Fly the Falcon

A Digital World

2011-04-15T12:00:00.002+10:00

Yesterday (April 14th) the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released their February 2011 sales report. The AAP produce such reports monthly and yearly, based on data provided to them by 84 U.S. publishing houses (major commercial, educational, professional, scholarly and independents). 16 houses provide them with eBook data. The figures for February 2011 are startling. Here are some excerpts from the report, which is ominously entitled E-books rank as the #1 format among all trade categories for the month.

According to the February results, once again e-Books have enjoyed triple-digit percentage growth, 202.3%, vs February 2010. Adult Trade categories combined (Hardcover, Paperback and Mass Market) were $156.8M, down 34.4%. E-book sales were $90.3 Million, growing 202.3% vs February 2010.

For February 2011, e-Books ranked as the #1 format among all categories of Trade publishing (Adult Hardcover, Adult Paperback, Adult Mass Market, Children’s/Young Adult Hardcover, Children’s/Young Adult Paperback). This one-month surge is primarily attributed to a high level of strong post-holiday e-Book buying, or “loading,” by consumers who received e-Reader devices as gifts. Experts note that the expanded selection of e-Readers introduced for the holidays and the broader availability of titles are factors. Additionally, Trade publishing houses cite e-Books as generating fresh consumer interest in – and new revenue streams for – “backlist” titles, books that have been in print for at least a year. Many publishers report that e-Book readers who enjoy a newly released book will frequently buy an author’s full backlist.

For the year to date (January/February 2011 vs January/February 2010), which encompasses this heavy post-holiday buying period, e-Books grew 169.4% to $164.1M while the combined categories of print books fell 24.8% to $441.7M.

Thus the total revenue for Trade and eBooks for February 2011 according to AAP was $247.1M, with eBooks accounting for 36.54% of that. The total revenue for 2011 to date is $605.8M, with eBooks accounting for 27.09%. There are several undeniable points here - a lot of money is being generated in book sales, the majority of which is still in print books, but the rise in eBook sales is nothing short of meteoric. This obviously raises a lot of issues, such as the much discussed impact on bricks and mortar bookstores, how publishers will adapt to a lower price point model, the increasing dominance of technology companies in the book market and the fundamental change in our reading habits, which in turn affects the physical makeup of our high streets and public spaces, not to mention the very furniture in our houses.

On Monday of this week (April 11th) technology research company Gartner released one of its regular prediction reports. According to them, 17.6 million tablet devices were sold in 2010 (83.9% of those were iPads, incidentally). This year they predict 69.7 million such devices will be sold. In 2012 the figure will rise to 108.2 million and by 2015 it will reach 294.3 million tablets. Gartner believe Apple's dominance will wane by then to 47% of the market as other devices find a foothold (last week Amazon began selling a 'new' cheaper Kindle with onscreen ads). If these predictions prove to be in any way accurate, the eBook sales figures AAP are currently providing will undoubtedly be the tip of a digital iceberg.

An interesting figure quoted in the AAP report is the February 2011 decline in Children's/Young Adult Hardcover and Paperback category by 16.1%. Traditionally quoted as the reason why print books will never die, it seems that even this former safe haven is now under threat. A kindergarten in Auburn, Maine made the news this week by announcing that all 300 students would receive a free iPad2, a move that Superintendent Tom Morrill called, "a revolution in education." The school board voted unanimously to approve the plan, but this is not an isolated incident. Dozens of school districts around the U.S. have taken a similar approach. Will children and young adults take to eBooks? The New York Times says it's a done deal. In this February 4 article, kids are eschewing television to bury their heads in Christmas gift ereaders, to the delight of HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, who report significant spikes in a market that has them salivating.

The digitalisation of books receives a lot of press, understandable given it is a world populated by writers and publishers and it is certainly fascinating (and horrifying for many whose future employment is thus rendered uncertain) to watch a very old industry cope, or not as is often the case, with enormous change. Burying one's head in the sand would seem inadvisable, though what anyone can do to hold back technological progress is debatable, as indeed is the argument over whether they should even try. Bookselling and publishing are certainly not alone in facing stiff challenges to adapt to this new environment. Spare a thought for travel agents put out of business by online flight booking, or shoe retailers outmanoeuvred by online shoe seller Zappos ($1 billion sales per annum, #23 on Fortune's top 100 companies to work for, employees offered $2000 to quit after their 4-week training as a loyalty test, managers contractually required to spend 20% of their time 'goofing off' - Zappos was bought by, guess who, Amazon in 2009). Though its long-term effects on our lifestyles, employment and topography of our cities is as yet unknowable, a digital world is upon us and there can be no going back, whether we like it or not.

Bookstore panel & New mags

2011-04-09T16:02:00.000+10:00

The Wheeler Centre have posted the following video of the Meanland event I participated in a few weeks back, on the future of the bookstore. Other guests are Michael Webster, Jo Case & Corrie Perkins, with new Meanjin editor Sally Heath at the helm. The room was packed to the gills, with lots of people standing down the back and a waiting list to get in, so it's obviously a subject that strikes a chord. It's a long video though, and I don't say an awful lot. What I do say seemed to be unpopular with the crowd, but I find it hard to imagine that bricks and mortar bookstores have got much of a long term future. Plenty to think about in any case, if you can make it through what sometimes feels like a promotional video for bookstores rather than a debate about their survival.

The latest issues of several literary mags have landed on my desk too. Zoetrope Vol.15 No.1 has been designed by film-maker Mark Romanek, who just happens to have a movie out, Never Let Me Go. It's not the best issue, with the photos from Romanek's iphone that are peppered throughout in many ways telling the best story. Brazilian author Frances de Pontes Peebles also turns in a strong tale, 'The Serrambi Case', about two teenage girls whose decomposed bodies are found in a cane field some time after their disappearance. The story is told from the perspective of everyone involved in the case, from the coroner, the old woman selling jewellery on the beach, both sets of parents, some birds flying overhead and even the cane itself. The classic reprint in this issue is Raymond Carver's 'Why Don't You Dance?', which is surprisingly introduced by Will Ferrell, who gamely admits to never having heard of Carver prior to reading the script of Everything Must Go, the film version of 'Why Don't You Dance' that comes out in May. Here's the trailer, which looks a little painful. I don't suppose making a 90 minute film from a 1000 word story can have been all that easy, and perhaps was ill-advised. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

The Paris Review continues its renaissance under Lorin Stein with a beautiful, tactile issue 196 that feels almost hand-made. Only one short story here though, by Joshua Cohen, which did my head in. One highlight is the first part of Roberto Bolano's lost novel The Third Reich, which he wrote in 1989 and which is being serialised in PR over four issues, the first such novel serialisation they've done in 42 years and a must for fans of the Chilean master. I was also stoked to read an interview with one of my favourite writers, Ann Beattie. She has had 48 stories published in The New Yorker, although the first 17 she sent them were rejected. When Gordon Lish was at Esquire he rejected one of her stories with a note that read, "All dressed up with nowhere to go." Gold. Beattie's modesty and humility shine through in this interview. Here's an excerpt:

PR: Do you know how many stories you've written altogether?

AB: Never counted. There are forty-eight in The New Yorker Stories and at least as many elsewhere. A hundred twenty-five maybe. Plus a lot that I ripped up at the last line. Or halfway through. Maybe three for every one I published.

PR: You discard that many?

AB: I have a very short fuse. I always think, This isn't the moment, another story will come along.

PR: Do you ever return to your old work, out of interest?

AB: No. I wouldn't of an evening sit around and read something I've written.

If you're looking to try Beattie out, The New Yorker Stories is definitive reading, though if you want something shorter, last year's novella Walks With Men is pretty great.

Finally, we have Dumbo Feather, the Australian mag which now has a new publisher, new editorial staff, new design and new contributors (disclosure: I am one of them, with a piece on Burmese border guards). Outgoing head honcho and one woman army Kate Bezar is finally one of the interview subjects, which fans of the mag have been requesting for years. Modesty saves the day once more here, and the interview with deputy ed Jessica Friedmann is an honest, moving feast. The launch for this was last night at Craft Victoria and was the most fun I've had at a book launch in a long time, though my recent prediliction for Jonathan Ames's Bored to Death led to white wine drunkenness and an attempted impersonation of the opening credits of cult 80s show Manimal. Much credit must go to designer Stuart Geddes for breaking lots of rules and taking risks with this mag, and to new editor Patrick Pittman, whose introduction to the Richard Skelton interview will have you tearing up. He has a knack for delivering the kind of quietly devastating sentences that are rarely seen in journalism anymore and it's going to be very hard very quickly to imagine anyone else at the helm of this mag. An inheritor to Kate Bezar's throne seemed unlikely, but publisher Berry Liberman has pulled an extraordinary ace out of her sleeve that will ensure fans of Dumbo Feather fall in love with the mag all over again, and recruit a whole new legion of readers.

And with that, I shall leave you, dear readers, with Manimal, as he transforms into a falcon to catch cavewomen and assist unconscious parachuters. French video, for extra giggles.

Book Depository vs Book Stores

2010-12-20T13:40:00.003+11:00

There has been a lot of hand-wringing by book retailers this year in Australia over the apparently disastrous state of their businesses, with fingers being squarely pointed at online retailers such as Amazon and Book Depository, whose prices are savaging profit margins. It's been a hot debate, sometimes an emotional one. I know many people who work in book stores, commercial and independent and the writing community tends to close ranks pretty quickly around them. A defensive position has been established whereby we, as readers, are supposed to feel bad for buying books overseas rather than in our local stores. An article in The Age on December 6th by Tim Barlass tells us "not to fall for the myth that everything is cheaper from an offshore website. Seven out of the 10 books on the Australian bestsellers list are cheaper if bought in an Australian bookshop or from a local online retailer compared with ordering them from an overseas website."

This is easy to verify and all very well if the only books you're interested in are top 10 titles but I would venture to claim that an awful lot of people read more widely than the bestseller list and really, how many times can you buy that Stieg Larsson? Given this has been the first year I've kept track of all the books I've read, I decided to do a little price comparison experiment.

118 books have been added to my shelf this year. As a reviewer I'm often sent free copies, but I estimate that I still purchased around half of those 118, some on Book Depository, some in book stores. I've just spent a few hours comparing prices on all 118 books, checking Book Depository against Borders (who are owned by the Red Group in Australia, also the owners of Angus & Robertson stores) and Readings, a popular independent Melbourne chain comprising 6 stores. 34 of the books were not available on Book Depository, in every case because they were Australian books with no overseas editions. Does this mean Book Depository and Amazon have no effect on sales of Australian books, which must be purchased in Australian book stores? With no Australian version of Book Depository, it sure looks like it to me. As for the remaining 84 books, this is what I would have spent had I purchased them all in the following outlets:

Book Depository: $1487.62
Readings: $2350.71
Borders: $2738.88

Sobering figures. The average spend per book is therefore:

Book Depository: $17.71
Readings: $27.98
Borders: $32.61

By purchasing all my books at Book Depository rather than Borders I am saving $1251.26. I would save $863.09 over Readings and there is still a $388.17 saving by visiting Readings over Borders, so that's a no-brainer. According to these figures if you're buying in a bookstore, you'd be a fool to visit Borders before an independent. Still, the gap between Book Depository and book stores is startling and $1251.26 is an amount I'd much rather have in my account than in the Red Group's, particularly given their considerable profit margin. On April 29th of this year Blair Speedy reported in the Australian that the Red Group had almost doubled it's first half profit to $19.5 million for the six months to February 27th, up from $10.7 million in the previous first half.

The Australian Booksellers Association has been pushing on behalf of retailers for the government to introduce GST on imported goods under $1000, which would effectively raise the price of books on Book Depository by 10%. On 18th December a Productivity Commission inquiry was announced to examine the concern of retailers, so expect a war of words between retailers and consumer groups in the next 6 months. It is worth pointing out that in the case of my 118 books, adding 10% to their purchase price would result in a spend of $1636.38, still $1102.50 less than had I purchased them at Borders, and $714.33 less than Readings.

This may be uncomfortable data for those in book retail but how can anyone reasonably expect consumers to not plump for the cheaper online option? Only a fool would believe the public will rush to spend 2-3 times as much for their product in order to sustain book stores just because they're nice. I used to love going into music stores every weekend to browse the CDs and pick a few out but you know what? That business is dead. It's over. Things change. No amount of vinyl or music lovers urging people not to download could save them. In terms of book store lovers, I suspect they will be vastly outnumbered by consumers who will, quite simply and without any ceremony or nostalgia, make a stark economic decision to save their money. Sad as it may be to acknowledge, maybe book stores, just like record stores, have had their run and the writing is on the wall. Unless they find some way to genuinely compete on price, which may mean having to accept less profit, then this is surely their end of days.

All this without even considering ebooks.

20 for 2010

2010-12-17T15:29:00.002+11:00

With the exception of Laurie Steed's posts at The Gum Wall (part one & part two), short stories seem to be forgotten in all the end of year 'best of' roundups. Which is a bit odd, given their enormous popularity and the proliferation of literary journals worldwide that print them. As the new fiction editor at ABR, a judge of their short fiction contest (read the shortlisted entries online and vote for your favourite to be in the running to win 75 Penguin classics) and subscriber to eight different journals (American, British and Australian) I read over a thousand short stories in 2010. Given I'm currently reading my 99th book of the year (yes, it's Freedom) it's a wonder I've had time to do anything else at all. 2010 was the year I finally managed to dedicate my life entirely to books, though I should point out that at 38, I've spent the past two decades trying to make it happen.

So since I'm such a clever clogs who's read a squillion short stories this year, how about a top 20? I will preface this by stating that several collections are staring at me from my 'pending' shelf and stories from those may well have made this list had I squeezed them in between the Franzens and Cronins of this world, but alas. They are: Granta 113 The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists; The Best American Short Stories 2010; and 20 Under 40, Stories from the New Yorker. The first 17 I will mention are in no particular order. Skip this part of you can only be bothered reading about my top 3.

Maile Meloy 'O Tannenbaum': A subversive Christmas tale from her collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want it, but previously published in Granta.
Katherine Dunn 'Rhonda Discovers Art': From the Paris Review 193, a stunning issue that also contains...
Ann Beattie 'Hoodie in Xanadu': She's been published in the New Yorker 48 times since she was 26. Forty. Eight. Times. People.
Sean Casey 'Conversations with Girls': McSweeney's haven't had a great year fiction-wise. Sean Casey's story from issue 34 stood out a mile for me.
Nick Earls 'The Magnificent Amberson': Hotel stories can be very effective when done well (see also Alan Warner's Booker longlisted novel The Stars in the Bright Sky) and Aussie Earls nails this one in the Griffith Review's fiction edition, issue 30. (I'm in there too, but Earls slaps me down.)
Elizabeth McCracken 'Property': She makes my top 20 two years running, with one of the best stories in Zoetrope last year and this cracker in Granta 111 in 2010. Watch out for her...
Tom McCarthy 'The Spa': I haven't read C and didn't know who he was when I read this in Granta's sex issue, number 110. It's long, dense and involved, unusual for a short story.
Emmanuel Carrere 'This is for you': Also from the sexy Granta, this super clever story is directed at a woman the author knows will read it on a certain train and contains explicit instructions on what he wants her to do. Trust the French.
Josephine Rowe 'Maps': Yes, she runs the storytelling night with me and is my best friend, but I'm also constantly rocked on my heels by how she can say so much in so few words. Magic in a bottle. This from her collection How a Moth Becomes a Boat.
Jonathan Lethem 'The Salon': The scariest story of the year from an affable gent. You'll never want to get your hair cut again. Taken from Zoetrope Volume 14 No.1, still the best fiction quarterly out there for my money.
George Saunders 'Fox 8': The highlight of McSweeney's 33, the Panorama newspaper issue, which otherwise irked me a fair bit, but then I don't like newspapers. They're so foldy. Saunders is a short story King though. Pick any of his books and be schooled.
Charles D'Ambrosio 'The High Divide': A few years old, this one, but his collection The Dead Fish Museum only got a local release this year through Text. Every one a winner in that great book.
Anna Krien 'Still Here': Showing unbelievable fiction chops, Krien destroys the competition by turning in the best story in Best Australian Stories 2010, a tale of floods and misdeeds originally printed in Griffith Review 28. She's also in Best Australian Poems 2010 and rocked the non-fiction boat with Into the Woods. A legend in the making.
A.G. McNeil 'Reckless, Susceptible': New Australian Stories 2 showcases some fantastic lesser-known talents, notably Mr. McNeil, who raises the bar here to a level sustained by...
Cate Kennedy 'Static': ...from the same collection, showing that to beat the best, you have to bring it...
Maria Takolander 'A Roankin Philosophy of Poetry': ...like Takolander does, pipping Kennedy to the post to take out the ABR short story prize. I was a judge for this, so I'm biased, but it's still one of my favourite stories of the year, because it's FUNNY and doesn't WALLOW IN MISERY like soooo many short stories seem to.
Laura van den Berg 'Where we must be': Her collection What the world will look like when all the water leaves us was nominated for the Frank O'Connor this year, beaten out by Ron Rash. Both of those collections come out in Australia in 2011 but I got an early look at van den Berg and loved this story about a bigfoot impersonator. How could you not?

Which brings us to the top 3. Drum roll maestro, please...

3. Anthony Doerr 'The River Nemunas': Why he's not better known is a mystery to me. The Shell Collector was an amazing collection back in 2002 and this year's Memory Wall tends to leave one speechless. This tale of an orphaned American girl and her poodle moving to Lithuania and trying to catch a legendary fish with her grandfather was my favourite, but only because the title story was on my list last year.
2. T.C. Boyle 'The Wreck of the Beverly B': The other standout from McSweeney's 34, prolific short story writer Boyle pulls a Jack London with this tale of a beleaguered woman who is the sole survivor of a boat accident. Unreal. Boyle captures the lives of others like no one else.
1. Tea Obreht 'The Space Elephant': There should be an acute accent over the 'e' in 'Tea', the youngest writer on the New Yorker 20 under 40 list, who makes my list two years running. In 2009 she had the best story in The Atlantic fiction issue and this year has the best in Zoetrope (Volume 14 No.3). An imaginary (or not?) creature helps a man paint surreal murals all over a coastal town. Get it. Read it. Obreht is a once-in-a-generation talent, I suspect. Her novel The Tiger's Wife comes out next year and early word is that it's a meteor that will knock the Earth off its axis.

The Kraken Wakes

2010-09-29T09:28:00.000+10:00

During a recent interview conducted for The Big Issue with China Miéville about his new book, Kraken, we got to talking about Dr Steve O’Shea, Director of the Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute at the Auckland University of Technology. O’Shea is a marine biologist and environmentalist best known for his research on the giant squid, or Architeuthis Dux, which is the lynchpin of Miéville’s latest novel. In Kraken, a giant squid that has been preserved in London’s Natural History Museum is stolen, resulting in a sometimes terrifying, often hilarious madcap pursuit that drags every weird, magical and criminal character in London into an ever-spiralling net of confusion. It’s a rollicking read and totally different from his previous Hugo-winning The City & The City (he had just won the award the night before the interview, jointly with Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl).

As soon as I mentioned O’Shea’s research into the colossal squid, a beast that dwarfs the giant squid, Miéville rattled off its Latin name without a moment’s hesitation - Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. Try saying that with a mouthful of calamari. This is where O’Shea and Miéville have a point of difference. According to O’Shea the giant squid is a passive predator, outclassed by the ferocity of its colossal relative. He is also rather dismissive of the Humboldt squid, which Miéville tells me hunt in vicious packs. One will lure the prey by causing its body to flash different colours then once it has said fishy or curious bather in its suckers, the others swarm in to feed. Nicknamed ‘El Diablo Rojo’, these raptors of the sea are evidently not to be trifled with.

In 2003 Brent Hoff interviewed O’Shea and his research associate Kat Bolstad for McSweeney’s issue 11. In his preface to the interview Hoff provided an excellent giant squid timeline to illustrate the history of squid lore. The idea of a sea monster with multiple arms apparently dates from 1755, when Norwegian bishop Erik Pontoppidan documented sightings of a ‘kraken’ that had attacked fishermen. Such a beast was indelibly imprinted on the popular consciousness 115 years later by Jules Verne, when a 25 foot squid attacked the Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Since then, everyone has been looking for these fabled creatures of the deep.

For a long time few believed life could exist in the depths of the ocean, given the enormous pressures, absence of light and scarcity of food sources. In 1960, US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss scientist Jacques Piccard descended 38,500 feet in a bathysphere to the murky depths of the Marianas Trench, supposedly the deepest spot on Earth. Just before they hit bottom a large unidentifiable creature passed by the window, lending credence to the existence of leviathans.

In the post-Jaws frenzy, even Arthur C. Clarke briefly got in on the act. Riding on the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey the producers of Jaws asked him to pen a screenplay for the sequel but instead of another Amity Island teenage munch fest, Clarke wrote an outline for a giant squid film entitled Architeuthis. Sadly this never saw the light of day. Now of course the existence of Architeuthis Dux and Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni are confirmed, though sightings of live specimens are extremely rare and often spurious.

No one had seen a colossal squid up close until 2003, when a New Zealand fishing trawler captured one they had witnessed attacking a six-foot long Patagonian tooth-fish. In addition to the usual suckers, along this creature’s tentacles were two rows of two-inch long hooks, which rotated through 360 degrees, enabling the squid to tear its prey asunder. O’Shea and Bolstad were the first scientists to examine the creature, and dubbed it the Colossal Squid.

The actual size of giant and colossal squid is often misreported and exaggerated, but it is generally agreed that female Architeuthis can reach up to 13 metres in length, when measured from the caudal fin to the tip of the longest tentacles. Males are always several metres shorter. At 14 metres the Colossal Squid is the largest known invertebrate in the world and possesses the biggest eyes in the animal kingdom.

The giant squid in Miéville’s book, dubbed ‘Archie’, is real. Measuring 8.62 metres in length, he was caught off the coast of the Falkland Islands in 2004 and sent to the Natural History Museum in London for preservation, finally going on display in 2006. Although Miéville never saw it, another giant squid was displayed in Melbourne Aquarium in 2006, preserved in a block of ice. Intact specimens such as these are extremely rare, with most decomposed giant squid carcasses washed up on beaches or found in the bellies of whales.

Live footage of the giant squid in its natural habitat has only been captured recently. In 2004 teams from the National Science Museum of Japan and the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association took startling photographs of an 8 metre giant squid aggressively attacking their lure, leaving behind a five and a half metre tentacle. This was the first time a giant squid had been seen hunting in the wild. Video of a much smaller 3.5 metre squid was recorded in late 2006 in the same location.

Despite the lack of evidence, O’Shea is convinced the colossal squid could be a much more dangerous predator than its giant relative. “That’s our theory, and it is common sense, having looked at the arsenal of hooks and general body construction. This is one animal that does not sit down over a cuppa plankton exchanging idle chitchat.”

Miéville remains unconvinced. “There is this whole kind of trash talk going on between partisans of the colossal versus the giant squid, with the giant squid being appallingly traduced. I’d like to meet Steve O’Shea at some point. I actually reference him in Kraken in a slightly cheesy dissing way. I should send him a copy.”

‘Before my eyes was a horrible monster, worthy to figure in the legends of the marvelous. It was an immense cuttle-fish, being eight yards long. It swam crossways in the direction of the Nautilus with great speed, watching us with its enormous staring green eyes. Its eight arms, or rather feet, fixed to its head, that have given the name of cephalopod to these animals, were twice as long as its body, and were twisted like the Furies’ hair. One could see the 250 air holes on the inner side of the tentacles. The monster’s mouth, a horned beak like a parrot’s, opened and shut vertically. Its tongue, a horned substance, furnished with several rows of pointed teeth, came out quivering from this veritable pair of shears.’

Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Torpedo Greatest Hits

2010-08-11T12:15:00.001+10:00

I am delighted to announce that Torpedo Greatest Hits is finally out! Yes folks, this compendium of tales includes the best of issues 1-7, and has a few extras thrown in for good measure. Thanks to the lovely folks at Hunter Publishing, you can buy TGH at bookstores around Australia, and here on the SPUNC webstore.

TGH features fiction and comics from Australians like Steven Amsterdam, Laurie Clancy, Emilie Collyer, Neil Boyack, Obelia Modjeska, Jon Bauer, Ruby Murray, Josephine Rowe, Oslo Davis, Mandy Ord, Krissy Kneen, Jessica Friedmann & Angela Meyer. ALSO overseas talents such as Toby Litt, Clancy Martin, Jim Shepard, Shawn Mitchell, Aaron Gwyn, Brian Evenson, Christian TeBordo, Ryan Crawford, Eric Hanson, Paul O'Connell, J.David Stevens & Richard Brautigan.

It's the definitive collection of stories from Torpedo, and marks a milestone since this will be the last hurrah for the journal. No further issues of Torpedo will be produced, we're calling it a day and going out with a bang. It's been great while it lasted, but don't take my word for it, get yourself a copy of Torpedo Greatest Hits and witness what Australia's best little lit journal has been up to the past 3 years. Thanks for all your support and keep on truckin'!

Chris & Eirian.

Heroic Hounds at Wheeler Centre

2010-06-03T11:18:00.002+10:00

Well here it is folks, for those of you who couldn't make it to my lunchtime soapbox event at the Wheeler Centre last week, they have posted the video of my speech on their site. Please excuse the weird twitching thing I seem to do with my mouth, which I wasn't aware of until now but shall be visiting the doctor about very soon.

For those who don't know, this is me chronicling the history of heroic hounds in literature and movies, discussing all the great brave dogs like Lassie, Benji, the Littlest Hobo, Krypto, dogs in Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe, Inspector Rex and even bomb-sniffing real life Aussie hero Sabi, held prisoner by the Taliban for 18 months.

If you haven't been down to the Wheeler Centre, you really should check out their program and book yourself in for a session. They're pretty much always free and they do lunchtime and early evening sessions so there's plenty to do on your lunchbreak or after work. 'Tis a fine institution, populated by sterling types like George Dunford, whom I must thank for this video. Thanks also to those who came along and forced a laugh, I'm glad you were there!

31 Books

2010-04-27T09:52:00.001+10:00

It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been reading more than usual this year, but it wasn’t until I sat down and made a list of all the titles I’ve read so far in 2010 that I realized just how bookish I’ve been. As a keen reader of Estelle Tang’s 3000 Books, in which she tries to read 50 books a year, and Literary Minded, in which Angela often becomes forlorn when staring at her ‘Tower of Hope’, I've always been impressed by how much they manage to plough through. To my amazement though, I have somehow managed to read 31 books in only 4 months.

Whilst it’s true that I have been doing little else other than reviewing and working on my novel this year, 31 books still seems excessive. Here is the tedious list of titles, but scan down to the end for some observations.

Carter Beats the Devil Glen David Gold

The Year of the Flood Margaret Atwood
Look Who’s Morphing Tom Cho

I play the drums in a band called okay Toby Litt

Parrot and Olivier in America Peter Carey

Granta Issue 108 Various

Zoetrope Vol. 14 No. 1 Various

McSweeney’s Issue 33 Various

The Original of Laura Vladimir Nabokov

These Demented Lands Alan Warner

Wyatt Garry Disher

The Unnamed Joshua Ferris

The Book of Other People Various, ed. Zadie Smith

Gentlemen of the Road Michael Chabon

Footnotes in Gaza Joe Sacco

Persepolis Marjane Satrapi

Paris Review Issue 191 Various

Paris Review Interviews Vol. 4 Various

Our Story Begins Tobias Wolff

Kill Your Darlings Issue 1 Various

Chronic City Jonathan Lethem

The Dead Fish Museum Charles D’Ambrosio

In Pharaoh’s Army Tobias Wolff

Known Unknowns Emmett Stinson

The Norseman’s Song Joel Deane

Rocks in the Belly Jon Bauer

Neon Pilgrim Lisa Dempster

The Corrections Jonathan Franzen

Shoplifting from American Apparel Tao Lin

Old School Tobias Wolff

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It Maile Meloy

27 male authors, 4 female authors

8 Australian titles, 23 Non-Australian

5 literary journals, 5 short story collections, 5 non-fiction titles, 2 graphic novels

It's fair to say that this is a pretty accurate representation of my reading habits, i.e. predominantly male non-Australian literary fiction. For the record, I only enjoyed two thirds of these. Will I break the century mark in one year?

How many books have you read so far this year?

Torpedo 7

2010-03-22T09:40:00.001+11:00

The sexiest issue ever of Torpedo is out now! Click here to be whisked away to the Amazon store to buy your Kindle ebook. If you don't own a Kindle, never fear. Instructions are below on how to buy and read Torpedo on your iphone, ipod touch, Blackberry, PC and Mac.

This issue features brand new stories from the following talented people:

Steven Amsterdam winds up in a threesome some time in the future.
Caren Beilin has secret sex in a garage whilst baby deer look on.
Matthew Salesses exits a 60s orgy with a redhead in tow.
Melanie Westerberg slips on her mermaid outfit.
Toby Litt is embroiled in an affair at a writing retreat.
Ruby J. Murray has an unhealthy obsession with a painted lady.
Ryan Crawford has Korean schoolgirls running their hands through his hair.
Krissy Kneen gives a new meaning to 'man's best friend'.
Mark Seymour ends up in a Catholic girl's school.
Clancy Martin pisses all over the bathroom, then tells us why in an interview.

Here's the thing - you can traipse down to the shops and spend up big on a print journal that's poorly designed and doesn't feature stories anywhere near as good as these, or you could order one online and pay expensive postage rates then wait a month for it to arrive. Then, it sits on your shelf gathering dust whilst doing its bit to destroy the environment.

OR

You can download this sexy thang right now to your Kindle, iphone, Blackberry, PC or Mac for $4.99 if you live in America, or $6.99 if you live in the rest of the world. Ladies and gentlemen, the future of short form fiction is in your hands...

HOW TO GET YOUR MITTS ON IT WITHOUT A KINDLE

iphone & ipod touch: download Kindle application from app store (free) and browse for Torpedo online.

Blackberry: arrange for email to be sent to your phone with a free Kindle app download.

PC: Download free Kindle app here to convert your computer to a Kindle.

Mac: Download and install free Kindle app.

St Kilda Storytelling

2010-03-17T10:43:00.000+11:00

These two charmers are Michaela McGuire and Ronnie Scott. They are the first guests to appear at the storytelling night Josephine Rowe and I are launching at the Dog’s Bar in St Kilda. If you would like to see them rant and/or rave then come along tomorrow night (Thursday 18th) to the Dog’s Bar. There’s only room for 40-50 people and the doors are locked at 8pm sharp, so don’t be late. It’s an intimate little venue so be prepared to witness much draping of long legs over the big comfy chair we have. $10 entry includes a glass of fancy wine.

Storytelling will be on every Thursday at 8pm, and upcoming guests include Lisa Dempster, Kalinda Ashton, Rhys Tate, Paddy O’Reilly, Lorelei Vashti, Tony Birch, Angela Meyer, George Dunford, Karl Smith, Sophie Cunningham, Paul Mitchell, Chloe Jackson-Willmott, Sean M Whelan, Anna Krien and loads more – just about everyone you can think of really.

We also have a short but super open mic section, where 3 daring people can each tell us a five-minute tale. If you want to take the plunge, become a fan of the Facebook page and send us a message. If you’re awesome and we don’t have to wrestle the mic from you because you’ve decided to tell your life story, we’ll book you in as a fully-fledged feature later down the track and you’ll have 20-30 minutes to regale us with your tale of laughter or woe.

Interview with Tom Cho

2010-03-09T11:12:00.001+11:00

Tom Cho and I sought respite from the 35 degree Friday afternoon heat in the Black Cat on Brunswick Street, where I inhaled a pint of cider whilst he wisely sipped a lemonade. In addition to the dog-eared copy of Look Who’s Morphing, he also carried a hefty tome entitled The Philosophy of Religion, which he was reading as research for his next novel. Do not be alarmed if you notice the initials ET appearing at irregular points in the conversation. This does not represent a stunted, wrinkled creature from another planet but blogger Estelle Tang, who whilst a little on the short side will surely not be described as ‘wrinkled’ for at least another forty years. Estelle threatened to take photographs but never did, her main contributions coming in the form of occasional witty comments and a penchant for leaning in unnervingly close to Mr Cho whilst emitting a low guttural drone, indicating an intense fascination in the conversation, or perhaps the need to invest in a hearing aid.

CF: What’s the worst interview you’ve ever had, job or otherwise?

TC: I had a job interview once that seemed to be going okay, then out of nowhere the guy said he thought Australia should restrict Asian immigration. I thought, ‘is this a test?’ If I don’t say anything will I be seen as compliant, or if I speak up will I be seen as forthright? So I did and a discussion started that lasted an hour and a half, then I got a parking ticket because I didn’t expect the interview to go on that long and then I didn’t get the job anyway.

CF: So it wasn’t a test. He was genuine.

TC: Yeah, he was a genuine bastard.

ET: Those kinds of moments make me think, ‘what would happen now in the Hollywood movie version’? I would say, ‘you’re a racist’ and then he would say, ‘That’s correct – congratulations, you’re the CEO!’

TC: I’ve never seen that Hollywood movie.

ET: Haven’t you? It’s called Asian CEO. My mum showed it to me every year since I was five.

CF: So, first question, of sorts. Have you ever read JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition?

TC: No.

CF: Right. Well that’s it then, interview over. That was the Asian CEO question. You got it wrong.

TC: I read very specifically, according to the artistic projects I’m working on. I have a slight fear of involuntary plagiarism so sometimes I won’t seek out authors that people recommend to me as being similar to what I’m doing.

CF: And yet a lot of writers recommend reading every day.

TC: I’m not saying my fear is rational. I think that it would be very difficult for a writer to read every day though, or to write every day despite what a lot of manuals would tell you. Every writer’s practice is different.

CF: So do you tread a line between researching and avoiding books that might be overly influential on your work?

TC: It’s been strange for me. I got a great email from a reader the other day who said that he really enjoyed Look Who’s Morphing and asked could I recommend other books that might be similar, but I couldn’t think of any. So I threw it open to Twitter, but everyone seems to be struggling to come up with titles.

CF: That’s why I mentioned the Ballard book. It’s the only title I could think of that was remotely similar, just because it’s a series of linked stories that feature pop culture figures of the day – JFK, Marilyn Monroe and so on. That was a controversial book, lots of graphic sex and an initial ban.

TC: Unfortunately I didn’t get banned.

CF: Would you like to have been?

TC: No, not really. The book is so multi-faceted that it’s difficult to categorise. I mean, similar books in terms of what? The use of linked short fiction? The incorporation of popular culture? Bending of genres? The use of fantasy?

CF: But we often take great satisfaction in classifying what we read - science fiction, horror, or crime. Do you think because Look Who’s Morphing defies that standard classification that it makes it more difficult for readers to know what they’re getting into?

TC: I wonder what it says on Amazon under the section, ‘people who liked this book also liked…’

ET: The Joy of Sex.

TC: That would be fun. But actually I wonder if people do know what they’re in for when they pick up the book. I didn’t write the blurb for the back, although I had a chance to revise it. I thought the editor who wrote it did a pretty good job though. It’s been interesting seeing reviewers and others struggle to encapsulate the book in a couple of sentences.

CF: In terms of the commercial life of the book, isn’t it quite important for bookstores and other outlets selling it to people who have no idea who you are to be able to sum it up briefly?

TC: I’m just lucky I have a publisher I didn’t have to ‘pitch’ to. Even the manner in which I got an agent meant I didn’t have to write a query letter or do a big pitch. I actually tried to find an agent a while ago and a lot of people turned me down. I would spend about two minutes on the phone with each person, having cold called them. I finally called the woman who is now my agent and when she asked me to tell her about the book, I was caught out a little as I didn’t have a spiel ready. I thought I would get the bad news out of the way first, since I knew most publishers don’t see short story collections as commercially feasible. When I told her it was a collection of short stories I heard this intake of breath. I remember it quite clearly as it was one of those moments when all ideas of professionalism or coolness disappeared as I said, ‘Wait!’ Then I reasoned that since it was being published there had to be something special about it but I still expected a polite rejection. It was only a few weeks away from publication at that point so I offered to send her a copy. She agreed, liked it, and that was that. It wasn’t a very professional pitch, if you could call it one at all.

CF: It’s interesting that getting an agent was harder than finding a publisher – surely that’s the wrong way round?

TC: I tried finding an agent before I had a publishing contract and had no success, but once I got the contract I thought it would be a matter of course but again I had little success. That morning in particular the general response seemed to be that they preferred working with manuscripts at an earlier stage, then concentrating on selling rights in Australia and overseas. That seemed tremendously unfair to me because when I approached them at an earlier stage no one was interested.

CF: They must be kicking themselves now. Do you think we’re moving towards short form content a lot more as readers?

TC: Firstly, the short attention span argument gets brought up a lot. It doesn’t necessarily follow that if someone likes reading short content they must have a short attention span. In discussions about whether or not we’re seeing a revival of the short story, people often bring up specific writers – Nam Le and Steven Amsterdam for example. But the novel is still the dominant format for prose fiction. Even with handheld devices, you can still read whole books, you can download the complete works of Shakespeare onto your phone, so I don’t know if that is making a difference either. I don’t think short stories are experiencing a revival. If they weren’t taught in creative writing classes and used in anthologies…

CF: You think they’d die out?

TC: No, but then I don’t really believe there is such a thing as a short story. That’s another matter, but I wonder if the idea of their revival is being overstated. Maybe if you were interviewing Nam Le he’d say something completely different. He’d be really eloquent about it too.

ET: Yeah, you’d wake up in a daze after he finishes speaking.

CF: I’m curious to know how you wrote Look Who’s Morphing. Did you write it in sequence? Did you have a huge plan, with index cards spread out across the floor and then work out how it linked together?

TC: No to the latter because that would indicate I had some level of foresight and organization. The creative process for me is often one of trial and error and experimentation, of testing out hypotheses before becoming more rigorous. There was necessarily for me a degree of improvisation and sometimes desperation. It started off being a book that was going to be about Asian popular culture, so it changed quite a bit after that. Many times when I was working on it I found it difficult to say what it was I was writing. We have this idea about the process of writing that there’s a research phase in which you acquire knowledge about a subject and then you use your talents to write about what you’ve learned, but that’s a very specific model. Look Who’s Morphing changed from being a book about Asian pop culture to a book about Asian Australian identity to a book about my identity to a book about identity and popular culture. It was that point, about four years in, when I decided to incorporate it into a PhD. So if I had an index card system, I would have needed a big lounge room floor.

CF: Did you enjoy writing it?

TC: I did. Writing can be great when it’s great, but torturous when it’s torturous. Throughout it all I felt I was working on an incredible and fun project. I’m glad if the sense of enjoyment comes through because you have a narrator who, amongst other things, becomes a Muppet and destroys the United Nations building.

CF: Was it hard to maintain the tone over such a long writing period?

TC: It was a great challenge. I’d written a couple of manuscripts before and some excerpts from those appeared in literary journals, but it was early in my career when Andrea Goldsmith did me a favour and looked at one of my manuscripts. She was great because she said so many wonderful things about my writing, which, given I was so early in my career I really appreciated the encouragement. But then she suggested that it was perhaps just a practice manuscript, which all writers have. She was right. I had another few after that but with this one, I knew it was no longer a practice manuscript and the fact that it was difficult to describe indicated that it was unique and original. That generated a lot of excitement, which lasted me through a long nine year writing process and incorporating it into a PhD, things that might be an enthusiasm killer for most people. I also had a three year break in which I wrote nothing.

CF: Were you worried about the manuscript during that time?

TC: A little bit. I always have that paradox where I have a lot of self-belief tinged with the panic that a project might not fly at all. But I always believe that nothing is wasted and that even if it hadn’t come to fruition, it would still have been worthwhile. I was very committed to the project emotionally, but three years of not writing was slightly scary.

CF: Do you feel an expectation on you now to produce a second novel?

TC: I’m starting to be asked the ‘what’s next’ question. When I was writing the book I never really classified myself solely as a writer though. I often described myself as an artist and I had ideas about moving into other areas of the arts after the book was complete. I used to comfort myself with the fact I could relieve the pressure of a follow-up book by maybe becoming a hip-hop performer, but as it turns out I am working on a second book now. All my dreams of abandoning boring literature and getting into the hip-hop project went down the tubes.

CF: You would have had the same problem there eventually too, with the difficult second album syndrome.

TC: I need to increase the number of art forms I’m good at so I never have to face it. Though my standard line now is that it took me nine years to write this book, so…

CF: Give me a break.

TC: Yeah, I’ll see you in another nine years.

CF: Can you speak a little about the new book?

TC: Well, it’s going to be about the fundamental philosophical questions raised by religion. Which sounds incredibly dry, but it’s going to be a crazy, wonderful project. I told Arts Victoria that I would be working on a book about, amongst other things, the meaning of life. It’s amazing that they would be willing to fund such an ambitious project.

CF: How do you swing these applications Tom? If anyone else approached Arts Victoria saying they wanted to write about the meaning of life, they would be like, ‘next!’

TC: Well I put it in context. It’s going to be quite fun and also incredibly challenging. In many ways it’s an apt project to do after Look Who’s Morphing, which was also ambitious.

CF: I guess it’s a natural progression, given the massive theme of identity in the first book.

TC: I did see it like that, as a way of raising the bar a little higher. The story ‘Cock Rock’ contains a creation myth and the power of that really struck me. I didn’t want my next book to be a straightforward story about someone going to the shops and then something happens to them. If Look Who’s Morphing was about who we are, the new book will be about why we are.

CF: How do you work writing into your life? What’s your routine?

TC: A lot of writers work every day or write to a 9-5 schedule, but I don’t. If I did I don’t think I would produce very good material. Right now I don’t have any settled writing place. I move a lot between a desk at home, libraries, cafés and my bed. I usually need quite a lot of time to reflect upon what I’m writing, so I’ll do a series of dot points first then let that distil for a while before working the essence of those points into a story. That dot point structure allows me a lot of room to manoeuvre because it breaks the story into fragments, into which further fragments can be introduced.

CF: Do you write in short bursts?

TC: No, long sessions, up to eight or ten hours at a time.

CF: Do you isolate yourself from distractions, like the net?

TC: I actually think that sometimes I wouldn’t have written Look Who’s Morphing if it hadn’t been for the Internet. I know it’s fashionable to bash Wikipedia, but it was a great research tool for me!

CF: Do you like having the net open and to hand whilst you’re writing?

TC: For sure. When I was writing ‘Cock Rock’ I was looking at pictures of parks in Japan. When I was writing ‘I, Robot’ I had a window open with the United Nations website displayed where I was trying to find out information about their headquarters.

CF: So you could destroy it.

TC: Exactly.

CF: Will the Kindle or Apple Tablet affect your practice as a writer?

TC: Why would it affect my practice? I could see how it would affect the dissemination of my work, but not my practice.

CF: I’m just thinking that a book like Look Who’s Morphing would be well suited to being read on a wireless tablet device that enables the reader to link from cultural references in your text to video windows that open alongside.

TC: That would be tremendously exciting. I would love that. I’d also like the idea of people purchasing standalone chapters as samples. I’m not sure it would have much influence on my practice in terms of composition though, but then when I was writing the book I never imagined people would read it in a linear fashion. As I went on, the stories became longer so you can roughly tell which ones I wrote first as they’re shorter. This raised questions for me about the story as a form. ‘Cock Rock’ is more of a novella. That’s why I said earlier that I’m not sure I believe in the idea of a ‘short’ story. The concept seems quite arbitrary. There’s no hard and fast limits to what a story is. I think in the end I started discarding the word ‘short’ and just worked on stories.

CF: How are you coping with reviews?

TC: I had a negative review quite early on in the Sydney Morning Herald, which as a first-time author was difficult but I found out that negative reviews are not necessarily a bad thing for a book. People don’t read negative reviews and automatically not buy the book, which sounds like a simple lesson to learn but in the heat of the moment when someone waves you off after nine years of work, it’s hard not to be dismayed. The morning that review came out I was appearing on a panel at the Sydney Writer’s Festival that day and a few other writers spoke to me about it and gave me some advice, that I shouldn’t overrate the importance of getting unanimous approval and that there was something to be said for books that had mixed reviews. I now agree with that. The book has polarised reviewers and that makes it more interesting.

CF: Reviews are very transitory anyway. Through word of mouth a book like this will have a life far beyond some review that appeared in a newspaper one morning in October.

TC: I’m sure no one remembers the reviews as much as the writer.

Glen David Gold's Carter Beats the Devil

2010-03-05T09:48:00.000+11:00

Glen David Gold’s Chaplin novel Sunnyside finally came out last year to some acclaim, but then seemed to mysteriously disappear and was disappointingly absent from all the end of year ‘best of’ lists. It had been an eight-year wait for his follow up to 2001’s Carter Beats the Devil, a sensation in its day and a title that has endured in the popular consciousness, perhaps because of the oft-rumoured movie or TV versions that have not eventuated. Its classic status has now been pretty much confirmed and it doesn’t take much to see why. Despite the 564-page count, Carter Beats the Devil is a breath of fresh air to read, somehow retaining a breezy, relaxed tone despite being dense and complicated. It’s also tremendously exciting, a feat of magic the erudite and charming Gold manages to sustain in performing over so many pages.

Charles Carter was a real-life magician who was at the height of his powers in the early part of the Twentieth Century. How much of Gold’s novel is factual I have no idea, but if even a fraction of it is, Carter’s extraordinary life certainly deserves immortalisation. Houdini is the name most associated with magic from that period but it is curious to think that international stars like Carter or actress Sarah Bernhardt, who were once widely known across the globe, are now strangely forgotten. Perhaps the same fate will befall David Blaine and Julia Roberts eighty years from now. We can only hope.

Covering a period of Carter’s life between 1888 & 1923, the novel begins at the end, with the master magician suspected of being complicit in the death of President Harding, whom he uses in the final thrilling act of his show. Despite being apparently devoured by a lion, to the great alarum of the Secret Service, Harding is in fact unharmed and able to walk grinning from the theatre. He dies later that night and suspicion falls on Carter. What grave matter had they discussed during their moments alone? What secret had the President made Carter privy to? During the investigation that follows Carter uses his skills to amusingly misdirect awkward Secret Service agent Griffin and so a riddle is posed that lies unanswered until we have discovered what forces brought Charles Carter to this strange point in his life.

Gold then jumps back to Carter’s youth and relaxes into an expertly woven tale detailing Carter’s initiation into the world of magic, his gradual rise to fame and determination to live up to the name Houdini finally gives him – Carter the Great. Personal tragedy, high romance, safe cracking, elephants and pirates all make an appearance in Gold’s epic narrative that never strays from feeling personal. Carter is a powerhouse of a central character – witty, sad, hopeless with money and an awesome stage performer. Gold’s glee in committing him to the page is constantly evident, and his enthusiasm for the subject matter is infectious. There’s even a guest appearance near the end by his and partner Alice Sebold’s dogs.

Carter Beats the Devil is available in a lot of those remainder bookstores now, at a bargain basement price. If you see it around, grab it immediately. It’s high entertainment indeed, no surprise perhaps to anyone who has met the author. He drinks vodka martinis and is about as affable a gent as it’s possible to be, a veritable James Bond of the literary scene. Here’s hoping he doesn’t make us wait another eight years for the next book and that we are spared a poor movie version of this one.

The Book of Other People

2010-02-25T11:20:00.000+11:00

It’s tricky levelling criticism at a project that devotes all its profits to charity, in this case Dave Egger’s 826NY centre for child literacy. But content-wise, The Book of Other People is one of the most disappointing compendiums of recent years. Maybe that’s because it promises so much, or the brief given to writers is so vague, or Zadie Smith’s editorship comes across as non-interventionist, backing down when heavyweight writers ignore what they’ve been commissioned to do. Her short introduction begins with a weak attempt to explain where it all has gone wrong then moves quickly on to discuss other matters, dwelling strangely on the various fonts stories were submitted to her in, that she bemoans the loss of in the book being presented to us. It’s an annoying ‘yah-boo’ moment, which she terminates cruelly with the statement, ‘Anyway: I hope what remains will satisfy.’ Not really, Zadie. It’s as if the best thing about many of the stories was the font they were written in, or at least the aspect of them she found most fascinating, and does not bode well for the pages that follow.

The brief was apparently simple – make somebody up. The hope was to create ‘a lively demonstration of the fact that there are as many ways to create character as there are writers’. It’s a little weak-kneed and despite the contributor list reading as a veritable who’s who of contemporary fiction, hardly anyone really runs with it. The preference instead seems to be for unsatisfying, often tentative attempts to describe a person instead of turning in a story that’s actually about someone, that features a character to whom something happens. Without context, unfortunately a lot of the attempts here seem ghost-like and perhaps that indicates how the project was hamstrung from the beginning by an uninspired brief that left the writers little room to manoeuvre.

The most successful stories are in fact those that defy the cloying theme. It was not until the 15^th story in (out of 23 total) that I finally breathed a sigh of relief. In that tale, ‘Puppy’, George Saunders ignores the simplistic ‘make someone up’ mantra and produces a rounded, complete story of a mother taking her kids to buy a dog from a white trash family who keep their boy chained to a tree in the back yard. With a perspective that shifts between the two mothers, this is a blatant disregard for the rules but thank God someone was brave enough to do it, although the mighty Aleksandar Hemon and Toby Litt had already rolled their eyes by turning in strange stories about, respectively, Jesus carrying his cross to Gethsemane and a large, turd-obsessed monster.

The obligatory comic strips are ably fleshed out by Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware, creating two of the best characters in the collection by virtue of having to really think about what they were doing. This speaks volumes about the importance of characterisation in graphic novels and the oft-underestimated skill of those who write and draw them. Matters do perk up towards the end though, with the double whammy of Vendela Vida and Miranda July, who show the rest how it should be done. Eggers himself puts in a nice turn, with the story of a sad giant. It is however Jonathan Lethem who triumphs in the end with ‘Perkus Tooth’, which blows everything else out of the water in terms of rich characterisation. But then this collection was released in early 2007 and as it turns out his story of an actor becoming friends with a very eccentric ex-critic was an early excerpt from his since-released novel, Chronic City.

Lethem can be quickly forgiven for trying out what would be subsequently published material, since it’s so damned rich and it’s all in a good cause, but there are a number of other stories included here that had already appeared elsewhere (or were going to appear that year), most notably in the holy grail of short fiction, the New Yorker. It’s an odd list too. I was not surprised to see Saunders and July’s stories appearing in those hallowed pages, but average efforts from Colm Tóibín, Hari Kunzru and editor Smith tell a sad story of a newspaper that has a worrying tendency to publish the same writers all the time, perhaps irrespective of the individual story’s merit.

The Book of Other People may have a superb Charles Burns cover and an impressive list of contributors, but there’s something utterly chaotic going on here and I think it’s the absence of strong editorship. Smith belies her lack of experience in such matters in her introduction – ‘As Editor, I have tried to retain the individuality of each piece by leaving them, by and large, little changed.’ Ah. I know everyone worked for free (she goes to great pains to point it out) but if the project is meant to help fund literacy programs for underprivileged children isn’t there a strong argument for making the collection as amazing as possible in order to sell some copies and get some money in the kitty? Instead we have a stunning list of writers dying for a better brief, a better editor and a book that is sadly found all too often on the sale table in bookstores. I bought it for $8, one quarter of its cover price. I can’t see much of that going to 826NY. Better to hit their website and donate directly.

Toby Litt's i play the drums in a band called okay

2010-02-23T10:19:00.000+11:00

When Peter Hook from New Order blurbs your novel about the music industry with what is essentially an ‘eep!’, you know you’ve struck gold. I play the drums in a band called okay was the novel Toby Litt wrote prior to last year’s Journey into Space, the giveaway being the first letter of the title. Litt orders his books alphabetically, which makes the upcoming King Death his eleventh, and one of the titles I’m really looking forward to in 2010. He’s an author I came to late, somewhat suspicious of anyone who can turn out a clever-sounding novel with a Penguin logo on the cover pretty much every year. But now I’m kicking myself for not diving in sooner and just to be ornery, have been reading his body of work in backwards order.

Although I haven’t read anything by him in years, I used to be a big fan of Iain Banks, in particular his non-SF work (although the Culture novels are hugely satisfying in their own way). One of my favourites was Espedair Street, chronicling the rise and fall of a rock band as seen through the eyes of bassist Danny Weir (nicknamed WeirD). That’s the only book I can think of that in any way resembles I play the drums… which follows the trials and tribulations of Canadian band okay, as narrated by drummer Clap (real name Brian). The other band members are Mono, Crab and Syph, a fair indication of their sexual proclivities.

Litt is one of the modern masters of short-form writing, and an ardent supporter of the short story. This novel is split into 26 short, very readable chapters, eight of which have appeared in a bewildering array of journals and newspapers. This episodic technique works extremely well for the subject matter, with the reader able to easily drop in and out of the band’s progress over the years. The tough nut to crack here is consistency, but Litt’s smart enough to know that and anchors the narrative with the solid, weary voice of Clap, who like all drummers, is under appreciated and condemned to bed Syph’s female cast-offs. The love/hate relationship between Syph and Clap is juicy material, with Syph never having known any other life than that of a rock God and Clap trying desperately to keep him alive.

As such there’s sex and drugs aplenty, particularly early on. Clap eventually sorts himself out, in a way, and becomes the lynchpin on which the band’s career hinges. Bassist Mono quickly settles down to a quiet life of fishing and contemplation whereas Keith Richards-style guitarist Crab lives on the edge, defying the naysayers to keep on going no matter what. As the front man, singer Syph is an elusive sprite, beholden to the never ending pussy and the whims of medication. He is, as all good performers should be, constantly entertaining, with Clap falling into the dogged role of the band’s conscience whilst struggling with his own rocky relationship.

Where Litt really triumphs here is in the sardonic humour stakes. Each chapter is laden with pathos and wit, from the girl who refuses to leave Syph’s hotel room even though he is on tour elsewhere, to the rapper who steals the ageing Clap’s drum sample for his number one record, paying him off with a briefcase full of cash in a Starbucks when an excited Clap just wants to talk shop. The sex, the religious epiphanies, the breakdowns and roadies who form their own quite successful offshoot band, I play the drums in a band called okay is just about as satisfying a novel about the music biz as you could ever hope to read. Litt is very stealthily proving himself to be one of the best British writers alive by amassing a major body of work without all the usual pomp and circumstance. May he make it all the way to ‘Z’.

Granta Issue 108

2010-02-18T09:49:00.000+11:00

Despite being the grand old man of lit journals, Granta is not one that has ever featured much on my radar. The last issue I bought a few years ago was a little too academic for my liking, but after reading their 108^th Chicago-themed issue, I’m seriously considering adding Granta to my subscription list.

There’s plenty to attract a casual buyer in this one, from the bright Chris Ware cover (a huge departure for the normally conservative Granta) to the impressive list of contributors – Aleksandar Hemon, Don DeLillo, Wole Soyinka and Peter Carey, all dazzling amongst a list of real pros. What really matters though, is that this issue grabs you straightaway. No messing around, no protracted intros or crowing about why they’ve chosen to base an issue around the city of Chicago, just straight down to business. And it’s consistent business indeed. It’s hard to pick a weak spot amongst the 22 pieces included – if anything it’s Carey’s excerpt from his latest novel that jars, since it’s the only piece that has nothing to do with the windy city (Parrot & Olivier in America has not been released in America or the UK yet, whereas we’ve had it in Australia for months now). It's still great writing and Carey also does some quiet work elsewhere, as a contributing editor.

As a snapshot of Chicago, this issue is simultaneously terrifying and thrilling. Hemon kicks off proceedings (excuse the pun) with a great piece about soccer in the park, which he plays alongside fanatical immigrants from across the globe. Sun-Times journalist Neil Steinberg follows up with an article on Ed McElroy, the former driver of JFK and Obama (a Chicagoan himself, discussed elsewhere by Nobel winner Wole Soyinka). Steinberg’s piece sets the tone for the rest of the issue as he uses McElroy as a means of explaining the turgid history of the town as a hotbed of corruption. Four of the past eight Illinois governors have ended up in prison, including the most recent, Rod Blagojevich, who memorably tried to sell Obama’s seat in the Senate despite knowing he was under investigation by the Feds.

A writer I have my eye on at the moment, Stuart Dybek, is up next, turning in an eerie tale of tsunamis on Lake Michigan, or ‘seiche’. Along with Maria Venegas’s story of Mexican hard men and former Torpedo contributor Tony D’Souza’s excellent car accident from hell story, the fiction in this issue is exemplary, a perfect complement to the often depressing articles about life in this tough city.

Alex Kotlowitz gives us the first clue to Chicago’s menacing side. His piece on Khalid Ahmed, the teenage son of a Sudanese refugee who is gunned down by his friend brings the world of The Wire home to roost. 15,000 people have been murdered in the past 20 years in Chicago, most of them shot, most of them young African-American or Latino men. That’s three times the total number of American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It’s a sobering statistic, reinforced by Camilo José Vergara’s amazing photographs of the projects, taken over a 28-year period. It is difficult indeed to imagine how a President like Obama emerged from this.

Chicago comes across as a maddening city that never changes much and that is crippled by administrative incompetence, never more so than in Richard Powers’ very funny short article about the Great Flood of 1992. In what seems like a piece of fiction, the clandestine tunnels built in the late 1800s under the city were finally breached by pile drivers in the early 90s, causing the Chicago River to pour in. The subway system was flooded, as were most businesses, often unaware of the labyrinth of tunnels beneath their feet. The power grid shorted out and downtown was evacuated. Despite cable TV reporters sending video of the leak’s location to the Mayor, city officials were baffled until a late night radio host spotted fish from the aquarium swimming in the basement of Merchandise Mart. The city dumped 65 truckloads of rock and cement into the gaping hole and order was temporarily restored. It’s too unlikely to be made up, and typifies a city that seems to be constantly teetering on chaos, holding it together just long enough to house several million desperate souls. Congratulations to Granta for reminding us of America’s oft-forgotten diamond in the rough.

Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America

2010-02-16T09:32:00.000+11:00

One of my writer chums (Brad Dunn, I’m looking at you here) emailed me recently to say he was reading Peter Carey’s new book, Parrot and Olivier in America and had a question for me, since I interviewed the amenable Mr Carey last year. Given it was an email interview I was unable to answer Brad’s pressing query, which was: Is Peter Carey a thousand years old? (I have cleaned up Brad’s poor grammar for the purposes of this post – for a glimpse of the original flavour, simply add a dash of ‘like’ in there, tut tut Mr Dunn)

What Brad wanted to know (as if I somehow could tell him) was this – how in Hades has Peter Carey written a novel stuffed to the brim with verisimilitudinous (made-up word ahoy!) detail about the end of the 18^th Century as if he was actually there? We’re not talking the occasional nod to history here. Parrot and Olivier in America leaves no doubt in the mind that Carey is either one of the world’s great literary genii, or that he must be, as Brad clearly suspects, a Highlander like Conor McCleod of the clan McCleod, born several centuries ago and still living amongst us mere mortals. It is quite easy for me to imagine Peter Carey standing in the background as Alexis de Tocqueville visited America, making notes in a grubby 18^th Century Moleskine and thinking, ‘I’ll turn this into a novel one day, in say, oh, two hundred years or so.’

Despite having lived in France for two years myself, studying a mind-bending Philosophy course and not speaking a word of English, I had never heard of de Tocqueville. Thank God for Wikipedia though. Turns out he was an aristocrat sent to America to study the penal system in the new democracy, with the idea of transferring the model to post-revolutionary France. Well there you go. You learn something new every day. Carey changes some names and makes a conscious decision to have a whale of a time as Olivier Jean Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont travels to New York against his will to perform what he sees as an odious duty. He is accompanied on this journey by John Larrit, a gifted, over-the-hill mimic and personal assistant of sorts, nicknamed Parrot.

That about sums it up and whilst you may wonder how this merits 450 pages, there is so much great observation, rich characterisation and bone-dry wit in Carey’s prose that I could easily have read another 450 pages. The story is told from each man’s perspective, with chapters simply entitled ‘Olivier’ or ‘Parrot’ indicating who is currently speaking. The Frenchman is initially an annoying prig, despicably full of himself and unable to sympathise with anyone outside of his social class. Parrot is a tough kid who matures into a journeyman, carrying the scars of his mistakes with him around the world. He is also an artist who never fulfilled his potential, and instantly likeable. Carey’s sole risk is in opening the novel with a 40-page stint of Olivier, whose mannerisms are difficult to put up with. Once you’re past the opening and introduced to Parrot, things do settle down into that familiar, satisfying underdog territory that Carey has done so well in the past, notably in Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang.

There’s a lot of reading pleasure to be had in witnessing the very different thought processes of each man, especially when they’re talking about the same incidents, but most touching is the begrudging friendship that develops between Parrot and Olivier as the book progresses. It’s a sort of 18^th Century bromance and whilst it may struggle to find an audience amongst contemporary readers, this is what I consider to be true modern Literature (notice the big ‘L’) at its finest – erudite, witty and masterfully written. How he does it is a total mystery to me, with Brad’s immortal explanation being the only one I’ve heard that holds the slightest credence. Moments of delight are peppered throughout, with Carey taking playful pot shots at his adopted homeland and somehow George Bush Jnr along the way. There is no tyranny in America, nor ever could be. The great ignoramus will not be elected. Olivier convinces himself of this, having decided American democracy is a grand and noble beast. Elsewhere he writes to his friend Blacqueville about the endless pursuit of wealth that causes such a restlessness in the American spirit, sentences that ring true in the context of banks foreclosing on people’s homes, as they do even here in the early days of the New World, where people have flocked for one primary reason – to make money.

It is strange, in New York and Philadelphia, to see the feverish enthusiasm which accompanies Americans’ pursuit of prosperity and the way they are ceaselessly tormented by the vague fear that they have failed to choose the shortest route to achieve it.

Parrot and Olivier in America is one of Peter Carey’s finest achievements, elevating him far above the rest of literature’s maddening crowd. There’s even a nod to the Aussies in the form of a devilishly funny early map of the colony. The man deserves his head on a stamp.

Zoetrope Issue 51

2010-02-11T09:58:00.000+11:00

The ever-dependable Zoetrope rounded out 2009 with an issue designed by founding editor Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew, Jason Schwartzman. Nice timing, given he was appearing in cinemas at the time in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox. Nepotism aside, it’s not a bad effort from Schwartzman, who favours bright bands of colour, reversed negative images and moulding the text around the page. The ever-changing design of Zoetrope is definitely one of its strengths, though Schwartzman was up against it compared to the other designers last year, Guillermo del Toro, Rex Ray and Antony (from Antony and the Johnsons).

It’s a short issue too, with only four stories plus the eponymous classic reprint they always feature. This time it’s Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’, a classic of waiting. The theme is reflected in the other stories too, one of which is in fact called ‘Waiting’. Stuart Dybek’s essay on Hemingway is intermingled with an account of a love affair in a remote lakeside cottage. Jumping between a fictional and non-fictional voice is jarring at first, but Dybek has hit his straps in recent times (he has a great story about inland tidal waves in Granta’s current Chicago issue too) and he knows how to get under the reader’s skin. He undermines the narrator’s initial academic tone by isolating him emotionally by the lake, waiting for the return of a woman that he has badly misunderstood. He has done more than enough to make me seek out his novel, I Sailed with Magellan.

Zoetrope show their willingness to experiment with Austin Bunn’s ‘Griefer’, a dazzling tale set mostly in an online gaming world that is being slowly deleted. I haven’t read anything quite like it and although I was put off a bit by the jargon-heavy opening, persistence paid off. Yet again the protagonist waits, this time for the end of the world he has spent years building, despite the disastrous effects his time spent online has on his real world relationship. This could have been cheesy but Bunn handles it slickly, fleshing out the frightening themes of deception and identity in a very satisfying fashion.

The weak point in this issue is the translated story, by Ingo Schulze. Zoetrope must be heartily commended for including new translations of non-English fiction, but it doesn’t always work. Their Guillermo del Toro-designed issue last year was a dual English/Spanish one, with translations of every story that proved to be a tour-de-force. Schulze’s German dinner party conversation comes across as stunted and unexciting, particularly given the vibrant design and palpable energy on view elsewhere in the issue. I’d like to see some short story translations of risky non-English writers, like France’s Marie Darrieussecq and Michel Houellebecq (and any other writers whose name ends in ‘ecq’ for that matter).

There’s an ace in the hole here though. The issue’s opening story, ‘The Lost and Found Department of Greater Boston’ by Elizabeth McCracken is simply stunning. One of the best stories I read in 2009, right up there in the top 3. It concerns one Karen Blackbird, a forty-two year old mother who vanishes without a trace in 1982. That may sound like the beginning to a cop show or movie-of-the-week, but in McCracken’s hands it is anything but. With masterful prose she outlines the effect the disappearance has on young Asher Blackbird whilst delineating the sad life Karen lived in excruciating detail. As a portrait of a character we never meet, it’s silently heartbreaking, with Schwartzman’s design perfectly in tune with the narrative. McCracken has a few novels under her belt but really made an impact with her 2008 memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination, detailing the loss of her first baby. She has been on the Iowa Writer's Workshop faculty and is this year moving to that other amazing hotbed of fiction, the University of Texas at Austin. On this evidence I'd read her shopping lists.

Zoetrope may not be the quarterly on everyone’s lips or the one you spot on the shelves of many bookstores, but for my money it’s the most interesting one out there. As they enter their 14^th year it’s comforting and deeply gratifying to know Coppola is committed to quietly and without fuss setting the literary standard.

Nabokov's The Original of Laura

2010-02-09T09:40:00.000+11:00

One of the stranger literary events of recent months was the release of a new ‘novel’ by Vladimir Nabokov, who of course has been dead for over thirty years. The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun) is presented to us plebeians as a masterpiece that was saved from the furnace, against the author’s express instructions. His wife baulked at chucking Nabokov’s handwritten index cards into the flames long enough to pass the odious duty onto his son, opera singer Dmitri. He too couldn’t bring himself to destroy the novel his father was writing on his death bed and after much soul searching, wringing of hands and checking of bank balances, finally reneged to show the rest of us mere mortals.

The front cover does warn that this is ‘a novel in fragments’, but really it is nothing of the sort. Despite being a brick-like ominous-looking tome, The Original of Laura takes about an hour to read. Each of the 275 pages contains a copy of Nabokov’s handwritten index cards along with a typed version below, meaning there is often only a paragraph’s worth of text to read. The index cards are all perforated, allowing the reader to pop them out and reshuffle them at their leisure, perhaps at a literary party over kippers, cigarillos and brandy. Why anyone would want to spend $50 on a book that they then tear to pieces is a bit of a mystery to me. I borrowed my copy from St Kilda library, slightly stunned to see it on their shelves so rapidly after its release. How it will withstand the sticky fingers of future borrowers is another matter entirely.

What little plot there is revolves around Dr Philip Wild, a bloated cynic of a man who is unbelievably married to a highly sexed young gamine. One of her lovers writes a novel about her misadventures, which becomes a bestseller. Having to face the constant reminder of his humiliation everywhere he goes, Wild begins a process of metaphysical self-annihilation, commencing with the removal of his toes. This all sounds mildly interesting, despite the obvious older man/young slut Nabokovian plot recycle. The unfortunate reality is that The Original of Laura is little more than a sketchy first draft of a novel that in all likelihood would have ended up quite different by the time a fully capable and healthy Nabokov had completed it. Written mostly during his final months in a Lausanne hospital bed, the strange obsession with podiatry in the index cards was a result of an aggravating inflammation under the toenails from which Nabokov was suffering daily. He may have been writing these final few thousand words just to keep himself sane. As to whether it would ever have become a fully-fledged novel in the event of his survival must be doubted, but can never be known.

His son certainly has a massive chip on his shoulder about it all. His introduction is an exercise in tetchiness, wherein he pays out just about everyone who has ever had anything to do with him. His father’s doctors cop it first, then he moves on to several American publishers, Henry Miller (‘the trashy tropics’), Sixties road novels, book thieves, ‘half-literate’ journalists and the ‘lesser minds’ who would write to him begging that he not publish the novel. Dmitri Nabokov comes across poorly, as a bit of an arrogant ass finally given an opportunity to air his grievances, ironically finishing his introduction by claiming to be ‘a nice guy’ who is finally publishing this book for the edification of the huddled, filthy masses, which I think means us, dear reader.

All of which is a shame, as amongst the meagre final paragraphs of his genius father are some beautiful moments, phrases that ring in the ears and transcend the decades that have passed since they were written. ‘He married the ballerina Lanskaya, a delightful dancer, though with something fragile and gauche about her that kept her teetering on a narrow ledge between benevolent recognition and the rave reviews of nonentities.’ Even at the end of his life Nabokov’s prose flowed smoothly and effortlessly. There is something desperately sad about the index cards, his handwriting clear and beautiful, the shape of his letters exhibiting a creative flourish that is pleasing on the eye. As I turned the pages of The Original of Laura I began to forgive the vitriolic Dmitri and feel that this was a book worth publishing, if not for the nascent novel that lies deep within, then at least for the parting glimpse of a dying man, perhaps the Twentieth Century’s greatest writer, captured for one final moment by designer Chip Kidd, without whom this ‘novel in fragments’ would have been so much poorer. Kidd’s reverence and skill present Nabokov’s epilogue in a fashion befitting such a questionable project. Just don’t be surprised if your library copy has some pieces missing.

Torpedo on Kindle & iphone

2010-02-08T10:08:00.000+11:00

And a belated Happy New Year to all. In case you’re wondering where I’ve been, well as you can see from the photo above, I’ve been busy. Yes, that is an Amazon Kindle. And yes, that is Torpedo you see onscreen. I’ve been assisting Amazon in testing the DTP software for international publishers and as of later this week, the first 5 issues of Torpedo will be available to purchase for $4.99 in the Amazon Kindle store.

So if you own a Kindle anywhere in the world, you can now read Torpedo on it. Also, if you own an Apple iphone, you can download the free Kindle app, browse the store and download Torpedo to your iphone.

Thus Torpedo is the first Australian magazine or journal available on Kindle and iphone (you will also be able to read it on ipad when that comes out). We are also, apart from the guys at Electric Literature, the first fiction quarterly in the world to have all its issues on there. Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, none of those journals are available in this format yet.

What does this mean? You can read short stories from the best writers in Australia and around the world directly on your Kindle or iphone, that’s what. No expensive postage (which should make a lot of American Torpedo fans happy) and no more massive print costs for us. The printed version of Torpedo will be put on hold indefinitely, as we simply cannot afford to produce it. However, Torpedo will continue in the Kindle/iphone format, so you can expect to see issues 7 through 10 appearing over the coming months.

I have been testing the Kindle extensively this week, particularly in regard to comics and how they look onscreen. Whilst some of the comics we have run in Torpedo look ok, most of them do not display terribly well, so the Kindle versions of Torpedo will feature short stories only. That is why issue 6 will not be on sale via Kindle, being as it is almost entirely graphic. The Kindle is a monochrome platform that does not have Apple’s touchscreen ‘pinch and zoom’ technology, at least not yet in any case. If future generations of Kindle incorporate colour and touchscreen technology, we’ll be all over it. Needless to say once Apple open their ibook store internationally later this year, we will convert Torpedo to that format too.

Short form content is perfect for these platforms and I hope Torpedo will thrive on Kindle/iphone. I’m delighted technology is finally catching up with what I want to do and it will be exciting to see what other mags and journals appear on these platforms as the devices themselves become ubiquitous. The tech is still a little behind what I would like and I’m looking forward to being able to incorporate colour illustration and comics, video links and the blog so readers can have a more interactive experience. It’s a little sad to see the print version grind to a halt, but before anyone gives me a hard time about that, it’s worth pointing out that with print costs running to thousands of dollars, expensive postage and a saturated lit journal market, it has been literally killing me to produce it. I could have bought a vintage Mustang with the money I’ve poured into Torpedo these past three years. That would have been much more sensible.

A new version of the Falcon vs. Monkey site will go up later this week with a page directing browsers to the Amazon store. Until then, welcome to 2010. It’s the future!

2009/2010

2009-12-22T12:53:00.000+11:00

I wasn't going to do one of these but given all I have to do today is file my nails and eat chocolate biscuits, I might as well. So, for the purposes of stating my case publicly, here is a list of books I have enjoyed in 2009. Any that were released prior to this year are indicated.

The City and the City China Mieville : All right, his name's missing an acute accent but this is an amazing book, part Kafka, part Chandler and scandalously missing from many 'best of' lists and awards shortlists. Plus, he's a lovely bloke, intelligent like a space monkey and handsome to boot. He actually looks like a character from a cool SF movie and writes like no-one else out there. The City and the City is one of the best of the year. China, you owe me ten bucks mate.

The Year of the Flood Margaret Atwood : More speculative fiction from one of the best novelists alive, Atwood takes post-apocalyptic dystopia to another level with this 'simultaneoquel' to Oryx and Crake. At a reading in New York she actually sang one of the hymns. I mean, like, wow. To be at this level after such a long career is stunning. Come to Melbourne, Margaret. Sing for us.

How to Sell Clancy Martin : A real sleeper hit in the U.S., jeweller turned Philosophy professor Martin produces a debut novel destined for greatness. Frank, revealing, funny and satisfyingly juicy on so many levels, How to Sell smashes modern America's preoccupation with wealth into tiny pieces and leaves a gaping, terrifying hole of truth. Rumoured to become a temporary Aussie next year, we can only cross our fingers. Make it work buddy.

Bruising Mischa Merz : Local journo Merz gives us a tantalising glimpse into the boxing world as she dons the gloves, gets ripped and proceeds to win a Golden Gloves title in the U.S., for real. Her next book is one to watch out for in 2010, I'm getting a sneak preview of the manuscript tomorrow before she gets really famous. Olympics, anyone?

Things We Didn't See Coming Steven Amsterdam : Sleeper's triumphant, all conquering first foray into novels has been an unqualified success story, thanks to Steve Amsterdam's turbulent, contemplative Aussie dystopia. A cracking read, justifiably awarded Book of the Year by The Age newspaper, watch out for this one in the U.S. and UK in 2010.

The Convalescent Jessica Anthony : McSweeney's continue to take the risks other publishers seem to shy away from, to their credit. Jess Anthony's debut is unusual and beautiful, but then how could it not be with a main character that sells meat from a van by the side of the road and keeps a blade of grass as a pet?

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned Wells Tower : On a lot of 2009 'best of' lists, and rightly so. Wells condenses 9 novels into short story format and consequently terrifies every short story writer in the world, who will struggle to ever reach these giddy heights. If he includes a mention of Hanging Rock and kangaroo testicles in his novel, that's my fault. Don't ask.

How a Moth Becomes a Boat Josephine Rowe : One of the best independently released short story collections of the year, Josie has been brewing for some time and if you missed this, look out for its wider re-release in 2010 through Hunter Press. If you're already a fan and are wondering when her first novel will see the light of day, never fear. I'm moving to the apartment next door to her in January just so I can kick her arse every time I see her shirking.

The World Beneath Aaron Gwyn : Not to be confused with the Cate Kennedy novel of the same name, Gwyn's U.S. only release is a work of breathtaking genius about a man who finds a bottomless hole in his back yard and the weirdness that ensues. Aaron can write like few other people and is a name to underline in your list of writers to watch. And yes, I will take you shark fishing if you come out mate. Pack a big rod.

Carter Beats the Devil Glen David Gold : A cocktail with the man himself guilted me into seeking out his 2001 debut and boy, what a trip. Magic, deception and an eye for detail that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame, Glen Gold's first novel is a corker. His second, Sunnyside is strangely absent from all these 'best of' 2009 lists, which is a crying shame. Glen, you're a legend, and I loved the bit where your dogs make a cameo. Bring them with you next time sir.

The Shell Collector Anthony Doerr : After reading his short story 'Memory Wall' in McSweeney's 32, I had to hunt down Doerr's 2002 short story collection. Despite having to wait 6 weeks for it to arrive from a shonky Amazon store, it was worth it. Amazing stories of the wilderness all written before he was 30, Tony Doerr was the Wells Tower of '02.

If this seems like a strange 2009 list, you'll have to forgive me. There are many famous books I haven't gotten around to reading yet. My summer reading list has the following on it, which I will report on once I've finished them:

Parrot and Olivier Peter Carey, Look Who's Morphing Tom Cho, The Corrections Jonathan Franzen, Snow Falling on Cedars David Guterson, I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay Toby Litt, Affection Krissy Kneen, The Infinities John Banville, Zeitoun Dave Eggers, These Demented Lands Alan Warner, A Gate at the Stairs Lorrie Moore.

That should keep me going for a while. In terms of early 2010, here's what I'm looking forward to:

Chronic City Jonathan Lethem (not out here yet), Serena Ron Rash (already read it, coming out through Text though, awesome), The Mayor's Tongue Nathaniel Rich, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want it Maile Meloy (not out here yet), The Dead Fish Museum Charles d'Ambrosio (same deal) and Eli Horowitz's book on ping pong. He possesses a wicked wrist.

In closing, thanks to everyone who read the blog in 2009. It's only been going for a few months but I hope you've enjoyed it. Expect lots more reviews and interviews in 2010. In the meantime Eirian and I are off to South Australia on holidays so I can get horribly sunburned and possibly eaten by a Great White. At least I'll be nicely toasted for the fish. It's the least I can do.

Take it easy, dear readers. I leave you with the words of the great philosopher Bruce Willis - 'Think Fast, Live Free and Die Hard. Yippee Ky Yay, Motherfuckers.'

Chris.

Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing

2009-12-21T09:49:00.000+11:00

It's been a while since I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, but I have fond memories of them. Which means I've either romanticized their appeal as I've got older or they were genuinely brilliant enough to endure. I hope it's the latter, but Eoin Colfer's sixth book in the series makes me wonder if it might be the former. Or maybe he's simply nowhere near as good as Douglas Adams.

There was certainly a lot of fuss amongst the die hard fanbase when it was announced the author of the Artemis Fowl series would pen the sixth installment of Hitchhiker's, with the blessing of the Adams estate. Colfer famously joined the Facebook hate group that sprang up railing against him and contributed to the diatribe, slagging himself off. Sadly that seems to be the funniest aspect of the whole debacle.

Plot was always a tenuous concept for Adams, but that was not necessarily a bad thing. Colfer follows suit here. With the Vogons having successfully destroyed Earth at last and our heroes rescued by Zaphod Beeblebrox during the final moments, the action switches to the small planet of Nano, where the last surviving colony of Earthlings live in luxury. The only thing missing is a deity to worship and set some rules. Whilst Zaphod tries to recruit his old buddy Thor for the job, Arthur, Ford, Trillian and daughter Random get embroiled with Wowbagger, an immortal alien who travels the universe insulting everyone. So far so Hitchhiker's.

It's easy to feel sorry for Colfer in many ways. If he tried to follow the Adams formula he would be unfavourably compared and if he went his own way he would be damned for that too. In the end he does a bit of both. He seems to be having the most gleeful fun when he's dealing with Thor, Hillman Hunter (the Irish administrator of Nano) and Wowbagger. He does pretty well with Zaphod too, but the quartet of main characters feel like stones around his neck. He has to include them even though they've done their dash in the series. As a result, Arthur Dent is resigned to the sidelines, a ghostly cynic who pops up now and again to mention cups of tea. Trillian and Random are poorly handled, and in fact are the only female characters in the book, other than the occasional mention of busty Valkyries. The nerdiness of Hitchhiker's was always offset by the capable spunkiness of its female characters, who were usually the ones who got things done. They are nothing here. On top of that lovable rogue Ford Prefect is terrible, hardly mentioned outside of drinking references. Colfer clearly has no idea what to do with him.

Despite his death in So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish and his subsequent cameo reappearance at the end of the radio version of Mostly Harmless as a car park attendant, Marvin the Paranoid Android does not feature in And Another Thing. This is a great shame as Colfer's humour is sorely bereft of sarcasm. The jokes throughout are weak and clutch at straws (a character called Schick Brithaus? Come on, work harder than that), with the usually hilarious Hitchhiker's Guide footnotes particularly unsatisfying. These too are incorporated into the text, denying the reader the fun of scanning down to the bottom of the page and having a laugh at the tangent before rejoining the plot.

There are a few inspired moments, such as the interviews Hillman Hunter conducts with unemployed Gods and the passages on Asgard as Zaphod attempts to penetrate the complex, but in general And Another Thing has an awkward feel about it. Colfer's concern about what he is doing seeps through on the page and he has a tendency to spin plot points out needlessly over dozens of pages, where Adams would have tied them off in a few succint, amusing paragraphs. At 340 pages this is way too long as well. The originals were all short and memorable, packing so much invention and wit into so few pages. And Another Thing feels like what it is - a ranting afterthought no-one wants or needs to hear. Mostly pointless.

Paul Auster's Invisible

2009-12-10T08:59:00.000+11:00

I once found a signed copy of Auster's book The Music of Chance in a charity shop in Edinburgh. My mum tried to throw it out a few years later, telling me over the phone that 'someone had written all over it'. It's still in her house somewhere, I hope. It's one of my favourite books of all time, which should indicate the amount of respect and admiration I have for Paul Auster. He's been prolific these past twenty years and unusually for an author, his forays into film have also been very respectable. Smoke and Blue in the Face are such great movies, and the film version of The Music of Chance is also very watchable, with a young James Spader outstanding as Pozzi.

Something seems to have gone wrong in recent years though. Auster is well known for his postmodern tics, inserting himself into the narrative as a character and writing about writing, notably in The New York Trilogy. But it gets a bit tiring seeing it pop up here again in Invisible. It all starts out well enough, with thinly-disguised central character Adam Walker (Paul Auster, geddit?) hanging out at a party in 1967 New York. There he meets French professor and possible spy Rudolf Born, who has a sexy young girlfriend in tow, Margot. Born implausibly takes a shine to Walker and offers him not only his girlfriend's charms but several thousand dollars to publish a literary journal. It's an uncomfortable set-up, which takes an Austerian turn when Born abruptly stabs a mugger to death and does a runner. So far so good, tight and suspenseful, plenty of potential as Walker tears up the cheque and ponders his inaction.

Part Two (the novel is in four parts) is where it comes off the rails. Auster jumps forward to the present day and give us an author, James, receiving a manuscript of the story from an elderly Walker in the mail. James wants to know more and investigates, urging the dying Walker to tell him what happened next. Walker continues the story in his correspondence to James, confessing an illicit relationship with his sister in the summer of '67. This passage is erotically highly charged and surprisingly well handled given the subject matter. From there matters deteriorate as the book becomes a bit of a jumbled mess. Walker recounts his visit to Paris and confrontation with Born in part three, written fast and loose as he is so close to death. The final section is mostly taken from the diary of Cecile Juin, the innocent young woman Walker becomes involved with in Paris to get back at Born, given to James by the modern-day Cecile. Confused yet?

Auster takes a promising idea and throws it into his postmodern blender, unable to resist having a tiresomely clever author in there convoluting the plot. It's an annoying device that in this case is completely unnecessary. The story doesn't need it and is swamped under the self-absorption of the writer. It's bitterly disappointing that Auster is still trotting out this trick and even worse, the voices of all the narrators sound exactly the same. Walker is James is Cecile, with the middle-aged Cecile particularly unconvincing: '5/14. A hard day. This afternoon, I realized that it has been exactly four months since my last period. Does this mean it's finally happened? I keep hoping for the old, familiar cramps, the bloat and irritation, the blood flowing out of me.' This sounds like a man writing. In fact it sounds like Paul Auster, and there's the problem. He can't stay out of it. I can't help thinking there is a powerful narrative tale begging to be told here, with Walker destroying his life in an effort to make amends for his one moment of hesitation as a young man, but there's an unwelcome intruder in the text - Auster, gleefully scattering marbles that his characters slip on, causing them to look up at their creator. Paul Auster's Invisible? No, he's not, more's the pity.

Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood

2009-12-03T09:00:00.000+11:00

Despite all the prizes to her name, Atwood is yet another writer whose work has somehow passed me by. Everyone was reading The Blind Assassin in my first year working in a bookstore, which was enough to bring out the stubborn Johnny Opposite in me and shun that Booker winner. I regret it now but still, for an old SF fan The Year of the Flood is not a bad starting point.

The story flits quickly between its two female narrators, Ren and Toby, with both women having survived a plague that has wiped out most of the planet. Toby is living inside a private spa building, in relative ease despite the carnage outside. Unsure of what to do, she scans the horizon, defending her garden from gene-spliced pigs and any marauding survivors. Ren is a trapeze dancer in a sex club, quarantined in the 'sticky zone' until her test results come back. She knows something has happened but is unsure of the scale of destruction. It is not their isolation from the world that has saved them from death, but a common link to the past. Both women grew up as members of tiny religious group the God's Gardeners, who as it turns out have all survived the disaster, seemingly due to their healthy and organic vegetarian lifestyle.

What criticism I have read of Atwood's latest has been linked to this underlying aspect of the narrative, which is never explicitly stated. Is Atwood preaching at us that we need to be vegetarians in order to survive as a species? Maybe, but so what? I can think of worse agendas to have. Her scathing depiction of the corporation-ruled world of Happicuppa and SecretBurger franchises is funny and also desperately depressing. What's in the burgers is a nice nod to Harry Harrison's classic Make Room, Make Room, which Charlton Heston fans may know as Soylent Green. In fact that is the book The Year of the Flood most resembles, taken to its logical conclusion. Where Harrison left us in an overcrowded, impersonal world, Atwood takes up the reins and shows us what might happen next.

Post-apocalyptic dystopias have always been easy to love, though it seems like everyone has one these days. Atwood's is supremely satisfying. She takes her time to let the characters inhabit the world she so deftly creates. Don't be put off by the fact it's a 434 page brick either. She wisely keeps the chapters short, and the sentences. Her style is crisp and to the point, yet she still manages to weave a rich tapestry. Verbose writers out there should take note. Whilst I have no objection to the 'vegetarianism will save the world' agenda, which is probably right anyway, I do have a few minor complaints. The leader of the God's Gardeners, Adam One, is largely unexplored as a character. Perhaps he is fleshed out in Oryx and Crake, her 2003 novel that features some of the same characters as The Year of the Flood, which I have not read. Of greater concern, and this is no fault of Atwood's, is the fact she is quite openly writing SF and being nominated (and winning) major literary awards. Atwood herself prefers the term 'speculative fiction' rather than 'science fiction', which I am happy to go along with even if I do feel it is splitting hairs. What I want to know is why China Mieville's The City and The City, which is every bit as accomplished and if anything slightly less speculative than Atwood's latest, doesn't even rate a mention on literary shortlists this year. Both writers have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, so what's the difference? None, in my book. Something is wrong there. Still, kudos to Atwood for writing a stunning, all-encompassing masterpiece so far into her career. May she survive the flood.

Interview with David Shrigley Pt.2

2009-12-01T10:32:00.000+11:00

CF: I lived in Newcastle in the north of England for 3 years and at the time they were opening up the Baltic, a huge old mill that had been regenerated into a contemporary art space. Do you think that has the effect of allowing working class people to realise they can make an impact on the art world?

DS: I think the opening of a space like that does change a city. We could really do with an arts centre like that in Glasgow. It would be a very positive thing, but then again the fine art community in Glasgow has flourished without there being any support network from the city or the state. The art community here has produced and continues to produce many fine artists who go on to exhibit internationally, and it’s not just to do with the art school either, it’s the fact that people stay after school because they’re supported by this self-perpetuating network.

CF: What’s your studio space like?

DS: I’ve got a room in my apartment with a big desk where I do all my drawing. I’ve also got a bathtub in there at the moment, because we’re renovating the bathroom. Then I have a workshop space in a studio complex a little way from where I live, where I make sculptural work. I can do most things I want down there. I go down and make a mess and it’s really cold. What I have is quite modest, but it seems to work.

CF: Have you seen any imitators of your work? Do you think you’re at the stage where that is starting to happen?

DS: I don’t really care, to be honest. I pity people who do, put it that way. People say ‘I saw an advert on TV, either you did that or they’re ripping you off’ and then I’ll see the advert and to me it looks nothing like my work because I’m not really into the stylistic aspect of what I do, it’s not really supposed to be an illustrative style, it’s more about content. I just try to render the content as economically as possible. I’m not the first person to draw in a childish way. There are generations of children drawing that way and I really don’t lay claim to originality as far as my graphic style is concerned. The content is mine and that’s something I’m perhaps more precious about.

CF: Do you forget about your work after you’ve done it?

DS: I always feel that the next thing I’m doing is going to be great, so everything I’ve just done I tend to forget about a bit and I have to be prodded to make sure it’s documented. Perhaps I’ll only appreciate it when I go back a couple of years later. The process that you go through all the time is this one whereby you’re working on the next exhibition, the next obligation, which is a good way to be. If there was nothing coming up, I guess that would be a bit depressing. Otherwise I don’t know what I’d do. Sit at home and play on the internet all day maybe. Or watch Prison Break.

CF: What writers or artists do you admire at the moment?

DS: I have quite a voracious appetite for all forms of culture. One of the last shows I saw that I really enjoyed was an exhibition in New York of David Altmejd. He made these giant figurative sculptures that were ornately detailed. It was beautiful work. That was the exhibition I enjoyed most last year. The last thing I read was Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. I think I’m a bit of a snob, in that I won’t read any pulp – only middle brow literature, no Carl Hiaasen or anything like that. I’m a big collector of music though. I buy a lot of records and see a lot of bands.

CF: I do want to ask you about Adam and the Ants.

DS: Yes, I was an antperson.

CF: So was I. I remember getting in trouble for painting a white stripe across the bridge of my nose with Tippex and having to take the day off school.

DS: Yeah, we all did that. They were a great band. I was looking on Wikipedia recently to see what had happened to all the members of the band. I think Adam Ant is now blind, and bipolar, in a terrible state.

CF: Yeah, I read he hit someone with a shovel and was committed to an asylum for a while. I guess there’ll be no Adam and the Ants reunion.

DS: Well maybe there will. But he is actually blind now, I think.

CF: Have you got fond memories of the early ‘80s?

DS: That was when I first started listening to music, buying seven inch singles at Woolworths. Not that I think very fondly of the eighties. I don’t really understand the resurgence of twentysomethings buying Huey Lewis. I never liked him at the time and I’m certainly not going to listen to him now. I mean there’s obviously something deeply ironic in youngsters listening to that stuff – it’s hip to be square.

CF: Have you seen that Altman movie, Short Cuts? Huey Lewis plays one of the three men who find the dead girl in the river and keep on fishing. Here’s Lewis in his first movie role, standing atop a rock, taking a piss into the river. So you actually get to see Huey Lewis’s cock.

DS: Well you know, method acting.

CF: That was it for me. I could never look at Huey Lewis the same way again.

DS: Now you’ve seen his cock.

CF: I never thought I would.

DS: Look, I don’t wish Huey Lewis ill. I just never liked his records.

DAVID SHRIGLEY'S NEW BOOK, RED BOOK, IS OUT NOW.

Interview with David Shrigley

2009-11-30T10:28:00.000+11:00

David Shrigley is one of those rare artists who appeals to a wide audience despite the apparently simplistic style of his work. By incorporating text into his drawings, they are rendered melancholic and often hilarious. With galleries queuing up to exhibit his work and a slew of art books to his name, his work has evidently struck a chord. I spoke to him on the phone earlier this year for Torpedo, just before he was about to go to Sweden for a residency. Whilst there he drew all over a skatepark and finished off his new book, Red Book, which has just been released. He spoke softly and with great eloquence, glad to be on the phone instead of watching Prison Break, a show we both agreed was baffling.

CF: I was in London last August and went to the Tate Modern, and you were everywhere.

DS: Yeah, I did some promotional work for them. I didn’t think too hard about it when I was doing it, and somehow I ended up all over the Tate.

CF: They were hawking your books pretty hard in the shop.

DS: It was kind of a nice thing to do in a way, although it’s much better being in the actual collection, than just doing the drawings to encourage people to join the Tate.

CF: It’s hard to imagine the National Gallery here in Melbourne housing anything like what the Tate has. The collection is pretty conservative – they still make a hoo-ha about the Jackson Pollock they bought back in the sixties.

DS: Well I suppose the Tate is a major national collection. In my mind New York has a much greater collection though.

CF: You’ve been in a few New York shows recently – the Kern Gallery for example.

DS: Yeah, I was in a few shows at that gallery. I was in a show at MOMO actually, about a year or so ago. They had some of my printmaking.

CF: Do you enjoy those sorts of shows, getting invited to openings and so on?

DS: Sometimes. When I’m involved in a group show, I don’t tend to go but when I’m doing a solo exhibition, I usually go. I’ve been to New York quite a lot and shown there quite a number of times over the past few years. I kind of enjoy it, but I guess it’s part of what I do. The first time you have a solo exhibition in New York it seems impossibly glamorous, but after a few times, it becomes business. I love New York though.

CF: Your books were fairly flying off the shelves at the Tate. It’s a bit of a long-standing tradition for an artist to have a ‘chapbook’, which is essentially what you’re doing.

DS: The publishing is quite a small deal. I’ve been published by the same guy for more than 10 years now. It’s sort of a tradition with me. I do one book every year. They don’t sell a huge amount, but they go pretty far afield. As far as artist’s books go, they probably sell pretty well. I guess the payback for that is that I can do whatever I want, whereas if I published with someone bigger, I’d have to toe the line a bit more.

CF: You must be pretty prolific to be able to produce a book every year. Do you draw every day?

DS: No, not every day. I go through stages where I don’t want to do it all the time, or I’d just get bored of it, but when I’m working on something I go through quite intense periods of making the work, then I stop for a while. I mean, I draw a lot.

CF: Are you disciplined? Do you keep a routine if you’re working on something particular?

DS: Yeah, I try to put the hours in, eight hours a day, six days a week if I’ve got something to do. That usually seems to nail it. There’s one thing I do everyday though, and that’s check my emails.

CF: The whole world’s addicted.

DS: It is. That’s the one thing I’m glued to is the computer, like it or not. Look, I haven’t really done an intense period of drawing for a while, just because I’ve been involved in exhibitions and 3D work. I’ve got a residency coming up in Stockholm and I’m kind of saving my next book for that period. I do like drawing though, it makes me happy.

CF: I was watching the video you did for Blur recently, which is very funny.

DS: That was a while ago. I did a few back then, but that was it. No more record company work for me.

CF: Have you ever thought about collaborating with writers?

DS: I do collaborate from time to time with other artists, but it’s generally just a social thing. I did a title sequence for a movie a few years ago, Hallam Foe. That was directed by a friend of mine and they edited it just around the corner. I’m not really a collaborator in terms of my work. Most of the work I’m well known for is done in a solitary fashion, without anyone else being involved. I mean, there are certain people I’d like to collaborate with. I really enjoyed doing the Blur video, because that was a collaboration with the animators. I’ve got about a squillion projects to do at any given time, so apart from all the things I’ve said I’ll do with people, there’s a list of things I actually should be doing. Collaboration is a way of meeting people and enjoying their company, because sometimes you can be a bit too solitary as an artist, particularly the kind of artist that I am you end up in your own company all day and it’s probably not very good for your mental health.

CF: What’s it like living in Glasgow these days? I lived in Scotland in the early nineties and I remember Glasgow being named ‘European City of Culture’, much to the amusement of everyone.

DS: I think Glasgow’s changed. The art world has flourished and become a lot bigger. There are many more artists and artist-run spaces. There’s still no art infrastructure, there’s no good museums, no good art galleries, there’s very little there. The museum of modern art is very provincial – it’s a curious legacy from a previous arts regime, really nothing to be proud of. On the surface Glasgow probably appears more affluent because there are certain parts of the city that have posh shops and posh apartments, which is much like most British cities but I think the city is generally as poor as it ever was and I’m not sure where all these supposedly affluent people have come from. Glasgow is still a bit of a jungle on a Friday and Saturday night.

CF: I used to be in fear of my life walking up Sauchiehall Street at the weekend.

DS: It’s not pleasant, there’s no two ways about it. I’d much rather be walking up the street in Berlin. In a lot of ways it’s a real dump. But then again, there’s a DIY arts culture here which is really engaging and engaged. For me, I have a lot of friends here, a lot of things to do, a lot of bands to go and see, young artists doing small exhibitions. I’ve lived here for 20 years, so it would be quite hard to go somewhere else. But then, nowhere’s perfect.

PART TWO OF THIS INTERVIEW WILL APPEAR TOMORROW, DISCUSSING HUEY LEWIS AND ADAM ANT.

Alan Warner's The Sopranos

2009-11-26T08:28:00.000+11:00

One of the tasks that will keep me busy this summer is catching up on some books I haven’t read but should have. Somehow Alan Warner’s The Sopranos snuck to the top of my pile. Maybe it was the premise (and promise) of drunken Catholic schoolgirls on the lam that swung it for me. Or the fact that Morvern Callar is one of my favourite books of all time. Or the knowledge that he has a new book out next year. All right, you got me. It was the schoolgirls.

Warner may not be a huge name in Australia, but he should be. If you haven’t read his first novel Morvern Callar I strongly recommend you get hold of a copy. Like, now. I’ll wait until you come back from the shop. All right, you can go after you finish this. The Lynne Ramsay film is also very watchable, for the great Samantha Morton performance (she shaved her head and started work on Minority Report straight after) and soundtrack featuring Lee Hazlewood, Holger Czukay and Aphex Twin. The Sopranos was his third novel, released in 1998 and has nothing to do with the HBO gangster TV series of the same name. This is about a Catholic girls school choir. Bada-bing, bada-boom.

The best singers in the choir are Fionnula, Kylah, Manda, Chell and Orla, though their lives revolve around torturing the nun, Sister Condron (nicknamed ‘The Condom’) who is taking them to a televised singing tournament in the city. All the girls can think about are the seven hours of freedom they will have far from their hometown (The Port, a location often used in Warner’s novels, a stand-in for Oban in Scotland) and the mischief they can get up to. Written in a parlance that will delight Irvine Welsh fans and guaranteed to make you chuckle with almost every sentence, the misadventures of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour’s Sopranos are a constant pleasure. That Warner can make a teenage girls’ shopping trip to French Connection highly readable is testament to the talent of this criminally under-rated writer.

It’s not all laughs and hijinks either. Warner tackles the awkwardness and bluster of teenagehood with subtle aplomb. Orla is recovering from cancer, Chell is pregnant, Manda struggles to compete with her cooler older sister and Fionnula (who is as close to a central character as we get) can’t figure out how to reconcile her sexual attraction for University-bound Kay with life on coastal Scotland, where such feelings are frowned upon. The amount of alcohol consumed in this book is staggering, as is the honesty. The girls hammer themselves with booze and dreams of escape, stuck in that terrible period on the brink of entering adult life and all its associated responsibilities whilst just wanting to have as much fun as possible before the inevitable cruelties and banalities of British life are forced upon them.

The cleverness of Warner is in presenting a bunch of rampant teenage girls who stumble from one dodgy scenario to another in the first two thirds of the novel to entertain the reader whilst slowly building character to a point where we suddenly care deeply about what happens to them. When their layers are finally peeled away to reveal their insecurities and doubts about their sense of place in a rotting world, we feel like heels for ever assuming they were just a bunch of idiotic no-hopers with nice tits and arses. The Sopranos is a complex, layered meditation on how we as a society try to pigeonhole teenagers into categories that make us feel comfortable, irrespective of how uncomfortable and alienated we make those young people feel in the process. It’s also a rip-roaring load of fun to read, with Warner showing prodigious skill as he creates not just one, but half a dozen fantastic female characters. The man’s a genius. His new novel, The Stars in the Bright Sky is definitely one to watch out for in 2010.

Interview with Sophie Cunningham Pt.2

2009-11-24T09:53:00.000+11:00

CF: Do writers take it personally when you reject them?

SC: People seem to be very well behaved on that front, even if they do take it personally in private. The only people who have been very rude to me about that are academics. There’s sometimes confusion about whether Meanjin is a journal that should be publishing academics or not and I think some people have approached it believing they would get a hearing that they didn’t end up getting.

CF: You haven’t had anyone turn up at your house at 3am?

SC: Not at my house, but we have had problems. In my career as a publisher there have been moments, but to be honest they tended to be people who were mentally ill. Roughly once every two years something creepy happens.

CF: What have been the biggest challenges for you inheriting such a property?

SC: Well it’s very much a Melbourne establishment journal and I’m not a Melbourne establishment girl but nor do I want to be disrespectful to its history, so it’s about finding a balance between my eclectic, slightly weird personality and some respect for the more formal, well-written essays people expect. Getting the balance right has been something I’ve enjoyed. The biggest challenge has been funding bodies, I spend weeks trying to manage that side of things. It’s really depressing and demoralising and even if you’re successful it takes up a huge amount of time. I’d been warned but still, those periods where funding applications have been due have been the low points.

CF: So what’s wrong here? Everyone seems to have the same story about funding – it’s either impossible to get or if you do get it, takes up half the year.

SC: Meanjin is lucky as we’ve been incredibly supported by funding bodies but it doesn’t stop the process being any less of a nightmare. You get attracted to jobs like this because you’re creative. Well, you think you are anyway. What you actually need is a different set of skills entirely to deal with bureaucracy. It feels like sitting an exam, like you’re being tested, which makes you feel insecure.

CF: You’re trying desperately to find the right answer to a question you don’t really understand.

SC: Yeah, and sometimes you have to exaggerate a little. But the main issue has been the reaction to the new design, although that’s calmed down a lot now. People think I’ve changed it in response to complaints but I haven’t, they’ve just got used to it. I did put the font up half a point on the essays, but some older people don’t like it and will never like it and have stopped reading it. That makes me genuinely sad. When you get a letter from someone who has been reading it for 30 years saying they can’t read it anymore, it does break your heart.

CF: But what’s the alternative?

SC: Exactly. I’ve never thought I should have done it differently, but I do understand if you’re 80 and already feeling disenfranchised and suddenly the journal appears in 9 point. It’s been going since 1940 and now you have some upstart trying to make it look cool.

CF: Curse you Cunningham and your 9-point font!

SC: The good thing about making it all available online next year is that people can print it out or read it at whatever size font they wish.

CF: That brings up an interesting point – who is the audience for Meanjin? Is it changing?

SC: I’m trying to change it and I feel like it’s changing. It used to be tertiary educated people who were 35+, or more likely 55+. In terms of the reaction and feedback we’re getting, it’s becoming much younger. I think I’ve managed to expand Meanjin’s profile and engage it more in the cultural conversation, but that doesn’t mean there’s been a dramatic increase in sales. People think we’re doing an awesome job but they won’t buy the fucking thing.

CF: But that’s a common complaint amongst editors. People under 35 want to be culturally aware. They want to know about everything, know about Torpedo and Meanjin, to know that Chase and Galley design it but that’s as far as it goes. They need to be aware so they don’t get caught out amongst friends but when it comes to taking money out of their wallets, they either don’t have any because they’re young and broke, or they’d rather spend it on hipster jeans and who can blame them?

SC: Jeff Sparrow and I are collaborating on a project next year called ‘Reading in an age of change’. We found that when we’re on panels we’re always expected to say the journal is awesome, the journal will never die. You can’t stand up and say, ‘we’re fucked’. I don’t necessarily think we are, but it means the whole panel is slightly disingenuous because you can’t talk about the elephant in the room. People also say books will never die, we love the smell of books, but who really knows? We want to try to push the mainstream, conservative conversation in the direction of what if the book does die? What if people start reading e-books? It’s not about saying whether it’s good or bad, simply that it’s happening and how are we going to deal with it? Let’s talk about what’s happening rather than romanticising the past. That may mean at the end of next year I realise there’s no further role for Meanjin in print. The big debate when I took over was that Louise Adler was going to force the journal online, but I have been under no such pressure. That doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes wonder if the place for journal culture is in fact online. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have print product. There are beautiful things you can only do in print, but there’s also quite a lot of what Meanjin does that can be represented online. I can imagine a world in which you had a once-a-year awesome, beautiful McSweeney’s style print journal and then lots more regular content online to compensate. I do think it will have to change, probably not under my editorship, but it’s hard to imagine that in 20 years the world will tolerate low-selling print journals.

CF: I looked into doing a Kindle version of Torpedo recently. Amazon take 65% of every Kindle e-book sold, which has a lot of publishers up in arms.

SC: That’s the sort of thing we need to be talking about. If it’s on the page or on a screen, well so what, you have to deal with it. I’m more worried about monopolies and what companies are going to take over the publishing market. How long do you buy something for? It’s one thing to read an e-book, but another to only have access to it for a few weeks before it disappears. The business structure these companies are working on needs to be looked at, the copyright implications and so on.

CF: Are we being blindsided by this should-we, shouldn’t-we debate and missing out on the important details?

SC: Like what happened to the music industry. Deborah Conway said something interesting when she was asked if illegal downloads would affect the money artists made and she replied that they never made any money in the first place. She was exaggerating but I do think that publishers exaggerate their concerns for the creators, when the creators are always bottom of the pecking order anyway.

CF: They’re the last ones to be considered. Amazon takes 65%, the publisher takes 34% and the writer gets 1%, if they’re lucky.

SC: And you’re stuck with it, because if you don’t go through those channels you won’t find an audience.

CF: Would Meanjin be a different beast if it couldn’t get grants? Would it exist at all?

SC: It would go one of two ways. One would be that it would become more of a Melbourne University creature as they provide half our funding, and the other is that it would become feral and much like my writing, would be a hobby that doesn’t pay.

CF: Would the content change? Aren’t you restricted by grants in having overseas contributors?

SC: Not really. Apparently I’m meant to be. The bottom line is that we don’t pay well enough to attract overseas writers anyway. It hasn’t come to the point where I’m approaching overseas writers and saying I’d love to publish you but Australia Council says I can only pay Australian writers. They don’t check up on it. Whilst the grant applications are fairly draconian, the individuals who work at those funding bodies are not.

CF: Tricky question coming up. Meanjin has been around since 1940. Do you think it should still be receiving grants after all these years? Shouldn’t it be standing on its own two feet by now?

SC: I do think it’s a problem that known brands continue to receive funding, which makes it difficult for interesting new things to come up. I absolutely think that. Whilst Meanjin does a good job, there could be half a dozen other up and coming journals that might do a better job but they don’t get a chance because we’ve grabbed our little bit of the pool. That’s not my fault however and I want to continue getting funding, but I’m aware that we receive a level of support that other very good journals would kill for, and they may be doing more creative, edgy stuff. It’s our brand that saves us. I don’t think Meanjin would have survived so long if it hadn’t survived so long, if that makes sense. Funding organizations need to take more risks on unknowns.

CF: It feels like things are changing so quickly in publishing but that the funding bodies are lagging badly behind.

SC: I think they’re trying, but they’re large bureaucracies. Individuals are aware they’re not keeping up, but being part of the government makes it difficult to change quickly.

CF: What’s your biggest fear for Australian publishing? Is it doomed?

SC: That I won’t be able to make enough money to live as a writer! I don’t know if it’s doomed. People will always find a way to do interesting work. They might not have the same long-term careers as before and they might be more underground than is ideal, but they won’t stop being creative, unless the world does in fact end and we have to fight for our survival.

CF: Will Melbourne take on its role as a city of literature?

SC: Melbourne’s a medium sized city, which makes it kind of old fashioned. It’s in old-fashioned cities like this that writing culture survives. Really big cities get taken over by financial institutions and people can’t find the room to work. Melbourne’s daggy coolness is a good thing.

CF: Melbourne’s still manageable. But for how long?

SC: Yes. The heat! The heat!

CF: Don’t forget the bomb.

THE SUMMER 2009 EDITION OF MEANJIN IS OUT NOW.