This Issue 1. Best sellers for 2009 2. Salon events @ Avid 3. Jeff Lindsay Interview 4. Writers in the Bookshop 5. Feature interview: Wells Tower 6. Frank Theatre 7. Kasia Contemplates Art 193 BOUNDARY STREET, WEST END, QUEENSLAND 4101 | (07) 3846 3422 | BOOKS @ AVIDREADER.COM.AU | AVIDREADER.COM.AU
DVD and CDs
Best Selling Fiction 2009
Best Selling Non-Fiction 2009
Best Selling Children’s Books
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu – Gurrumul
1. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson, $24.95 2. The China Garden by Kristina Olsson, $32.95 3. The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, $32.95 4. Breath by Tim Winton $24.95 5. Brown Skin Blue by Belinda Jeffrey, $19.95 6. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, $19.95 7. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Grahame-Smith, $24.95 8. Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam $25.00 9. The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson, $24.95 10. Ransom by David Malouf, $29.95
1. Affection: A Memoir of Love, Sex and Intimacy by Krissy Kneen, $34.95 2. The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doige, $35.00 3. Seven Seasons in Aurukun by Paula Shaw, $26.95 4. Guide to Ethical Supermarket Shopping, $5.00 5. Dreams From My Father by Barak Obama, $24.95 6. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, $23.00 7. The Birth Wars by Mary Rose MacColl, $34.95 8. The Next 100 Years by George Friedman, $29.95 9. Dialogical Community Development by Gerard Dowling and Peter Westoby, $32.95 10. Brisbane’s Budget Bites 2009 by Mei Yen Chua, $14.95
1. Sarah’s Heavy Heart by Peter Carnarvas $24.95 2. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak $19.95 3. Beast Quest Series $15 4. Zac Power Series $9.95 5. Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate Di Camillo $16.95
$29.95 Still a clear bestseller, even 18 months after its original release. If you haven’t heard this album, you are missing out on something truly special. Blind from birth, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu is a powerhouse of musical creativity. Geoffrey, or Gudjuk as he is also called, is from the Gumatj nation, his mother from the Galpu nation both from North East Arnhemland. A former member of Yothu Yindi, now with Saltwater Band, Gurrumul’s solo excursions highlight his amazing talent as a singer/songwriter/musician, his beautiful voice singing the songs of his Gumatj country will never leave you.
Best Selling Young Adult Books 6. Brown Skin Blue by Belinda Jeffrey $19.95 7. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer $23.00 8. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer $23.00 9. Riding the Black Cockatoo by John Danalis $19.00 10. My Private Pectus by Shane Thamm $19.95
Best Selling Staff Picks 2009 1. The Lost Life by Steven Carroll 2. American Rust by Philip Meyer 3. The Housekeeper and the professor by Yoko Ogawa 4. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain De Botton 5. Omega Park by Amy Barker 6. Women in Black by Madeleine St John 7. Riding the black cockatoo by John Danalis
8. Seven Seasons in Aurukun by Paula Shaw 9. Raising my Voice by Malalai Joya 10. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 11. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. 12. Revolutionary Road by Richard yates 13. The Children’s Book by A S Bayatt
14. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Johathan Safran Foer 15. Eat the Document by Diana Spiotta 16. The Ice Age by Kirsten Reed 17. Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro 18. Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave 19. Song For Night by Chris Abani 20. Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill
Live in London DVD – Leonard Cohen $24.95 It’s a wonder we’re still here, considering the amount of Leonard Cohen we listened to, read and watched at the start of the year. Cohen’s world tour had just hit Brisbane, and everything depressing was cool again. This DVD captures Cohen at his best, recorded live on July 17, 2008 at London’s O2 Arena. Live In London offers definitive performances of classic songs drawn from Cohen’s 40-year career. This was the first time ever that a performance video of Cohen had been available. Unmissable.
Events at Avid Reader a crowd, what hope has first time novelist, Kirsten Reed (The Ice Age) of drawing a sizeable crowd to listen to her read from and talk about her book. Despite reviews that suggested that The Ice Age is ‘Compelling—the twenty-first century love child of Lolita and Huck Finn.’ (Christos Tsiolkas) and that ‘Reed writes in an arresting, confronting voice, getting the confused child-woman balance just right. A compelling road novel.’ (Sunday Mail) Avid Reader needed to find an innovaftive way to help Reed and other writers of fiction make contact with her audience.
Salon Events at Avid by Krissy Kneen Why go to hear an author speak? Well if they are engaging with a political issue that you are invested in the answer is easy. If they are talking about the economic downturn (Tony Kevin Wednesday November 18th) or about a fascinating public figure (Paul Barry The James Packer Story Wednesday October 18th), then why wouldn’t you want to come along and join in the public debate. As Events Coordinator at Avid Reader, the trick has been finding an audience for the writers of wonderful contemporary fiction who are on tour. Publicists are finding it more and more difficult to book in events with writers of literary fiction unless it is a book that has been turned into a very successful movie (Bernard Schlink The Reader) or television show (Jeff Lindsay Darkly Dreaming Dexter). Celebrity authors always draw a crowd and there will be no shortage of readers desperate to catch a glimpse of the marvellously articulate Margaret Atwood or the frighteningly astute Jeanette Winterson. Prizes are also good. We had a modest event with DBC Pierre on the back deck of Avid Reader not long before he was awarded the Booker Prize. When he returned to Australia post-prize we had to move our event to a larger venue to contain the crowd. But a worthy author who has not yet won the coveted Man Booker may be speaking to an almost empty house.
Susan Hornbeck, Publicity Manager for Scribe says that “it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince bookshops in major cities to host events for fiction authors (unless they’re extremely well-known) away from their home cities because audiences for such events are generally very small. It is much easier to promote a non-fiction book event to the general public (and the media) as they can immediately understand what they are going to come to hear. Fiction events are a much bigger gamble,as the success of the event often depends on the ability of the author to communicate rather than the subject of the book.” Kirsty Wilson, Publicity Manager at Text Publishing agrees, “a major independent bookshop in Sydney recently turned down a one-off event with Lloyd Jones, who was shortlisted for the Booker two years ago, because of their doubts about attracting a crowd to a fiction event. Lloyd was to have flown to the Ubud Writers’ Festival via Sydney so it would’ve been a ‘one-night only’ event -- but the events manager said no go.” The talented (and incredibly attractive) Tash Aw was merely shortlisted for the Booker has had two events at Avid and in each case Avid Reader staff worked very hard to convince a modest handful of readers that this was a not to be missed event. If an internationally successful and prizewinning writer like Tash Aw has trouble attracting
The Salons were developed as a direct response to this growing problem. There are three strong creative writing programmes in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast. Griffith Uni on the Gold Coast, QUT and UQ all have very talented and committed students working towards careers in creative writing. The idea was to facilitate a meeting between students and authors that would be benefitial to both. The Salons address this perfectly. Before the main event a select group of students get to meet with the writer and the discussion (over drinks) is all about process. What methods does the writer use to craft their story? What are the pitfalls? How did they first manage to snare a publishing contract? This discussion is followed by a regular author event with one twist. Three students, one from each university are invited to read for four minutes from their own fiction before the author reads and talks about their work. The success of these events have been heartwarming. We have drawn together an incredibly committed group of students who have begun to take control of their own events, facilitating their own question time, promoting their events and participating in post-event conversations about the night through social networking. There have been bonds formed between writers across the different universities and there are plans for Avid to find ways to develop a stronger programme of fiction events in 2010 with greater student involvement and perhaps even
a magazine that features the work of the students who participate in the events. A group of writing students from Griffith University who go by the name of Small Room have even approached Avid Reader to run an event of their own in the bookshop featuring their readings and drawing on the strong network of emerging writers that have been supporting the Salons. Ira Maguire from Small Room says, “I have attended the Salon Events with Kristen Reed, Philip Meyer and Ethan Canin, and have found the experiences invaluable. The sessions are for students and established writers to interact – a fantastic resource for those trying to break into the industry. Not only do we hear abut each writer’s process, but how they came to get their book published. It has also been a fantastic way to meet other up and coming writers. It is important to have contacts outside of your work – to have others who understand the processes and pitfalls of writing and to have a supporting network.” Ira is excited to be facilitating a conversation between students and Emily Maguire, author of the novel Smoke in the Room and the non-fiction book Princesses and Porn-Stars. The 2009 Salon series will end with the recent Age Book of the Year winner Steven Amsterdam author of Things I Didn’t See Coming. Steven is looking forward to meeting the students at the Salon. “As a newly established writer, I have to say that I’ve always found advice or general wisdom from more established (read: paid) writers to be beneficial. Not simply instructive (e.g. write every day; seek feedback promiscuously, submit endlessly), but comforting. They tell you what it feels like, what the struggles are, and, for the most part, they’re not that different. Among most writers, established and less so, there is a reassuring sense that the wall between them is not that high.” says Amsterdam “Being reminded of that has always made me feel more confident in my course.” You can join our last Salon of the year with Steven Amsterdam on Thursday the 12th November, 6pm for a 6.30 start.
193 BOUNDARY STREET, WEST END, QUEENSLAND 4101 | (07) 3846 3422 | BOOKS @ AVIDREADER.COM.AU | AVIDREADER.COM.AU
Feature interview
Dreaming of Dexter by Jason Reed (film reviewer and bookseller, Riverbend Books and Teahouse). Picture by Chris Somerville
The Brisbane Writer’s Festival was held recently and we were lucky enough to be visited by some international authors. One in particular had sold out sessions and long lines for book signings. The creator of Dexter, the serial killer who only kills bad people, made the long trip from Miami to join us here in Brisbane, and he loved “being in Australia, I can understand up to 50% of what people say.” While he was here, I was lucky enough to ask Jeff Lindsay a few questions about his unusual character. Jeff came across as very approachable, relaxed and most of all funny. He has a past in stand-up comedy amongst many, many other things, and this comes through when he speaks, always ready with a clever quip or one-liner. When asked if he was surprised by the success of Dexter, he said he was “surprised and appalled, what is wrong with you people?” Dexter often gets compared to characters who right wrongs or level the playing field, which may have a lot to do with his appeal, however, “the big difference is vigilantes; Robin Hood and all that are working from a sense of outraged justice and trying to correct wrongs. Dexter truly doesn’t give a rusty possum fart about all of that, he just likes to kill people. And he happens to kill people that probably deserve to die, because that’s the way he’s been set up. And it works. He’s not going to change it as long as it works. But without that early training, he’d be just as happy killing anybody.”
During the writing of the Dexter novels, Jeff delved into research surrounding the behaviour of psychopaths. He was lucky enough to have a psychologist as a relative whom he could bounce ideas off. However, after writing about psychotic behaviour for a while, he didn’t need to ask anymore and just knew how Dexter would act, “it was a bit worrisome. While it’s happening, it’s a moment of triumph, I know what this is like, perfect, I can write about it, and then afterwards I go, yeah, but how did I know?” Despite the common misconception that authors of horror must contemplate the same thoughts themselves, Jeff is friendly, generous in his answers and of course nothing like his serial killer creation. He encounters this kind of opinion with “almost everyone actually. Most interviewers make these sort of jokes with this scared look in their eyes, ‘heh, heh, it’s not really you is it?’ Like ‘I know this is stupid, but I can’t help myself, I have to ask.’ It couldn’t be further from the truth, just last night there were a couple of people I should have slapped and I didn’t. I guess, basically I’m a mild person.” That’s not to say that Jeff doesn’t get his own version of literary revenge, for example, in “Darkly Dreaming Dexter, there’s a guy, Dexter goes to a construction site and he tapes him down to a table and sort of kills off the cuff. I had an agent, who had the manuscript for the first book for a year and didn’t read it… That’s him.” The television adaptation of the books features a certain amount of violence. However, readers of Jeff’s books will know that the violence is more subtle and implied. This was intentional as, “part of the trick with the books is to make people like him, and I thought holding back from that is one good way to help that out a bit. I also thought that there’s a kind of good taste to Dexter, that he really doesn’t want to dwell on that aspect of it so much and in any case, he’s somewhat disassociated from it.” You might think that
making a serial killer likeable would be quite challenging, however, it “turned out to be surprisingly easy, I mean, people were more than willing to meet me half way on this, which is a little bit disturbing… every now and then [I like to] have people going ‘What a great guy… wait a minute.’” The advertising for the show depicts Dexter, played by Michael C. Hall, on large billboards, bus stops and all over the Internet. The images show a handsome, smiling man, often with a knife held behind his back and surrounded by blood splatter. It seems possible that this sort of advertising might inadvertently glamorise violence, “possibly, but I don’t think, however you dress it up, you can convert someone. You can’t take a person who doesn’t have that problem and give it to them, by showing something on television or in a book. If there’s someone who is deeply disturbed already, there are many things that could set them off, and maybe Dexter’s one of them. But it doesn’t create a problem.”
I had an agent, who had the manuscript for the first book for a year and didn’t read it A fifth book is on the way, titled Dexter is Delicious, which deals with cannibals. I managed to get a few details from Jeff about the story, “make sure you put the spoiler alert here. I thought after four books, I could deal with the subject and no one would think I was stealing Hannibal Lecter, especially since it’s not Dexter who is actually eating people, in fact he’d probably think the idea is as appalling as I do. There’s a group of cannibals that he comes across and they actually get their hands on him and it’s a bit of a sticky wicket there for a while, I don’t want to give too many details away, but he’s actually captured and nearly cooked.”
While we’re all eagerly waiting for the fifth instalment, we’ll just have to make do with the four existing books, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Dearly Devoted Dexter, Dexter in the Dark and Dexter by Design. There’s also the three series of the television show, all available from Avid Reader.
It’s A Bloody Crime! Bookclub meets the first Saturday of the month at 2.00pm on Avid’s back deck. Not only do we like to read crime we also love to travel around the world without leaving the comfort of our lounges. (We might be blood thirsty but we are also a bit lazy). From the gold granite city of Glasgow to the coast of Puglia, each month we have read a crime novel set in a different country. In December we will vote for our favourite book for the year and I’m reckoning two that will make the shortlist include: Involuntary Witness by Gianrico Carofiglio $25.00 More than a perfectly paced legal thriller this is intriguing insight into a less than perfect counselor, Guido Guerrieri, who is called upon to represent a Senegalese peddler in what is a hopeless case. I think we all fell a little bit in love with Guido. The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill $27.95 Colin recently won the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library Award for his body of work which features the elderly and charming Dr Siri Paiboun. It’s 1976 and the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos has been declared and Dr Siri, a now reluctant communist is drafted to be the national coroner for which he has no training other than curiosity & two unlikely staff members.
AVID READER HAS EXTENDED OPENING HOURS. WE ARE NOW OPEN MONDAY TO FRIDAY UNTIL 8.30PM
A writer’s place is in the bookshop City Lights was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. In 1955 they began the famous City Lights Publishing house which became synonymous with the Beat Generation of writers, publishing Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
“A couple of years ago, I found myself without a friendly writing space due to renovations at my Playboy Mansion. Avid’s frighteningly vast network of spies found out about this, and next thing I knew I was bundled upstairs past the used dump bins and life-sized Harry Potter cut outs, thrown into an empty room and told to get writing. It was a little like being kidnapped by that crazy chick in Stephen King’s Misery. But it worked. After months of flapping about haplessly I got my writin’ mojo back and cranked heaps o’ words on Without Warning.” This from John Birmingham, the man who brought us He Died With A Felafel in His Hand and more recently the Weapons of Choice series. This is a particularly extreme example of the symbiotic relationship between writers and their favourite local bookshop. Avid Reader is indeed fond of adopting our local writers and many a book has been completed, at least in part at our cafe tables or upstairs in the office. There is nothing we like better than selling a book to a keen reader and suggesting that we should get that book signed because the author happens to be working / meeting / having coffee in the store. 50% of the bookshop staff are published authors and ex-staff Benjamin Law, Anna Krien, Ronnie Scott and Kristina Olsson, all have books or short stories published or about to be published. There is a fine global history of authors and booksellers sharing their space and their love of books. City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco set up a publishing house to harness the creative talent walking through the door.
In Paris, Shakespeare and Co became known as a place where penniless writers could live rent-free as long as they proved their commitment to reading and to their craft. Avid Reader does not provide the same kind of welcome that Shakespeare and Co afford to their visiting authors. There are no beds tucked away in the corner of the shop, although in my ten years as a bookseller at Avid I have often slept on a day bed in the upstairs office working on one manuscript or another, ducking home only to eat and shower at first light. Perusing the shelves is an excellent cure for writer’s block although the sheer number of books published each month and the effort it takes to put the right book into the hands of the right reader is enough to induce a panic attack. So many ideas for novels and works of non-fiction have found their sea legs at Avid Reader, book contracts have been signed, first drafts have been completed. The writing mentors Kristina Olsson and N A Bourke from The Perilous Adventures often use Avid Reader’s cafe as a meeting place to work with clients on their manuscripts and to provide them with carreer advice. Belinda Jeffrey, author of Brown Skin Blue has had a long and successful relationship with Avid Reader as a space to write and to interract with her readers. “I will never think of my first book, or the beginning of my writing career, without thinking of Avid Reader. It’s where I launched my first book, it’s where I read and write and drink coffee. A woman came up to me at a library the other day and said ‘I’ve seen you at Avid Reader’. It seems like the place to be.”
Fiona Stager who co-owns the bookshop with her partner Kevin Guy believes that writers who don’t interract with their local bookshop are at a disadvantage. “Writing is an important job, but like all jobs, you aren’t operating in a vacuum. Without a view of the whole of the industry you are at a bit of a disadvantage.” Books are a conversation between a writer, a world of readers and also between other writers. A writer who does not read is not going to know where their work fits into the conversation. Reading is a part of the job of writing, and reading widely and insightfully can only help a writer to hone their craft. Emily Phillip from Riverbend bookshop echoes the sentiment. “It seems obvious that a bookshop could not exist without writers, but how well would a writer do without a bookshop? There seem to be an ever-increasing range of options for writers to publish content online but still, for the majority, bookshops are the source of where the public gets a glimpse at what writers have been writing. To me the best writers are those that aren’t afraid to hang out in bookshops. In a bookshop writers are free to peruse what their contempories have written and to talk to professional readers (aka booksellers). There is nothing more phony than a writer who doesn’t read.” Avid Reader has been a creche from which several new voices in literature have emerged. Trent Jamieson has recently been signed for a three book deal across three continents for a science fiction series. His relationship with bookshops has been a long and healthy one. Trent grew up around books. His parents-in-law owned a successful Dymocks store in Lismore and his early working life saw him coming into contact with an incredibly diverse range of books. “Working in a bookshop is great, and terrifying for writers. Great because you’re exposed to so much interesting and different material. You can’t just read one genre, in fact you realise how crippling that is as a writer,
and as a reader, well you want to taste everything, try everything. There are so many ways to tell stories, to use words beautifully. Working in a bookstore exposes you to more of that narrative and beauty than you’d get anywhere else, it’s a background radiation, a constant. Books and people talking about books, that becomes your life. Terrifying because you realise just how much stuff is out there, and how wonderful a lot of it is, and just what it is that you’re trying to make your mark against, and just how easy it is for any book to become lost in all that product.” Avid’s Christopher Currie worked in Dymocks in the city before I met him at a writing retreat and lured him to work with us at Avid. Since his time at Avid, Christopher has produced the incredibly successful one-story-aday blog FuriousHorses, been longlisted for the Vogel award and landed a coveted publishing contract with Text Publishing for his first novel due to be released in 2011. “Moving into a buying role at Avid has taught me how much is published every month, and how your book has to be very special to rise above the white noise of new releases. Let alone stay on the shelf for longer than four weeks.” For me Avid Reader has become a place where writing and reading is placed firmly at the centre of the world. I meet many touring authors in my job as events coordinator and the insight I gain from listening to them speak is invaluable. Each box of new books reveals a secret to me about the craft that I could never learn at a university. Each customer holds the potential for some new piece of information about what good writing is and how it impacts on a reader. Sometimes, the endless grind of the day-job clouds the reality of this, but take one step back and I realise that a writer’s place is indeed in a bookshop. Krissy Kneen is a bookseller and the Author of Affection: A Memoir of Love Sex and Intimacy
193 BOUNDARY STREET, WEST END, QUEENSLAND 4101 | (07) 3846 3422 | BOOKS @ AVIDREADER.COM.AU | AVIDREADER.COM.AU
Short Original Fiction
Theatre have performed at the Summer Season, a festival of international theatre, four times. This year the company, with its new ensemble, performed their show The Reckoning of Badengood.
Six Sentence Fiction
Death
Frankly Speaking
Ira Maguire.
The woman walks down to the florist. She does this every Wednesday and orders a bouquet of flowers. Then she returns home, arranges them in a small glass vase, placing it in the same place. The photo that is there in front of the vase is weathered, sepia toned. She picks it up and wipes invisible dust with the sleeve of her shirt, then places it back. The smiling baby in the photo is a contrast to the woman’s face, which turns away, the eyes sad and haunted, her face now weathered, drained of colour.
by Kate Lee Roger Federer has selected you as part of an international committee to codify the method of his training and to decide the future of his legacy.
Love She had left him decades previously, tired of waiting for his commitment and the children he wasn’t ready for just now. There was plenty of time so why rush things? Spending his life working and avoiding commitment, he ignored his wistful longings as he passed older couples on the street content in their quiet companionship, years of shared knowledge between them. He had heard along the grapevine that she had married a man who barely kept their head above water, but she had never been happier than living in her small neat house, surrounded by her four small children. He lay where he fell on the floor of his pristine kitchen, surrounded by cold granite and stainless steel, the large and looming windows showing the passing of the day, with no one to help him. He realised in his final moment that he should have married her; she had been willing to overlook his temper and moods, had loved him despite his arrogance, and now that it was too late, he loved her in an outburst of emotion, with a kind of flailing rage.
Restraint At first she is clingy, wanting to spend every moment by his side and demands his constant attention to the point where he wonders if it’s all worth it. But after a few years things seem to change. She no longer needs him as much, is confident in her own company, steps into the world without him. One day he realises their roles have reversed. Now he is the clingy one, holding onto her like a child with a balloon – a tenuous grasp as she floats higher, afraid of pulling against her in case the string snaps; instead letting her float out, further and wider. He hopes that she can still feel him at the end of the fraying string, now thinner, unkempt; a small figure from such a great distance. Ira Maguire is a Creative Writing student at Griffith University on the Gold Coast Campus. She has facilitated with the Avid Reader Salon Series of events.
This is the analogy John Knobb’s, from Brisbane’s Frank Theatre, used to describe the honour of being selected to be part of an international conference to decide the future of Tadashi Suzuki’s Company of Toga (SCOT) and th Suzuki Actor Training Method. Since the 1970s Tadashi Suzuki has been a forerunner in avantgarde and intercultural theatre and is a founding member of the International Theatre Olympics. His exploration of text and physical performance led to the development of his unique form of psychophysical actor training. The Suzuki Actor Training Method is a combination of Noh theatre, Kabuki, traditional Japanese martials arts and classical ballet. Knobb’s and his partner Jacqui Carroll discovered Suzuki when Knobb’s was invited to perform The Chronicle of Macbeth in Melbourne in 1992. Since then, the couple have been training performers in Suzuki’s method and challenging Brisbane theatre with their irreverent stagings of the classical canon. Knobb’s continually seeks to re-define the training for western sensibilities and Carroll, who directs Frank’s work, is drawn to the challenge of physicalized theatre. Since 1994 Frank Theatre have visited SCOT yearly and
The Toga Summer Season first opened its doors to international artists in 1982. Renowned theatre artists such as Robert Wilson and Tadeusz Kantor performed there, giving the festival its international reputation. Nestled in a sleepy village in the Japanese Alps, with two outdoor theatres and three traditional indoor theatres, SCOT and the Summer Season is a truly unique place. Knobb’s and Carroll’s relationship to Suzuki and the training is remarkable. As former dancers Carroll’s infinite physical knowledge combines with Knobb’s psychological explorations and together they have created a training system that is internationally distinctive. That is why Knobb’s has been selected as a member of the international committee, with seven delegates from six countries, to discuss the future of Toga and the Suzuki Actor Training Method. Over the next two years the conference will discuss methods to retain Suzuki’s theatre complex in Toga and to codify the training. With individual interpretations and cultural adaptations the systemization of the training may be problematic. Perhaps the future of Suzuki’s training lies not so much in its systemization, after all it is a Japanese system developed for a Japanese body, but in the continual conversation of international trainers and artists to share their experiences and outcomes with the training. Frank Theatre’s next show Up Jumped The Devil will be at QPAC from October 23-31 Kate Lee is a director, writer and performer and we are lucky to have her working at the Avid Reader Cafe.
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Author Interview.
Wells Tower Interviewed. Christopher Currie caught up with Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned at the recent Melbourne Writers Festival. This interview was first published on Angela Meyer’s LiteraryMinded blog, hosted by Crikey: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/literaryminded’. Picture by Chris Somerville
Back in March, during one of my many reverential trawls through my RSS feeds, I began hearing about an American writer, Wells Tower, whose short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned was beginning to garner some very warm praise. After reading Edmund White’s review in the New York Times, I knew I wanted to read it. Badly. Using my best bookseller’s cunning, I tried desperately to get Allen & Unwin (the book’s Australian publisher) to part with an advance copy, to no avail. And I am ashamed to say, amid the other shiny new books, I forgot about it. I picked it up eventually in late July, and was blown away by the quality of Wells’ writing and narrative skills (more on that below). To my great surprise, I found out that Wells was going to be appearing at the Melbourne Writers Festival (a fact I had to triple-check, thanks to the time I thought George Saunders was coming to the Sydney Writers Festival, and had nearly booked my tickets before realising my information came from a typo in a press release). To my greater surprise, Wells was available for interview! When my good buddy Angela threw this info my way, I jumped at the chance to catch up with the author of my favourite short story collection of the past five years. After he wowed audiences with his impeccable and impressive In Conversation session at the festival, and signed his book for a good twenty minutes, Wells very
generously gave over his time to me for an interview. Just talking to him makes you begin to compile a hefty checklist of short story writers you’ve always meant to read but just haven’t. And he talks like he writes, with a profound, considered intelligence. Which made me all the more aware of the distracted yapping that was my interviewing style. To Wells’ credit, he took my strange questions and answered them eloquently. You’ve probably done a whole heap of media for this book— what’s the question you’re most sick of being asked? People like to ask me whether there’s a resurgence in short story publishing, or whether we’re experiencing some sort of short story renaissance, which I couldn’t possibly begin to know. I suppose you should ask that of the person who’s never read a short story before. I’ve loved short stories for quite a while. That question is impossible to answer. It seems as though it’s part of a cycle, though. It seems as if there’s a short story collection every few months or years that gets some attention. But I think people will always pay attention to short stories on some level. You said you read a lot of short stories. Has that always been the case? Do you go out of your way to read short stories, whether they’re in collections, journals or magazines? I guess I’m not really chasing as many short story collections as I probably should be. I think we had a great run in the United States in the 20th century. We had a lot of people who were fantastically gifted: John Cheever, Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Denis Johnson— there were a lot of people who really dedicated themselves to the form, in that it wasn’t just their workbook for longer works. If you
read someone like Nabokov, who was the master of the novel, when you read his short stories, you can tell it’s just his sketchbook. I suppose it’s rare these days to find someone who devotes themselves fully to short fiction. To me the short story is such a difficult puzzle; when you find someone who’s done it well, you really enjoy going back and reading their stories again and again and trying to see where the gears are, how the machine is put together. With a good short story, as soon as you’ve got a flat paragraph, or unnecessary information, the reader is gone. Do you see the transition from short stories to novels as the inevitable career progression of a writer? I don’t. I suppose there is this emphasis on novel writing, as in if you’re a real writer, you’d better get to it on a novel. In some ways I think it’s more difficult to write a successful short story. That said, I’m having a miserable time getting started on my own novel, and that will be tremendously difficult too, but I agree with the famous Cortázar quote that the novel can win on points, but a short story has to win by knockout. A really gripping short story, I think, is such a difficult thing to pull off. I don’t think there’s any reason to disdain the people who’ve done it well. John Cheever is certainly one of those. Reading his novels, they kind of don’t hold together. I read a couple of them this summer, and they’re fine, but somehow there’s not the same kind of intensity. I was interested in the time frame of the stories that appear in the collection. How far apart were they written, and published? It was probably six or seven years. The first short stories in the book were really the first short stories I ever wrote: I wrote those stories in graduate school. I suppose I wrote four or five stories over two years, and then the rest, probably over another four or five years. But I was doing a lot of magazine work then, too, so I didn’t really have a lot of time to focus on the fiction. Did your journalism start before the fiction, or did it happen at the same time?
Kind of simultaneously, yes. I sold my first magazine piece in the spring of 2000, and then went to graduate school in the fall of 2000. Not long after I got out of graduate school I got a contract with the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, so I’d do three cover stories a year for them, and those were quite long—about eight thousand words, so it would take two or three months to do the whole thing, with the reporting and the writing and the editing, so it was quite a bit of work. What is the relationship between your fiction and your nonfiction? How do they live side by side? I think when I started writing large magazine stories, it really screwed up my ability to write short fiction. The way you write a big magazine piece of course is that you go out and do some reporting. Because I had no journalistic training, I was kind of a frenzied, paranoid note-taker—I would take so many notes because I was so scared I wouldn’t come up with anything worth writing about. I would generate huge amounts of notes, many hundreds of pages for each story. From there you would try and figure out which scenes were strongest, or whether you’d taken a good description of something, and then, for eight thousand words, you’d take five or six scenes and try and come up with a contextual argument, and thread the thing together to make it more or less work. For a while I was trying to use that same approach to writing short stories, where I would just generate these big, explosive, terrible drafts, and I’d think I’d be able to go back and condense it into something that made emotional sense. But it never did. I think with a short story it’s really about trying to define a small, private space with a lot of intensity and an intimacy of feeling, and it’s very hard to try and fumble your way into that with large, unwieldy, emotionally vague drafts. But then, a lot people I met when I was out researching nonfiction pieces have made their way into my fiction. When you were writing nonfiction, were you reading other peoples’ work, in the same way you’d read other short story writers? I was. I was reading more nonfiction when I was doing magazine work. But again, I think I have pretty
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standard canonical tastes. I was reading George Orwell’s nonfiction, and Joan Didion and Ian Frazier. It’s important to me to have a stack of books at the side of my desk so I can just crack into them and remember that writing is possible. When you were deciding on which stories to include in this collection, were you looking at the bigger picture, i.e. will these nine stories work as a whole? Or was it more a case of looking at each story individually? I was just looking at them individually. I wouldn’t have really known how to work in themes that would make it appear more “book-like”. For me the theme of the book was simply that they were the first nine stories that I wrote that I didn’t despise. I guess at one point I thought, well maybe the way to make this work is make the stories linked, and to have somebody from one story wander into another, but a lot of times that just feels really stupid and contrived, so I stayed away from that. After the collection was under contract, I went back and threw out three or four stories. Many others I re-wrote: I scraped them to their foundation and rebuilt. For me it was just a case of going through and trying to do away with what felt like cheap tricks—stories that felt like they were a bit too glib, or there were emotional parts in the story I was deliberately shying away from. That’s how it works for me, going back and working out what is the most important emotional tension in each story, and trying to address that in subsequent drafts. In other interviews, you’ve talked about your stories having a “moral pendulum” swinging between characters, and the importance of putting the reader slightly off-balance at the end of a story. Do think that’s more of a modern feature of a short story—the idea that the story doesn’t have to exist in a neat little world? I suppose. Although with someone like Chekhov, he would write stories that would end at an uncertain moment. On the other side, you’ve got somebody like Roald Dahl or Somerset Maugham, where the stories are very carefully plotted out. I really enjoy reading those guys, but I have a hard time believing that everything is tidied
up so neatly, without it feeling contrived. I think in the ending of a short story, the reader should be rocking back on their heels a bit. That said, a story should give a suggestion of how its inhabitants are going to wind up, where the momentum of their lives is heading at the end of the story. I like the uncertain moment. A lot of Raymond Carver’s short stories were like that. I really like the freeze-frame, where the crockery is up in the air, and you’re waiting for something to fall. I don’t really know where I stole that impulse. I’m sure I lifted it from somebody. It never really occurred to me that I was doing something weird with my stories until people started telling me. I think my stories do have sort of “lights out” endings, where a master switch gets thrown. The one ending in the collection that seemed different to me was in the final story [the title story, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned], those final paragraphs that talk about the balance between love and fear in a family. It was lovely, and it felt more like a summing up. Yeah, it’s a nice bit. I like those paragraphs too. That was a pretty early story for me. It’s funny how it all felt like such simple carpentry back then. I’d written this quite grotesque story, and then I thought I’d better come up with some sort of counterweight to that so I’ll have this more heart-swollen conclusion. I just kind of riveted it on the end, but I think it kind of works. One of the most impressive things about the book, and what has been attributed to it in other places, is this sense of it being “oldfashioned” writing. I suppose what I see this as is that while you have very lean prose, you’re still not afraid of a confident simile or considered word picture. Yes, I think my impulse is much more toward baroque sentencecraft. When I’m writing, often the first drafts are really antic, and just playing with language a lot, but then I go back and try to pare it down. I do think that with good writing, you feel the pulse of it in every sentence. There should be something exciting, gleeful, or artful in every sentence. I think
when writing is too spare, it’s tedious. When you start to write like that, as a writer you stop paying attention. I think when you’re writing, you have to be incredibly invested in every word and every line of what you’re doing. When I’m writing well, I can find some sort of pleasure in every line of a story, but if I can’t, it needs work.
editing the better. I really relish it.
Sometimes I read work by writers, and you can see they’re not really thinking about how they’re putting sentences together, and I think that’s unforgivable. How can you possibly expect anybody to read your work if you’re not obsessively labouring over every word you put down? When I read work that doesn’t reflect that degree of intensity I get kind of angry.
One of my big commandments in my stories is no good guys and no bad guys. The story is about two brothers who don’t get along, and they get together and go hunting. The first version of the story was told from the point of view of the younger brother, and he’s going to visit his older brother, who’s kind of a blowhard, a bit of an asshole. The younger brother shows up, and the older brother is obnoxious, and continues to be obnoxious, and at the end of it, eats a bit of rotten meat. When I went back to edit it for the short story collection, it just seemed to me like a moral and an emotional monotone: here’s this guy who’s an asshole, and who’s punished for being an asshole. I thought it would be a much more morally complicated story to tell it from the point of view of the older brother, and try to curry the reader’s sympathy for the more despicable character. It just seemed like a more interesting assignment to give myself, and a much more honest one.
A lot of the stories in your collection have appeared previously in other magazines and journals. Is it ever a problem working with more than one editor, say one editor at Harper’s Magazine, or The New Yorker, and another editor at your publishing house? It really isn’t. It’s rare to find an editor at a journal or a magazine who will beat up your fiction the way they will if it is nonfiction. A piece of nonfiction gets heavily edited—the editor has his handprints on every single bit of it. A magazine’s identity is decided very much by how its features are assembled. They want a kind of continuity of product. Whereas with fiction— I’m not sure if it’s a dismissive view of fiction on the part of magazine editors, or whether it’s a case of this is a piece of art, and we need to be more respectful of the artist. I don’t intend to get anywhere near the same kind of sweeping edits with fiction that I get with nonfiction, but it’s kind of a relief when I do. Eli Horowitz at McSweeney’s [another guest of MWF] is a very meddlesome editor, in the best possible way, in that he’ll really look at a story and think what is this story about? and how can we re-arrange it? We really go through a lot of drafts, and he’s really a lot of fun to work for, even though I think every story I’ve ever done with him, I get to a point where I just think there’s no way of making this story good, so can we please just not do this. For me, the more
The first story of yours I read, Retreat, was in McSweeney’s 30. It was, as I found out, the second version of the story to appear there. I was fascinated by the essay in that issue where you talked about rewriting the story from the point of view of a different character. How did that come about?
So, a novel is next? Yeah, I’ve started on that. Have you attempted longer pieces before? I have, but not in years. I started writing some semblance of this novel back in 2001. It’ll be exciting to do it. How much planning are you allowing yourself to do? I’ve got a loose plan. It’ll be a family book. I’ve got a sense of where the tensions are in this family and how things may wind up. But really, I’m going to have to just write my way into it. Then Wells started to ask about my novel, and I switched off the tape. * To read more about Wells Tower at MWF, you can read Estelle Tang’s review of the book; Thuy Linh Nguyen’s review of Wells’ short fiction workshop; and Jabberwocky’s overview of the In Conversation session.
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Science Fiction and Fantasy
Children’s Fiction
Trent Jamieson
Paul Landymore
Anna Hood
Palimpset
Civilisation As We Know It
Liar
Catherynne M. Valente $29.95 The city lies at the heart of most fantasy, whether it’s a repudiation of urban spaces and an argument for nature and its wildness and capacity for wonder, or a celebration of the streets where most of us live, the city is undeniable in its influence. Palimpset, by Catherynne M. Valente is one of the most erotic explorations of the city I have ever read. In rhythmic sensual prose she takes us to a fantasyland an eye blink and a dream beyond our own. The city of Palimpset is lush and hot, and filled to the dripping brim with dangers fabulous and dark. And it can only be entered, so to speak, by having sex with someone who has been there. The city leaves its mark on all its explorers, and to be there once is to yearn for it endlessly. In this novel we trace the journey for adventurers, bound by their hunger for Palimpset, and their desire to make a living there. The prose is elegant and beguiling, the characters and what they are prepared to give up fascinating. Palimpset is certainly one of the most fabulous cities you are likely to encounter in modern fantasy. It’s a wonderful read, and one that will have you hunting down everything by this new star in the Spec Fic firmament.
Apocalyptic fiction has been an obsession this year. First there was Richard Matheson’s triple film adapted I Am Legend, and if you’ve seen any of these films, forget them, as the book has much greater depth and a far stronger and impacting ending. Its story of a global pandemic that turns humanity into ‘vampires’ whilst much copied was truly original and the strength of the novel over the films is the mutation of the virus and the impact this has on the moral position of lead character Robert Neville. Currently I’m reading Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, which as in the previous book mankind suffers near annihilation by a virus. But where this differs is the story of how the disparate survivors deal with their isolation, some eventually forming a small community that initially tries to maintain the ways of modern life but ultimately brought to the realisation that a return to earlier, simpler ways, offers their best chance of survival. Special mention must be made of Nevil Shute’s, sadly, often out-of-print, but once again soon to be re-issued classic On the Beach. Set in Australia in the aftermath of a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere, the fallout of which is slowly moving south, this simply but beautifully written story of how people live in the shadow of inevitable death proved to be very moving and has haunted my memory. For those afraid of being seen to read genre fiction, two recent and exceptional novels that deal with the same theme are Cormac McCarthy’s much lauded The Road and Steven Amsterdam’s quite staggering and increasingly lauded debut Things We Didn’t See Coming.
Justine Larbalestier, Out Now $23.00 Micah is a self confessed liar. She is quite happy to live the first week at her new high school having everyone believe she is a boy. She tells lies to cover up the affair she is having with someone else’s boyfriend. She even makes everyone think her father is a mobster. Her days are filled with keeping all these fabrications going or dealing with the aftermath when people find her out. But when her boyfriend Zach is found dead and all her lies are exposed there is one truth Micah must keep secret, something no-one would believe anyway. Micah also thinks she knows who did it and maybe if she writes it all down and for once stops telling all the lies, she will bring Zach’s killer to justice. Micah is a flawed character whose one promise at the beginning to tell no more lies is tested as she explores the days before and after Zach’s murder. This young adult novel is not for the faint-hearted and is best read by knowing very little of the storyline. I found this to be an engaging read full of so many twists and turns, I just couldn’t put it down. If you loved the first-love yearning of the Twilight novels and you enjoy a gory murder-mystery, this book is for you.
The Magician’s Elephant Kate DiCamillo October 2009 $24.95 Kate DiCamillo is already one of Avid Reader’s favorite children’s authors. She penned timeless classic such as ‘The Tale Of Despereaux’ and ‘The Miraculous Journey Of Edward Tulane’ and her new book ‘The Magician’s Elephant’ is a story so beautiful and such a joy to read, it will quickly become a favorite for readers young and old alike. A Magician of mediocre standards stands in front of an audience wishing he could perform some magic, something extraordinary and amazing, and without really meaning to or believing he could, he conjures an elephant that crashes through the roof of the theatre. Across town a little orphan named Peter wishes desperately for his family back and he is told he will find his sister, as she alone is not dead. All he has to do is follow the elephant. From there we are swept into a magical journey that brings people together, attracts love to those who have none, shows people the correct path their lives should lead and makes you truly believe the impossible can happen with a little luck, some magic and one huge elephant. I cannot stress enough how much I love this book. It is already one of my all time favorite children’s books. Read it and I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.
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Staff Picks for a New Season
Kasia Janczewski
Krissy Kneen
Trent Jamieson
Fiona Stager
Half Broke Horses
A Gate at The Stairs
Sharp Shooter
Non-Fiction
Jeannette Walls, $33.0 The very first page of this true-life novel had me holding my breath while I was willing for the survival of Lily Casey Smith, a child clinging for survival with her two younger siblings in a cottonwood tree during a flash flood on her family’s ranch in Texas. This is our introduction to the feisty, intelligent and resilient woman at the heart of this novel and her tremendous life – the grandmother of Jeanette Walls, a family legend born in 1901.
by Lorrie Moore. Arthur Veno & Edward Winterhalder, $33.00 Lorrie Moore is a bit of a legend among writerly folk. Her short stories have appeared in the New Yorker and The Paris Review and in several masterful collections including Birds of America and Collected Stories. These wonderfully simple contemporary stories are insightful, wise and delicately written and she does not dissapoint with her new novel.
Marianne Delacourt, $30.00 Ok, so I have to say upfront that Crime isn’t my usual thing. But Brisbane writer, Marianne Delacourt’s Sharp Shooter was a breezy fun read and about as fast-paced as the Monaro the novel’s heroine, Tara Sharp drives.
In another life I would be a world traveling biologist. I would go in search of the rare White-Letter Hairstreak Butterfly. I’d track down curious bees and wax lyrical about the sex pheromones of insects. I’d join the quest to find evidence of the extinct Labrador Duck. But the reality is I failed science and am a half-hearted camper. So instead I collect not specimens but natural history books. My favourites at the moment are:
I had the feeling that I was covered in red dust as I turned the pages to follow Lily as she joyfully and sometimes painfully toiled the harsh landscape of her family ranch, breaking horses and tending to the demands of their property, their only livelihood. I loved every minute of discovering how she would deal with the hurdles of her life as she traversed urban and rural America, desperately pursuing an education she couldn’t afford, a vocation that inspired her and ensured her survival and companionship that she could trust. This story had me enthralled and invested in its main character to the very end – no-nonsense evocative writing that celebrates a brave woman and reveals a history of hardship probably endured by many Americans.
Moore is known more for her short stories than for her two previous novels, but this is about to change with the release of the subtle and poignant A Gate at the Stairs. This post September 11 New York novel is not as obsessed by the terrorist attacks as previous novels that touch on the subject. have been. Instead, we are securely along for the ride with protagonist Tassie Keltjin. Tassie is fresh from the mid-west, more at home milking cows than prancing around New York. Yet, wide eyed and with an infectious sense of humour, Tassie is determined to get the best out of New York and enjoy life in the great city despite her sense of aloneness and the distinct impression that she is a bit of a misfit. She seeks work as a nanny and secures a position with a couple who are trying to adopt a baby. It is through the enlightening relationship between Tassie and her Employer, Sarah, that we gain insight into a world where the adults amongst us try and fail to provide a safe environment for the next generation. This is a book that echoes long after the last page is turned.
They’ve packaged the first book to appeal to Janet Evanovich readers, but I found it better written than Evanovich’s stuff, and, well, fresher. Maybe it’s the Perth setting, lovingly drawn, or Tara’s combination of enthusiasm and twenty-something ennui. Tara’s a great character, kick-arse, yes, but also sensitive enough to be compelling. She also has a tendency to get into deeper and deeper trouble, despite, or maybe because of, her almost supernatural gift for reading people. The supporting characters are fun too, the villains are slick and dangerous, the love interest is gorgeous. And the stakes keep on rising. Perth has never looked as sexy – who’d have thought. So, a fast-paced crime thriller with a strong Australian voice, what more could you want heading into the Summer? Fans of Janet Evanovich will quickly become fans of Tara Sharp, the rest of us, can just jump into Mona the Monaro, slip on our seatbelts, and crash along for the ride. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more of Tara Sharp in the future.
Fireflies, Honey, and Silk Gilbert Waldbauer $49.95 The most recent additions to my garden are two native stingless beehives. Three year old Gracie from next door and I will often sit and just watch little black bees going about their bee business. So I was just delighted when this enchanting hard back, written by an entomologist, arrived in-store. It’s about the myriad ways insects have enriched our lives-culturally, economically and aesthetically.
The Curse of the Labrador Duck Glen Chilton $35.00 Glen Chilton is a self-confessed obsessive. He’s a man who never collects anything by half so when he becomes intrigued by the extinct Labrador Duck he starts an 82 000 mile journey to track down every known stuffed specimen and every known spot were they were last spotted. Along the way he risks heavy-metal poisoning in Russia, swims naked in a glacier-fed stream, and narrowly avoids arrest in New York City. Meet Glen Chilton on Tuesday 27th October @ Avid 6pm for a 6.30 start
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Staff Picks
Paul Landymore
Christopher Currie
Anna Hood
Fiona Stager
Transition
The World Beneath Cate Kennedy, $32.95 As a huge fan of Cate Kennedy’s short fiction, I had very high hopes for this, her first novel. Luckily, I wasn’t disappointed. The World Beneath is an intelligent, excellent modern Australian novel, displaying that fine eye for unexpected humour and everyday tragedies that made Kennedy’s stories so appealing.
Let The Great World Spin’
Julie & Julia
Iain Banks, $33.00 There are two sides to Mr Banks. There is the one who writes literary novels rich in character and plotting and the one with the middle initial M who produces wild and entertaining science fiction tales. With this latest book the two have clearly had a sit down and a long chat. The Concern is a self-appointed organisation whose scientists have produced a substance that enhances the abilities of its agents, enabling them to move between an unknown multitude of versions of the Earth, manipulating events in accordance with an unclear agenda. One of these is Tamudjin Oh, an assassin, whose standing in The Concern is shaken by the attentions of the renegade Mrs Mulverhill. Amongst the other characters there is the Philosopher, the efficient but world weary torturer, Adrian, a fast talking city trader and the un-named patient 8262, hiding in fear for his life in an insane asylum. Above them all looms the aged, sexually perverse Madame D’Ortolan, the de-facto head of The Concern, manipulating all for her own dark ends. What you get here, to my mind, is a musing on the way governments and their shadowy agents manipulate the events of the world, driven by greed and a desire for power for its own sake, wrapped up in an impressive SF cloak.
Colum McCann Out Now $33.00 The year is 1974, the city is New York and one man, Philippe Petit, does the impossible: he walks across a tightrope slung between the Twin Towers. As this act of sheer audacity and beauty unfolds above the city, on the ground the lives of many people are affected by this one truly memorable moment in history. Told in a series of vignettes we meet many people, a few being: an Irish monk who makes his life purpose saving the prostitutes who walk the streets outside his apartment building; a family mourning the death of their son in the Vietnam War; and a woman dealing with the aftermath of being involved in a hit and run. Through their lives and perspectives we see New York from many different angles. The rich, the poor, the immigrants, the people who are only just surviving and the people who aren’t - New York becomes a stage, all glitter and dirt and beautifully heartbreaking. It has been a long time since I have had such a strong reaction to a novel as I did to ‘Let The Great World Spin’. I loved every single word. This is an epic read with such abundant beauty and sadness. Colum McCann conveys the love he feels for this fascinatingly flawed city and has created an amazing read some people are already calling an American Masterpiece.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Sandy and Rich are estranged, middle-aged and both clinging desperately to their heyday activist roots: Rich, with tragic wanderlust and selfishness: Sandy with near-helpless devotion to a new-age lifestyle. Their only common link is Sophie, their teenage daughter, who has not seen her father since he drove off in a Kombi in her infancy. These three lives collide on Sophie’s fifteenth birthday, when Rich returns to her on a six-day hike through the Tasmanian wilderness, setting off a series of events that will change mother, father and daughter forever. The writing here is of the highest quality. And while the characterisations become, at times, a little too pat, Kennedy manages to skewer neo-hippies, emo teenagers and male mid-life crises with alarming and painful accuracy. As each major character comes face-to-face with their individual delusions, so too we see how modern life requires such “serious dedication to the task of placing yourself at risk”.
Julie Powell. $24.95
Julia Child $39.95 Powell’s quirky memoir has just been released as a major film with script by Nora Ephron and starring Meryl Streep but it actually began as a blog. Julie Powell was a disenchanted office worker in New York City when she decided to give her life meaning by spending a year cooking every recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by the legendary Julia Child. The fact that Julie lived in a very small apartment, had never really cooked and occasionally drank too many vodka gimlets with her girlfriends didn’t deter her from becoming a great blogger. I always love any fiction or biography where food is a feature so it I went to this book eagerly but to be honest thought it would be a bit twee. In fact it starts in the most unlikely way and continues to be both fresh and funny. The book and movie has seen a huge resurgence in the cookbooks of Julia Child who introduced French cooking to the Americans. She went on to be one of the first celebrity cooks with her own television show. When I went to Washington D.C I visited her kitchen which now resides at the Smithsonian. (I should confess it was the only part of the Smithsonian I visited).
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Kasia’s art column in the French Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. He appeared as a sleeping wooden figurine in the first room of a three-part installation titled Casino, that created a nightmarish vision of childhood fears about the body, power and desire manifested in adulthood. Messager reflected that, “we are all puppets” and that “we manipulate and are manipulated”.
Love is not Loud You often hear people say that their best ideas come to them while riding the bus to work, walking home or maybe eating a sandwich (or perhaps a really good madeleine). In these seemingly banal, routine moments that lie in between episodes of productivity our minds wander as we gaze at strangers or the passing landscape and inadvertently read signs. We hear random conversations, sample ambient noise and bursts of music. Fingers unconsciously navigate immediate surfaces and we smell the encircling odours of life and decay. Suddenly a thought pierces through our daydream and we feel elated by a new revelation or have finally worked out that ‘thing’ that has been troubling us for weeks. How does this idea or solution unexpectedly emerge when we are not even trying to think about it? Of course I do not have the definitive answer to this question but artists often gather and study many sources of interest to create a swirl of information in their minds that may suddenly resonate with a random instance and flourish into an artistic concept. There is a long history of artists turning to literature for inspiration. Pinocchio, the puppet who longs to be a real boy, was originally conceived by Italian writer Carlo Collodi in the late 19th century. Annette Messager, an installation artist known for her elaborate displays of soft sculpture that often include dismembered plush toys, was greatly informed by this melancholic figure when she exhibited as the first female artist
Minimalist artists of the 1960s, like Robert Morris and Donald Judd who created ‘specific objects’ rather than paintings or sculptures were greatly informed by the phenomenological writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The French philosopher proposed that meaning is constituted by the act of perception, ever-changing and subjective. The reductive and non-representational forms constructed by Minimalists reflected this theory as they attempted to demonstrate that the only meaning these objects had was the experience of physically observing their presence. A white cube as tall as a seven year old could not be a depiction of a political issue - it was simply about the relationship of people and things in space, each defining the other. Conversely, writers are also stimulated by the visual arts. Joseph Cornell, loosely associated with Surrealism, is famous for his bricolage assemblages made from books, images and objects he would hunt for amidst the second-hand stores of his Queens, New York neighbourhood during the 1920s and 30s. The Convergence of Birds is an anthology of fiction inspired by a series of box constructions housing birds created by Cornell. Stories and poetry by authors like Rick Moody, Siri Hustvedt, Joyce Carol Oates, Diane Ackerman and Jonathan Safran Foer take literary cues from the meticulous yet stream-of-consciousness combination of materials that form the worlds of these boxed birds. Sometimes art and literature converge to produce an exciting amalgamation. Joe is a breathtaking collaborative publication by Japanese
contemporary photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto and American writer, Jonathan Safran Foer, wholly inspired by the first torqued spiral of post-minimalist artist Richard Serra. This giant, outdoor sculpture has a dynamic presence as it responds to alterations of light, weather and the shadows of visitors who must navigate its external boundaries and enter its coil to fully experience the work. The book unfolds to reveal a series of full page, sombre and evocatively blurred black and white photographs that capture the shifting nature of the sculpture as it reacts to its environment. These haunting images are accentuated by the sparse and meditative prose of Foer, lying on the adjacent pages. His words seem to echo the thoughts of silence, memory and mortality expressed by the man he describes as Joe. But they also seem to reverberate from the hazy dream-like spaces of dark and light captured by Sugimoto. Joe is a truly beautiful example of art and literature bouncing off one another. I remember walking through the city listening to music and all of a sudden a lyric struck me very deeply, “love is not loud”. I was confused but moved by those words and the way I feel about them changes all the time, they stay with me. I suppose inspiration and creativity may be a little like this statement. They are difficult to explain but they are always stirring inside and looking for something to admire. “The silence between a husband and wife might take the shape of a kitchen window, or a pocket watch, or an ocean in a pocket.” Jonathan Safran Foer from Joe. Kasia Janczewski is a visual artist and arts journalist. She works at Avid Reader
Contemporary Art Books for Your Collection
The Upset: Young Contemporary Art Hardback $130.00 This book is startlingly good. It is a collection of our favourite young artists whose influences include comic books, graffiti, street art and contemporary culture. It includes work by Mark Ryden, Miss Van, Tim Biskup, Yoshimoto Nara, Gary Baseman and sculptural work by Elizabeth McGrath. We are in a golden age of Lowbrow art and illustration. Never before has a generation of artists and art appreciators been so visually literate. This book revels in the Neo Surealism of a new wave of artists, presenting work with full colour illustrations on 287 pages. An accessable book, more images than text,perfect for the reference library or the coffee table.
The Contemporary Art Book Charlotte Bonham-Carter and David Hodge, Hardback $59.95 For the more serious student of art or for the art practitioner, this is a book that is as informative as it is beautiful. This book brings together the best contemporary artists including, sculptors, painters, performance and video artists and conceptual artists. This easy to use book includes a timeline of key movements in contemporary art, a glossary of terms, a guide to Museums and Galleries around the world as well as art fairs, events and prizes. With work and analysis of artists such as Francis Bacon, Anish Kapoor, Lucian Freud, Takashi Murakami and Jeff Wall, this book is a perfect starting point for anyone hoping to negotiate their way around the complicated landscape of contemporary art. It is also the kind of book that will help you keep a record of the amazing work being made and displayed in the world today. This one is a keeper.
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Michaela McGuire Apply Within: Stories of Career Sabotage
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Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986 – 2008
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