Showing all posts about novels
How I was conned by a manuscript thief
16 March 2022
American writer Peter C. Baker on being fooled into handing over a draft of his novel to a manuscript thief. The culprit, known as the Spine Collector, who was finally arrested earlier this year, had tricked numerous other authors, including many who were still unpublished, into sending him copies of their work.
It was the first book I’d ever tried writing, and, during the previous near-decade, it had become an overburdened locus of my ambitions, hopes, doubts, and fears. Many times, I’d looked at the manuscript and wondered if I was fooling myself. Getting fooled into handing it over made me feel sick.
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The Passenger, Stella Maris, new novels by Cormac McCarthy
12 March 2022
After a sixteen year hiatus, American author Cormac McCarthy, whose last book, The Road, was written in 2006, will publish two new novels later this year. Both stories are connected, and will be released a month apart. The first title, The Passenger, arrives in bookshops on 25 October 2022:
1980, Pass Christian, Mississippi: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flightbag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit – by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.
The second book, Stella Maris, set eight years earlier, is based on the treatment transcripts of Bobby’s sister Alicia, who is a patient at a psychiatric hospital, and will be released on 22 November 2022:
1972, Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers.
While I haven’t yet read The Road, I did see John Hillcoat’s harrowing 2009 film adaptation, starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and a then young Kodi Smit-McPhee.
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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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Avoid the loss of your Goodreads data, back up your account regularly
2 March 2022
Alarming news for members of book cataloguing website Goodreads, of which I am one. Be sure to regularly backup your account data, as it may be irretrievably lost in the event of a website glitch, as was the case recently for Nelson Minar.
Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.
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The Film Adaptation Test of a book
25 February 2022
Telling an author you read their book is the greatest compliment they can receive, according to American poet Lee Ballentine. Anyone taking five to six hours out of their time to read a book cover-to-cover must have — in most cases — thought highly of it. The title evaded the did not finish pile: that’s saying a lot.
As an additional compliment, you could tell the author you’ll read their novel again. But with so many books in the world, who has the time to repeat read a title? Instead it might be better to say their book should be made into a film. It’s a way of saying your novel is so good, more people need to experience it, so let’s get it into cinemas. For most authors that’s probably an affirmation; it’s my guess many quietly hope their work will result in a movie.
It’s more than a commendation though. It’s an endorsement that discharges a reader from the obligation to pick up the book again. But it also makes for a useful metric in assessing a novel. If a book is worthy of being adapted for the big screen, it’s probably a good story. It’s something that should be put before a wider audience. And if not, perhaps you could settle for telling the author you read their book, and leave it at that.
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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
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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Not the centre of the Earth that Jules Verne saw
10 February 2022
The long held notion that the centre, or core, of our planet consists of solid iron, may have been up-ended by a recent study suggesting Earth’s inner core is made up of a solid iron sublattice and liquid-like light elements:
A joint research team led by Prof. HE Yu from the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGCAS) has found that the inner core of the Earth is not a normal solid but is composed of a solid iron sublattice and liquid-like light elements, which is also known as a superionic state. The liquid-like light elements are highly diffusive in iron sublattices under inner core conditions.
Well that differs somewhat from nineteenth century French author Jules Verne’s depiction, in his 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth.
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Book reading suggestions for February 2022
4 February 2022
Ten books to read in February, put together by Jason Steger, books editor at the Sydney Morning Herald. A nice mix of Australian and international titles, fiction and non-fiction, including The Furies by Mandy Beaumont, What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, by Wendy Mitchell, and Found, Wanting, by Natasha Sholl.
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