Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret film adaptation
21 February 2022
Sydney based Australian author Liane Moriarty’s 2013 novel The Husband’s Secret is headed for the big screen. American filmmaker Kat Coiro whose credits include L!fe Happens and Marry Me will direct the adaptation.
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film, Kat Coiro, Liane Moriarty
Studio 666, a film by BJ McDonnell
19 February 2022
Dave Grohl and the Foo fighters move into a nice old house in the country to record their tenth album, in Studio 666 (trailer), a film directed by BJ McDonnell. But things don’t quite go to plan. Grohl begins to lose his mind, and it turns out the house is a conduit, allowing maligned spiritual entities to cross from their world into ours. Ah, the trials and tribulations of the difficult tenth album…
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BJ McDonnell, film, music, trailer
Global Grey, an online ebook collection
19 February 2022
Global Grey, the project of London based book aficionado Julie, is a repository of novels in electronic format, with about three thousand titles currently on the catalogue.
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This Devastating Fever, a new novel by Sophie Cunningham
19 February 2022
Melbourne based Australian author Sophie Cunningham is set to publish This Devastating Fever, her first novel in fifteen years in September 2022, according to Ultimo Press. In addition to her writing and teaching work, Cunningham is also one of the founders of the Stella Prize, an award honouring the work of Australian women writers.
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Australian literature, novels, Sophie Cunningham
Wordle is not harder says The New York Times
18 February 2022
The New York Times, now the owner of Wordle, have confirmed they have not made the ever-popular word game more difficult. Anyone playing recently — game 242 anyone? — might’ve had cause to suspect as much though. No, apparently the game retains the same “solution set”, being some two thousand five hundred words, added by creator Josh Wardle last October. The New York Times has however confirmed the removal of “potentially offensive” words from the original solution set.
The main change that the Times made was to remove some words: the game’s new owners have removed some offensive language both from the list of valid guesses for the game (specifically, offensive language and slurs) and from Wardle’s solutions, in addition to removing some more difficult words from the original set (like “AGORA” and “PUPAL”).
If anything then, they’ve made the game easier, though Agora would not be too difficult for me, after seeing the 2009 film of the same name.
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Vale John Bryson Australian author
18 February 2022
Sydney based Australian author John Bryson died earlier this month, at the age of 86. Bryson, a former lawyer, wrote several books, including Evil Angels: The Case of Lindy Chamberlain in 1987, a title that proved instrumental in exonerating Lindy Chamberlain, who had been wrongly convicted of murdering her baby daughter in 1980.
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Australian literature, John Bryson
Will electronic book publishing kill libraries?
18 February 2022
Brewster Kahle, an American librarian, and founder of the Internet Archive, writing for Time, fears libraries may become a thing of the past, if commercial publishers have their way:
The libraries I grew up with would buy books, preserve them, and lend them for free to their patrons. If my library did not have a particular book, then it would borrow a copy from another library for me. In the shift from print to digital, many commercial publishers are declaring each of these activities illegal: they refuse libraries the right to buy ebooks, preserve ebooks, or lend ebooks. They demand that libraries license ebooks for a limited time or for limited uses at exorbitant prices, and some publishers refuse to license audiobooks or ebooks to libraries at all, making those digital works unavailable to hundreds of millions of library patrons.
In Australia we have the Lending Right Schemes, and I’m sure similar arrangements apply in other countries, whereby an author or publisher receives a royalty when one of their titles is borrowed from a library. While the arrangement doesn’t presently cover electronic books, changes are afoot. But it sounds like these sorts of payments may not be enough for some publishers going forward.
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The This, Adam Roberts
16 February 2022
This sounds convenient. Instead of hauling a smartphone around all the time, you could instead have a social media platform injected into the roof of your mouth. The implant would mesh with your brain, eventually taking the place of your phone. Blink twice to take a photo maybe, communicate brain to brain with friends who also have the app implant.
Welcome to The This, the futurist social media app, and novel of the same name, written by British science fiction author Adam Roberts, published by Hachette Australia. The app is popular with many, but there are those who do not like it. They do not want to be part of the so-called hive mind. They’ve seen Twitter, they’ve seen enough. But the storyline has all the hallmarks of a hive mind, a sprawling, surreal, neural network spanning space and time.
Adan is a journalist, sent to profile the CEO of The This. But after Adan’s mother unexpectedly leaves the country, he is forced to join the army as he is left without a home or any money. Adan is battling a robot invasion, in a reality far removed from the one he once knew. In later centuries a diminished humanity is fighting off another hive mind, one intent of the final destruction of humanity. And all because we wanted to try out a new social media app…
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Adam Roberts, fiction, TBR list, writing
Twitter users to get Oscars vote
16 February 2022
Twitter users have been given the opportunity to participate in the Oscars/Academy Awards voting process this year, though it looks more like a people’s choice vote, rather than a say in the regular award categories.
From February 14 to March 3, Twitter users will be able to vote up to 20 times a day for their favorite film and favorite film moment of 2021. The winning film and scene will then be featured during this year’s Oscars broadcast.
Talking of the Oscars, Regina Hall, Wanda Sykes, and Amy Schumer, look set to be named hosts of the awards ceremony.
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Francis Spufford, a writer once not a writer
16 February 2022
If you were a writer like British author Francis Spufford is, but didn’t want to call yourself a writer, as was once the case for Spufford, what title would you settle for instead?
It took me a long time to decide I wanted to be a writer. And then I felt that to call myself a writer, let alone a novelist, would be a kind of boast. I accepted it gradually, once I could see the objects I’d made.
If it were me, and we were talking about say works of fiction, I’d probably describe myself as a storyteller.
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