reading group at Melbourne University, which in 2011 taught no Australian literature course at all, the Wheeler Centre is about to launch a program of lectures about Australian books. And this year, Text, where I am publisher, is releasing a series of Australian classics in cheap editions (Careful, He Might Hear You and The Glass Canoe among them).

When Professor Stewart reduced Australian literature to a single book, he had available to him The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Such is Life, My Brilliant Career, the stories of Lawson and Barbara Baynton. He had For the Term of His Natural Life and Robbery Under Arms. He had the poetry of Kenneth Slessor. His comment reminds us that we are unlikely to find what we are not looking for. Stewart and Cowling had the excuse of being Englishmen marooned in what they understood to be colonies of the mind. What’s our excuse?

This May, Text will be launching a series of Australian classics: 30 books by our most loved writers, books that tell our stories. More information about the Text Classics will be available here in the coming weeks.

Friday Links

2012-01-20T00:00:00Z

Trong G Nguyen’s ‘Library’, the complete text of a book or individual chapters written word for word on rice kernels.

Best thing ever said to me on the mic at a public event: “When I read your book I really wanted to sleep with you, but now not so much.” And I can’t work out to this day whether it was the way I looked or some unsexy thing I said about plot or the use of apostrophes.

Authors' stories of interactions with their fans.

Beautiful bird illustrations drawn in old engineering and science textbooks.

Here’s some motivation for literature-loving neurotics who are trying to stop biting their nails.

From Boswell and Johnson, to Kerouac and Ginsberg: famous literary friendships.

A whole new visual dimension to the idea of autobiography.

Selfridges celebrates all things word-y.

Friday Links

2012-01-13T00:00:00Z

Mark Twain presents, snarkily, how to commit 114 out of 115 possible violations of literary art in less than a single page.

This ‘10 Legendary Bad Boys of Literature’ post got us thinking about the bad girls of literature we know and love.

The greatest Rube Goldberg machine yet: The Page Turner.

The Celebrity Lecture Series hosts lectures from some of the world’s best writers.

Friday Links

2012-01-06T00:00:00Z

The first #fridayfrivolity of 2012! Be sure to follow us on twitter for all kinds of book news.

If you didn’t get an e-reader for Christmas, don’t worry. Print books have more interior design potential, anyway.

Are there enough cats in classic literature? Apparently not.

Authors give writing advice. (I would expect nothing cleaner from Bukowski.)

Sam Anderson at the NYT Magazine looks back on a year of marginalia.

Some pretty great epigraphs.

Not one word worth more than 10 points!

2011-12-12T00:00:00Z

A much-beloved publicist went on maternity leave and gave us a parting gift of magnetic Scrabble.

We have perhaps not been putting it to the best use.

Friday Links

2011-12-09T00:00:00Z

Would you be more likely to buy a thriller by someone called ‘Alison Potter’, or by someone called ‘Ali Knight’? An interesting consideration of how writers choose pen names.

The Symbolism Survey, undertaken by a high school student in the 1960s.

Beautiful book bindings at the National Library of Sweden.

Cats: the natural enemy of the book and book-related activities.

This has been a dream of mine since early childhood: detailed instructions on how to make a secret door in your bookcase.

On my Christmas wish list: the Chromatic Typewriter.

‘Reader, I marinated it’: your favourite authors as recipe writers.

Friday Links

2011-12-02T00:00:00Z

Some famous authors who weren’t too bad at other arts, either.

Different editions and covers of Moby Dick, from a single collection.

The smell of old books, explained.

Movember may be over, but we can remember it with a look at some luxurious literary moustaches.

The opening lines from six famous books: can you pick them?

The ten oldest books known to man.

Friday Links

2011-11-25T00:00:00Z

A few examples of beautiful book art.

Strange to think that we might be talking about Catch-11s, instead.

The city of Stuttgart in Germany has built an amazing new library.

Rejection letters are part of any writer’s life, but do they have to be so mean?

Some incredible book sculptures, left mysteriously in Scottish libraries.

Melbourne makes an appearance on the National Geographic list of the 10 top literary cities.

Some Messages from Marjorie Bligh, Housewife Superstar

2011-11-23T00:00:00Z

Marjorie Bligh on the perfect Christmas gift

Marjorie Bligh on the perfect marriage

A favourite quotation from Marjorie Bligh

A favourite tip from Marjorie Bligh

Marjorie Bligh on the perfect Christmas

We came, we saw, we read.

2011-11-22T00:00:00Z

A Text bag takes a Roman holiday.

(Pic by WH Chong)

Friday Links

2011-11-18T00:00:00Z

The top ten books lost to time.

The Swedes have produced some pretty amazing book covers.

Spike Jonze has made a beautiful short film, featuring embroidered first editions gallivanting around the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris.

Some odd day jobs authors had before they made it.

Can you match the fictional rock band to the novel it appeared in?

Rodney Croome's Speech for Housewife Superstar

2011-11-14T00:00:00Z

Rodney Croome, renowned Tasmanian gay-rights activist and former Island editor, gave a moving speech to launch Danielle Wood’s Housewife Superstar: The Very Best of Marjorie Bligh, which he’s kindly allowed us to reproduce here.

When Danielle Wood asked me to speak today she said keep it light and fun.

But when it comes to Marjorie Bligh, I’ve already made that mistake and won’t be repeating it.

Last month in Canberra I told some friends I would have the honour to launch Danielle’s book.

Being from other states they’d never heard of Marjorie, so looking to amuse them I explained she was a doyen of household hints who recommended putting slices of garlic in children’s socks to prevent whooping cough.

‘Rodney,’ one said gravely, ‘you do realise that chemists charge heaps for little bags of herbs meant to keep you healthy by being put in your socks?’

I didn’t, and I checked and she was right.

I really have no excuses for making light of Marjorie Bligh home hints.

I spent my childhood on a farm near Sheffield where it seemed everyone owned and regularly consulted books by Marjorie Bligh.

In my adolescence I lived no more than 200 metres from Marjorie’s home in Devonport, a town in which her words and example were taken very seriously by those seeking to maintain a link with their past.

Now, as a grown man wondering how I might weather the world’s economic instability, I think twice before throwing out old things and wonder if Marjorie might have some hints for repairing and maintaining them.

But to me, even more important than the practical use of Marjorie’s hints is what her work and life says about us as Tasmanians.

On almost every page of Danielle’s book there is a reference to something I recognise as peculiar to older Tasmanians, something which Marjorie Bligh may have taken to a new level but which has been common and unique to our shared heritage.

It might be something as simple as a cake recipe or how to name a house, or as puzzling as a preoccupation with newspaper clippings.

It includes the way Marjorie tells stories through unlikely digressions and the gathering together of unrelated odds and ends into a sprawling narrative as baroque as a Flanagan novel.

It certainly includes Marjorie’s strong sense of who she is and where she belongs.

In recent days the Sydney press has puzzled over research which shows Tasmanians are the happiest people in Australia.

One expert put it down to exercise in natural settings, which seems to me far more fanciful than any of Marjorie’s health hints.

My explanation is that we are happy because we are more likely to know who we really are and to be content with that.

In common with Marjorie, Tasmania comes from unprepossessing origins into the world that doesn’t care much for what makes us special. This in turn gives us an opportunity to construct who we are and be in control of what we have built. We are under fewer illusions about the meaning and value of our lives.

The final and most important thing other Tasmanians share with Marjorie was revealed to me on a recent visit to MONA.

The Victorian friend I took there declared it a monument to David Walsh’s ego.

I was astounded. ‘If this place was about ego,’ I said, ‘it would be in Melbourne or Los Angeles or somewhere that would attract more attention. Instead, it is here in humble Hobart where David Walsh grew up.’

Hobart would have been a tight fit for a man of Walsh’s intellect and vision. It is a place where people would not always have appreciated or understood him.

But it is his place and we are his people and he has given us all this gift, for free, unconditionally.

This is an act of love.

In exactly the same way, Marjorie Bligh’s many books are anything but an act of ego.

They are about her readers, not her.

They are an act of love for an island people who have not always appreciated or understood her, who were sometimes too indolent, brutal, petty and small for her, but with whom she shares an indissoluble bond and to whom she owes so much of who she is.

Like Walsh, Flanagan and so many other Tasmanians, Marjorie Bligh is too big a personality to fit easily here, but she also has too big a heart to retreat to other places or into herself.

Instead she casts her immense creativity, originality and insight to the world come what may.

Danielle understands that Marjorie’s work has an importance beyond home hints.

She does not let herself get snagged on the difference in their ages or their values, as a shallow biographer might.

Her careful research and her fine prose style shows she takes her subject very seriously indeed.

As a result, this book also becomes a gift of love not just to its ostensible subject, Marjorie Blight, but to its other hidden subject, Tasmania.

Danielle, congratulations on another fine book, one that preserves the fruits of Marjorie’s work as well as the best-made jam, and is a better medicine for our weary souls than any amount of sliced garlic.

Rodney Croome, Hobart, 6 November 2011

Friday Links

2011-11-14T00:00:00Z

A tumblr about the books given to us by lovers, ex- and current.

A handy illustrated guide to some of literature’s narrow escapes from death.

Oh ‘F*** Yeah’ memes, will you never get old?

A look at some of the books lying around media offices.

Can’t find a name for your first book? Never fear!