The COVID-19 pandemic was a challenging time for many people, particularly small businesses. Brick and mortar retailers, independent bookshops among them, struggled with lockdowns that kept customers away. Numerous operations were threatened with closure, and not all survived.
In the shadow of the pandemic, a small town rallies to protect a beloved local bookstore in its hour of need. A landmark in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Bookstore is a magical, beatnik gem thanks to its owner, Matt Tannenbaum, whose passion for stories runs deep. Presiding at The Bookstore for over forty years, Matt is a true bard of the Berkshires and his shop is the kind of place to get lost in. This intimate portrait of The Bookstore and the family at its heart offers a journey through good times, hard times and the stories hidden on the shelves.
This survey will investigate the current experiences of Australian authors in the book industry, and follows on from an earlier survey conducted in 2015, which, among other findings, reported that Australian authors earn on average $12,900 per annum from their creative practice. Their key findings on author income have been instrumental, informing and strengthening the advocacy efforts of the ASA and book creators over the years. The ASA enthusiastically supports the effort to update this data and urges all members to participate.
“When you read Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear you’ll be taken on a wild ride. Like the namesake of its title, this collection is simultaneously comical and dangerous. If you live here and don’t acquire the necessary local knowledge, the drop bear might definitely getcha! But for those initiated in its mysteries, the drop bear is a playful beast, a prank, a riddle, a challenge and a game. Dropbear is remarkably assured for a debut poetry collection, and I think we can safely say it announces the arrival of a stunning new talent to Australian literature. Congratulations, Evelyn.”
At twenty-nine, Araluen is the youngest recipient of the literary prize that celebrates the writing of Australian women, and says she may never have become a poet had she not studied her great-grandfather’s language:
Araluen, a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation born in Dharug Country and now based in Naarm/Melbourne, began writing poetry while she was studying her great-grandfather’s language at TAFE, becoming attuned to poetic techniques like fragmentation and different sentence structures. “I honestly don’t think I would have become a poet if I hadn’t started learning that language,” she told ABC Arts in 2021.
“We’ve built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) … and it flows … everywhere,” the document read. “How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?”
What are Facebook users meant to do here? Drain the lake?
Late on a cold night somewhere in the U.S., teenage Casey sits alone in her attic bedroom, scrolling the internet under the glow-in-the-dark stars and black-light posters that blanket the ceiling. She has finally decided to take the World’s Fair Challenge, an online role-playing horror game, and embrace the uncertainty it promises. After the initiation, she documents the changes that may or may not be happening to her, adding her experiences to the shuffle of online clips available for the world to see. As she begins to lose herself between dream and reality, a mysterious figure reaches out, claiming to see something special in her uploads.
the html review is home to literature made to exist on the web, and is edited by New York City based author and technologist, Maxwell Neely-Cohen.
Every year we will publish works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, graphic storytelling, and experiments that rely on the web as medium. the html review was started out of a yearning for more outlets comfortable with pieces built for our screens, writing that leverages our computational networked tools, both new and old, for the art of language, narrative, and exploration.
