Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 longlist
10 March 2022
The longlist for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced on Tuesday. Just under ten percent of the original one hundred-and-seventy-five submissions were among the sixteen titles selected. A few familiar titles leapt out at me: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Hellerand, and The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. The shortlist, consisting of six titles, will be announced on Wednesday 27 April.
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Gabrielle Wang named new Australian Children’s Laureate
9 March 2022
Melbourne based writer Gabrielle Wang has been named the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2022 and 2023. Wang, the seventh person to be accorded the title, succeeds Ursula Dubosarsky who was in the role from 2020 to 2021. What exactly is a laureate, you ask? Good question. It’s a term we hear quite often, and not only in literary circles, but here’s a brief explanation.
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Australian writing, Gabrielle Wang
Heardle, the musical version of Wordle
9 March 2022
Heardle takes the Wordle experience, and translates it to music. You have six attempts to guess the title of a snippet of music, which you can hear anywhere from five to thirty seconds of, to help you figure it out.
Heardle is one of several variations of Josh Wardle’s word game (I’m not talking about outright duplicates here), that have spawned since October 2021.
It’s the latest in a string of Wordle-inspired online games to have popped up recently, including Worldle, which tests users’ geography knowledge, Dungleon, featuring fantasy characters over words, and the battle royale version, Squabble, where up to 99 players can race to figure out the word correctly, losing health points if they guess wrong.
If you’re familiar with music released in the last ten years, then you should have little difficulty winning Heardle. But will it be the next big thing, behind Wordle? Possibly. According to its creators “Heardle was made for a small group of friends, then somehow gained millions of players overnight.”
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Trailer for My Brilliant Friend season three
8 March 2022
A trailer for season three of the HBO produced series My Brilliant Friend, based on Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third novel of the four part Neapolitan Novels series, written by Italian author Elena Ferrante, between 2011 and 2014.
And in case you (somehow) missed it, a Netflix made teaser for the in production Lying Life of Adults series, based on Ferrante’s 2019 novel of the same name, which is coming to a screen near you maybe later this year.
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The first casualty when war comes is truth
8 March 2022
Twenty-five year old Oleksandra lives in Kharkiv, a city in Ukraine, about thirty kilometres from the Russian border. Her parents live in Russia, but so far Oleksandra has failed to convince them of the danger the Russian invasion of Ukraine poses to her, and Kharkiv.
“My parents understand that some military action is happening here. But they say: ‘Russians came to liberate you. They won’t ruin anything, they won’t touch you. They’re only targeting military bases’.” While we were interviewing Oleksandra, the shelling went on. The internet connection was weak, so we had to exchange voice messages. “I’ve almost forgotten what silence sounds like. They’re shelling non-stop,” she said.
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Loveland, by Robert Lukins, Melbourne book launch
8 March 2022
If you’re fast, you may still be able to score a (free) ticket to the launch of Melbourne based Australian writer Robert Lukins‘ second novel Loveland, tomorrow evening, Wednesday 9 March, at Readings Carlton, from 6:30PM.
Amid the ruins of a fire-ravaged amusement park and destroyed waterfront dwellings, one boarded-up building still stands. May has come from Australia to Loveland, Nebraska, to claim the house on the poisoned lake as part of her grandmother’s will. Escaping the control of her husband, will she find refuge or danger?
As she starts repairing the old house, May is drawn to discover more about her silent, emotionally distant grandmother and unravel the secrets that Casey had moved halfway around the world to keep hidden. How she and Casey’s lives interconnect, and the price they both must pay for their courage, is gradually revealed as this mesmerising and lyrical novel unfolds.
In an article in Good Weekend, published last Saturday, Lukins explains that seeing the bleak cover of the 1982 Bruce Springsteen album, Nebraska, as a ten-year old, partly inspired Loveland, which is set in the American state of the same name:
The cover of Nebraska, with that black-and-white photograph taken from the front seat of an old pick-up truck in deep winter. An empty highway is peeling away into an American horizon that was impossibly flat and infinitely distant. Snow is banked up on the truck’s hood and to me, a Sunshine Coast kid who lived permanently beneath fluoro board shorts and a stripe of zinc cream, this image was pure exoticism, pure mystery.
If this were Instagram, what would you call the filter on the cover of Loveland? Vintage? Retro? Whatever, I’ve added the novel to my to-be-read list.
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Australian writing, Robert Lukins
The Oscar for the best Twitter nomination goes to…
7 March 2022
Last month I wrote that the Oscars were, for the first time, allowing the general public an opportunity to participate in the 2022 awards. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had decided to hold a popular vote, a people’s choice award, if you like, on social networking platform Twitter.
This “fan favourite” vote was one of two initiatives the Academy introduced this year, to bolster interest in the awards. In recent years television audiences have been abandoning the annual celebration of film in droves. A mere 9.85 million viewers tuned into the 2021 ceremony, compared to 23.6 million in 2020.
That’s an alarming decrease in anyone’s book. But it’s not only the Oscars who are struggling. The Emmy Awards, and the Grammy Awards, are also seeing significant declines in their television audiences. But, in the case of the Oscars, with past ceremonies clocking in at well over three-hours in duration, is anyone surprised?
While I’ve always been interested in the Academy Awards, I’ve not once sat through a televised broadcast of the event. Or I should say, an entire broadcast. I watched once, but alarmed at the glacial pace of proceedings, switched off the TV, and wandered around to the local cinema to see a movie.
When I came home, the Oscars hadn’t even reached the Best Picture award. To counter this indulgent run-time, the Academy has promised to slim down the event, and will omit certain awards all together from the live broadcast. How that will help, if at all, remains to be seen. The fan favourite vote, on the other hand, has been an overwhelming success.
Well, kind of. The proposal certainly drummed up interest, though not perhaps quite what the Academy envisaged. Twitter members residing in the United States were invited to tweet the title of their favourite film from the last year, and or a scene from a film of any age, appended with a particular hashtag.
People without Twitter accounts had the option to participate at OscarsFanFavorite. Voting for the fan favourite on Twitter seemed a little out of hand though, with the likes of Taxi Driver (from 1976), Apocalypse Now (1979), and No Country For Old Men (2007), being selected. All great films, albeit they were released well before 2021.
At least they were actual movies. Karl Quinn, an entertainment writer for The Sydney Morning Herald, spotted a film called Rochelle, Rochelle, sitting among frontrunners for the fan favourite award. Fans of nineties TV sitcom Seinfeld would be familiar with Rochelle, Rochelle, but year of release aside, there was another problem: the film does not exist.
While soon removed from the listings, its inclusion highlights the need to set firm parameters when opening the doors to everyone online. A few years ago, the Hottest 100, an annual music poll run by alternative and indie music Australian radio station Triple J, was swamped with votes for a track performed by Canadian singer Justin Bieber.
While Bieber’s nationality was not at issue — artists from across the globe feature prominently in the Hottest 100 countdowns — Triple J listeners took exception to the way some Bieber fans, spurred on by a large betting agency, were attempting to manipulate the vote. Ultimately the efforts of Bieber fans failed though.
But the question stands, was the Oscars fan favourite vote a folly on the part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? Again, while the final answer remains to be seen, if nothing else, the idea started people talking, and taking action. Perhaps the interest stirred up may yet make a difference.
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We Got This, edited by Eliza Hull
7 March 2022
We Got This (published by Black Inc, 1 March 2022), is an anthology by parents with disabilities, edited by Victorian based Australian writer, audio producer, and musician Eliza Hull.
In We’ve Got This, twenty-five parents who identify as Deaf, disabled or chronically ill discuss the highs and lows of their parenting journeys and reveal that the greatest obstacles lie in other people’s attitudes. The result is a moving, revelatory and empowering anthology. As Rebekah Taussig writes, “Parenthood can tangle with grief and loss. Disability can include joy and abundance. And goddammit – disabled parents exist.”
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Bullet Train, a film by David Leitch
5 March 2022
Sandra Bullock, Brad Pitt, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, star in what might be described as a kind of locked-room thriller, albeit set on a Japanese bullet train, in a film of the same name, Bullet Train, trailer, directed by American actor, stunt performer, and filmmaker David Leitch.
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Do large book reviews result in more book sales?
4 March 2022
Since 2012 the Stella Count has been analysing the number, and length, of book reviews published across twelve Australian publications. These periodicals include regional and national newspapers, magazines, and journals.
Reporting of the counts for the two most recent years — being 2019 and 2020 — has been delayed by COVID imposed restrictions, but they have shown for the first time that reviews of books written by women, has exceeded the fifty percent mark for the first time since the Stella Count commenced.
While on the surface it appears there is finally some parity in book reviews between the genders, being published in the twelve surveyed publications, there is a significant caveat. This comes down to the length of the reviews. While more than half of small and medium sized reviews critiqued the work of women in the 2019 and 2020 period, when it came to large reviews, books by men remained in the majority.
As far as I can tell, the Stella Count only looks at print publications, though I assume these reviews are cross-posted to their online counterparts. While using established periodicals makes for a consistent benchmark to measure comparisons over time, I’m guessing these numbers would be quite different if social media reviews were — somehow — to be included.
The value — and prestige even — of large reviews cannot, and should not, be dismissed, but I wonder what the conversion rate, if you like, of large reviews to book purchases is, compared to small and medium reviews. Research tell us people take more time to assimilate longer articles (consisting of a thousand words or more), than they do shorter, or small and medium, sized write-ups.
This is possibly because large reviews contain more information, and readers perhaps feel better informed if they are making a decision to spend money. If I were making a big purchase, such as a car, I would read as many long-form, in depth articles, about the vehicle I was interested in as I could, but buying a novel would be different.
I tend to read several small book reviews published on social media, and possibly a couple of small to medium periodical articles, before deciding what to do. That way I’m able to get a range of opinions, and quickly, rather than relying on the thoughts of a single reviewer.
Might others of the TL;DR generation agree with me?
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