And the longlist is....

This morning the Man Booker Longlist was announced and Australia's own Christos Tsiolkas was nominated for The Slap. Oh, and Peter Carey too. In other news, Tom McCarthy's C made the list and not surprisingly, David Mitchell is there too for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. 
While I'd love for The Slap to win because Christos is fabulous and C to win because I think McCarthy is utterly fascinating, I wouldn't put money on it. Apparently, British bookmakers William Hill rate Andrea Levy's The Lost Song as the favourite.

Hold on to your hats!

Farrar Strauss Giroux, quite possibly my favourite publishing company (despite being part of Macmillan now), has recently lauched an online magazine: Work in Progress. If ever there was a reason to get an iPad, this would be it. You can read about book jacket design, the new Eugenides or survey some of the treasures from the Susan Sontag archive. It's a whole lot of great content, and it's free.

I do wonder though, with this sort of material increasingly available, how does a magazine like the New Yorker maintain subscription levels?

Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Apparently inspired by a trip to Japan, and 10 years in the writing, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a highly atmospheric and enchantingly transporting book. The first third (and the least dynamic) introduces us to 'Dazuto', as he is named by the locals. A clerk for the Dutch East India Company, sent to Deijima to check the accounting in the company's outpost. This is a book concerned with honour, the limits of loyalty and misuses of religious faith. 

     As with Cloud Atlas, I enjoyed reading David Mitchell's latest offering. The reader is able to thoroughly lose themselves in the world Mitchell creates. He does have a lovely way with words but ultimately, this was not a moving book for me, either intellectually or emotionally.  It's not Mitchell's fault he is described on the cover of my proof copy as 'a man who may yet prove to be the greatest British writer of his age' but, for me, he hasn't yet reached up into greatness.
     On a side note, I was lucky enough to score a proof copy which is a dazzling gold mirror foil all over. While the finished version is rather pretty, with blue glitter embellishments highlighting the text and some of the undulations of the waves, I wonder whether booksellers were disappointed after the Midas-gold of the reading copy.

Disappointment

I had extremely low expectations for Sex and the City 2. I thought it would be difficult to expect less of anything. But still, I was disappointed. And somehow, those clever movie people, managed to slip an errant apostrophe into the film. At one point Carrie is printing off a story for Vogue entitled (cue shot of the printer) ‘Terrible Two’s’. Did we ever see Carrie printing out stories in the series? Surely she would deliver electronically. So not only was the shot pointless and time-wasting, like most of the film, but committed that most frightful of sins, the misplaced apostrophe.

Waiting...

In preparation for Sir Ian this evening, I've returned to my bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot. Becket has taken on a whole new persona since I read the Nora biography by Brenda Maddox. Apparently James Joyce and Nora's daughter fell madly in love in Beckett when she met him at her parents' apartment in Paris.
Anyway, this one lean, economical and thoroughly fascinating play and I can't wait to see it performed for the first time.It was almost enough to distract me on the bus this morning from the foul-odoured person who sat next to me, full body contact for most of the trip.

Lights Out!

Lights Out in Wonderland

DBC Pierre

It’s just what postmodernism should be: ironic, fun, footnoted and dripping with disestablishmentarianism. Drawing from David Foster Wallace, Don Delillo and Hunter S. Thompson style hijinks for the 21st century, Lights Out in Wonderland is a drug-soaked and fatalistic bacchanal. Our hero, Gabriel Brockwell, is planning one last bender before committing suicide and he pulls his best buddy, a chef called Smuts, along down with him. From fornicating in a fish tank to koala confit, this is one helluva ride. 

I can see my house from here

Well here's an exciting production. UTS bravely charges a bunch of students each year with producing an anthology. And this year's is a cracker (and not just because yours truly was one of the editors). Everything you ever wanted in an anthology is packed in here: flash fiction; screen-writing; poetry and short stories. Crikey sure liked it. Where can you get your copy? Right here.