Novels and collections of short stories including work by Elizabeth Harrower, Charlotte Wood and Amanda Lohrey dominate the long list $50,000 annual Stella Prize which celebrates great books, fiction and non-fiction, by female Australian authors. The only non-fiction book to make the list is Small Acts of Disappearance : Essays on Hunger by Fiona Wright. The full long list is:
Good crime writers must frequently edge along an ethical tightrope. It balances things out a bit in a world where only one side is playing by the rules. But too much smudging of the line, and they risk undermining the good-guy bad-guy dynamic that in the end is so satisfying.
In The Unbroken Line, Alex Hammond’s hero, defence lawyer Will Harris, is heading home after a night out when he is attacked and beaten up, his girlfriend Eva deliberately slashed across the face. The menacing warning is “Back off.” Things don’t get better. His partner, barrister Chris Miller is arrested after the drug death of a young up-and-coming Aussie Rules Footballer. And he is still subject to an ethical tribunal investigation for his handling of a previous case, and the on-going representation of a known drug dealer, part of a brutal Serbian gang.
Women writers dominate the short list for the Miles Franklin, one of Australia’s most prestigious awards which was announced tonight. Only one man, Craig Sherborne, who wrote Tree Palace, made it through. The short list for the $60,000 prize which celebrates “Australian life in all its glories” is:
The judges’ spokesman, Richard Neville, said the shortlisted novels had “a rich cast of unforgettable characters, and themes ranging from childhood
Eight women have made the long list for the long list of the Miles Franklin Award for $60,000 prize for Australian Literature won last year by Evie Wyld’s evocative All the Birds, Singing. The shortlist will be announced on 18 May with the eventual winner named on 23 June. The…
How many books is too many? I confess there’s more than a little self interest involved in the question. The long list for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction has just been announced and it’s a whopping 20 books long, albeit from 165 original applicants. The prize, which was previously known as the Orange, is for a full-length novel written in english by a woman of any nationality and published in the United Kingdom.
Of course a plus for having long lists longer than the customary 10 or 12 titles is that many more authors are able to get their moment in the literary sunshine. This particularly applies to debut authors of which the long list has five including Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing, which won the Costa Prize, and Laline Paull’s dystopian The Bees. It also gives the judges the opportunity to broaden the range of work celebrated beyond what might be viewed as more “conventional” subject and style.
On the downside, I know I am not alone in liking to read as many of the contenders for
Joan London’s poignant The Golden Age and The House of Grief, Helen Gardner’s harrowing reportage of a crime that shocked the world, are standouts on the longlist for Australia’s prestigious $50,000 Stella Prize, which celebrates women authors, and which was announced yesterday. The longlist for the Prize, which was first awarded in 2013, also includes three debut writers.
Full long list is:
I am not sure whether I would have read To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by 
Joshua Ferris if it hadn’t made it to the long list of this year’s Man Booker prize. That is probably the greatest benefit of paying attention to literary line-ups of all hue – they lead you off in new directions. My failure to have previously zeroed in on this book or Ferris’s earlier novels, The Unnamed and Then We Came To An End, is a little strange seeing as both were very highly praised and Ferris was on the recent Top 40 Authors Under 40. Another list. Stephen King clearly acknowledges on the back cover how much he loved To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: “One hesitates to call it the Catch-22 of dentistry but it’s sort of in that ballpark”. However for the first third of the book it was like being stuck in a loop of endless Seinfeld re-runs. Sort of fun, but much ado about nothing.
In brief, Paul O’Rourke is a highly successful and wealthy New York dentist, rabid
devotee of the Red Sox (the baseball team not footwear), who has developed a bit of a habit of falling madly, passionately, many would say obsessively, in love with the families of his Jewish girlfriends. Then his website gets hi-jacked, or to be more accurate, someone creates a website but hijack’s O’Rourke’s life to star on it. Soon O’Rourke has a Facebook and Twitter account plus a new email address. Only he doesn’t. And his unwanted alter ego is spouting some pretty incendiary stuff
“The book was reading me, as I was reading it,” writes Rebecca Mead of her experience of Middlemarch by George Eliot, a book that was published almost 100 years before Mead was born, yet one that for her couldn’t have felt more relevant and urgent. The Road to Middlemarch, which…
E-book prices are likely to fall after the US federal court approved a settlement between the US Department of Justice and three of the world’s biggest publishers charged with price collusion.
But inevitably many see the settlement as a double-edged sword fearing that it will endanger smaller booksellers.