Off the Shelf

12/09:
More than 30,000 Borders customers voted in the store’s 100 Favourite Books of All time list, with the ubiquitous Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Rings in the top three spots. There were 16 Australian books in amongst the 100 faves, with The Book Thief by Markus Zusak in eighth place, Shantaram: a novel by Gregory David Roberts at 13th, and Cloudstreet by Tim Winton in 20th.

Horror writer Stephen King has revealed that he is working on a sequel to The Shining, first published in 1977. It will focus on a 40-year-old Danny Torrance.

Nick Cave's novel The Death of Bunny Munro has been named as a finalist in this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Film rights to Tim Winton's Miles Franklin-winning novel Breath have been acquired by Australian actor Simon Baker and producer Mark Johnson. Winton's novel Dirt Music is also being adapted for film, to be directed by Phillip Noyce, while the classic Cloudstreet is being made into a mini-series.

At Bookseller and Publisher, Michael Reilly's The Five Greatest Warriors comes in at number one on the bestsellers chart, Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna is the week's ‘highest new entry' and I, Alex Cross by James Patterson is top of the 'fastest movers' chart.

Australian-born author Geraldine Brooks has been announced as the winner of this year's Peggy V Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The US$40,000 (A$42,800) award recognises Brooks' contribution ‘to the field of literature and letters'.

The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly is being adapted for film. Matthew McConaughey has already signed on, as has Tommy Lee Jones, who is to co-star and also direct the film.

The Power of One Australian Hero Award rewards and recognises one special person whose commitment to the greater good is an inspiration to those around them. A prize of $50,000 will be presented by Bryce Courtenay to the winner of the 2010 Power of One Australian Hero Award to assist that person to continue their work in the community. This annual award is a joint initiative between Bryce Courtenay and Penguin Books Australia.

Sept. 29
Booktopia has announced that it will install some 200 book vending machines in shopping centres, hospitals and hotels across Australia in the next 12 months. The company says it will give people access to books 24/7. The book-vending machine will allow the consumer to read about the books on offer, hear interviews with authors and learn about upcoming releases from an LCD screen.

Bah Humbug: A bookshop in Tasmania will ditch playing annoying, repetitive Christmas carols in the lead up to the festive season’s buying frenzy and has opted for “energetic indie-electronica” … Whatever that is.

Marcia Hines has penned a memoir due for release late in October. Called Life: Things That Get You By, it takes a slightly different format than the traditional life story by offering an insight into key experiences that have made a difference in her life and helped to form her philosophical ideas.

More than 4,000 libraries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have banded together to allow people to borrow from them, no matter where they live. Existing membership cards or a proof of address will allow people to use any library in the scheme, although books have to be returned to the same area.

London's Heathrow airport has appointed a writer-in-residence to muse on the world of flight delays, passport controls and duty free shops.
Popular philosopher Alain de Botton set up his laptop at the airport's new Terminal 5; his writing appears on a screen behind him as he types.
Eventually his thoughts will be collected into a book entitled A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary, which is due to be published shortly. The first 10,000 copies will be given to Heathrow passengers.

A new scheme has popped up in Melbourne and Sydney called The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library. After the death of a young friend, Benjamin Andrew, Sarah Garnett decided to make herself useful by serving meals to the homeless and disadvantaged in Sydney's CBD.
One evening Sarah noticed a man sitting under a streetlight reading a novel while waiting for the food van. She started bringing him a few books and it was here The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library began.
The Footpath Library is supported by a dedicated patron – Peter FitzSimons, best-selling non-fiction author, a Park Bench (Board of Directors) and Management Team, all of whom donate their time. For further information, check out www.footpathlibrary.org

TWO women have won the $20,000 Vogel Literary Award with novels based on historical figures from Melbourne - one a prolific landscape artist, the other a mysterious book arcade proprietor.
The award was won by Sydney writer Kristel Thornell for her novel Night Street, based on the painter Clarice Beckett, and by the Melbourne author Lisa Lang for her novel Utopian Man, based on Edward William Cole, the colourful owner of Cole's Book Arcade.
It is the fourth time two people have shared the award, which is for an unpublished manuscript by an author aged under 35. Both books will be published by Allen & Unwin next year.

July 29:
Michael Palin has announced he will write a second novel, as yet unnamed, to be published next year. His first novel, Hemingway’s Chair, was a bestseller, but that was in 1995. He said he’s enjoyed writing travel books enormously but feels it is time to give the imagination ‘a bit of exercise’.

In the Galaxy British Book of the Year awards, Kate Summerscale took out top honours with The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. The Crime Thriller of the Year went to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and the New Writer of the Year was Tom Rob Smith for Child 44.
Meanwhile, at the delightfully named Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Mark Billingham’s London copper DI Tom Thorne has seen off Reginald Hill’s Yorkshire duo Dalziel and Pascoe and Peter Robinson’s much-loved Inspector Banks to take the UK crime novel of the year award. Voted by members of the public, Death Message beat titles by the cream of Britain’s crime writers, including Ian Rankin, Lee Child and Val McDermid.

The bible of traditional French cooking, Ginette Mathiot’s Je Sais Cuisiner, will be published in English for the first time. Published in 1932, Je Sais Cuisiner has sold more than 6 million copies in France and is still in print today. Seen as the indispensible cookbook for every household, it contains more than 1,400 recipes. Mathiot, the domestic goddess of French cooking, was made an Officier de la Légion.

Sculptor Peter Latona's most recent work, a bronze tower of books, will find its home in the Canberra suburb of Garran where the streets are named after Australian writers such as Mary Gilmore, Mary Gaunt, Charles Harpur and Will Ogilvie. His sculpture celebrates the contribution of books and writers to the ideals of knowledge and wisdom. Climbing Latona’s 2.6 metre work, and perching atop it, are three inquisitive possums, forming a link to the landscape.

Production company Matchbox Pictures has won the bidding process for a screen version of Christos Tsiolkas’s award-winning novel The Slap. It is hoped the television version will be filmed in eight episodes to match the novel’s eight chapters, each one revealing the perspective of a different character.
_ _ _ _ _
July '09:
The first Michael Jackson tribute biography is bound and ready to go. Harper Collins is one of 15 publishers racing to get their book onto the shelves first.

At a time when publishers are scrambling to keep customers willing to pay $26 for a hardcover book, the publisher of Senator Edward M. Kennedy's forthcoming memoir is issuing a limited edition it plans to sell for $1,000 a copy.

A beach in Cornwall, England, that is believed to have inspired the Virginia Woolf novel To the Lighthouse was sold at an auction for £80,000 – £30,000 more than the guide price. After interest from as far afield as Russia and the US, the plot, covering 30 hectares (76 acres), was bought by an unnamed woman with Cornish connections.

A federal district court judge in Manhattan has ruled that a Swedish author may not publish a sequel to J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye in the United States. Salinger had sued to stop publication of the book on the grounds that it infringes on his copyright to the original novel. The book has already been published in England. The ruling is temporary and will hold until a full trial is held on the merits of the case.

Earlier this month, the winners of the 2009 Thriller Awards were announced at a gala held in New York by the International Thriller Writers Organization. The winners include: Best Thriller of the Year - The Bodies Left Behind by Jeffery Deaver and Best First Novel - Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith.

Christos Tsiolkas lost the 2009 Miles Franklin Award to Tim Winton but his novel, The Slap, won the Book of the Year in The Australian Book Industry Awards, hosted by the crime writer Tara Moss. These awards are bestowed for both literary and commercial success in the previous year.
The Slap also won the award for literary fiction book of the year. Other winners were Chloe Hooper for The Tall Man (general non-fiction award), Nam Le for The Boat (newcomer of the year), Shaun Tan for Tales From Outer Suburbia (illustrated book) and Judith Lucy for The Lucy Family Album (biography).

Following enormous speculation about the eagerly awaited new novel from Dan Brown, the publisher, Random House, has a global English language first print run of 6.5 million copies: the largest first print run in the history of Random House worldwide.
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29/4
Best-selling author, John Grisham, will have a new book out before Christmas called Ford County. Ford County, Mississippi, was the fictional setting of Grisham's seminal first novel, A Time to Kill.

R.I.P. Author J.G. Ballard, author of Empire Of The Sun, passed away this week from prostate cancer.

Two novels by Michael Crichton will be published posthumously. Harper Collins says a completed novel called Pirate Latitudes was discovered in his files after his death together with notes for a book exploring the 'outer edges of new science and technology'.

A film adaptation of Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island is slated for release this year.

In UK literary prize news, the shortlist is out for the Orange Prize, awarded annually for the best original full-length novel by a female author of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK the preceding year. They are: Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman; The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey; The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt; Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden; Home by Marilynne Robinson and Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie.

Christos Tsiolkas' explosive novel, The Slap, has won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for South East Asia and the Pacific.

Two new lists of other award contenders have just been released:
The Man Booker International Prize differs from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction as it highlights one writer's continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In seeking out literary excellence, the judges consider a writer's body of work rather than a single novel. The list of contenders has one representative from each of 14 countries. Double-Booker Prize winner [1988, 2001], Peter Carey, is carrying the flag for Australia.

Australian author Gail Jones has been included on the longlist for this year's Orange Prize for Fiction, the award for a novel written in English by a woman. Jones, the only Australian on the longlist, has been nominated for Sorry. Her work is up against 19 other titles, including Anne Enright's The Gathering, which won last year's Man Booker Prize. The full longlist can be viewed at www.orangeprize.co.uk/show/feature/home/orange-prize-2009-longlist

Former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has agreed to a three-book deal with Crown Publishing.

Books Into Movies.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith is being released by HBO at the end of this month. Also coming to DVD are Twilight, Marley & Me and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
Next month is The Soloist, based on the book by Steve Lopez and Angels & Demons by Dan Brown; while June will see the release of Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper, starring Cameron Diaz and Alec Baldwin.

The inaugural winner of the Northern Territory's Book of the Year is Andrew McMillan's An Intruder's Guide to East Arnhem Land.

The Oddest Book Title of the Year (2008) has now been whittled down to a shortlist, with the winner to be announced later this month. In the running are:
Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M Seyfarth; Curbside Consultation of the Colon by Brooks D Cash; The Large Sieve and its Applications by Emmanuel Kowalski; Strip and Knit with Style by Mark Hordyszynski; Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring by Lietai Yang and The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Professor Philip M Parker.

New Zealand born Aussie, Ruth Park, has been awarded the 2008 Dromkeen Medal. Park has enjoyed a long career in children's literature - The Muddleheaded Wombat, Playing Beattie Bow - but also writes adult fiction including the classic The Harp in the South and Poor Man's Orange.

Love and The Platypus by Nicholas Drayson [see our Shelfari for a review] has just been nominated for the ACT Book of the Year Award.

Michelle Obama's brother, Craig Robinson, is set to have a book "A Game of Character" published this year. It's part tribute to his family and part inspirational.

The winning Australian science fiction, fantasy and horror titles in this years Aurealis Awards:
The best science fiction novel was awarded to K A Bedford for Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait; The Two Pearls of Wisdom by Alison Goodmnan took away best fantasy novel; John Harwood earned best horror novel for The Seance;
Shaun Tan won best-illustrated book/graphic novel for Tales from Outer Suburbia.

The Australian Government has asked Thailand for a royal pardon of author Harry Nicolaides who has been jailed for three years for insulting the monarchy.

The BBC Scotland is undertaking a three-year project to record Burns' work more than two centuries after he penned over 600 poems and songs. The project got a boost this week when the Prince of Wales recited two of his favourite Burns poems: My Heart's in the Highlands and My Love is Like a Red Red Rose.

A foreign academic has been jailed for two years for stripping pages out of ancient books. The British Library is seeking damages of more than three hundred thousand pounds.

The Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller has just been awarded the Annual Best Foreign Novel, 21st Century Award in Beijing.

A new Winnie-the-Pooh book will be released later this year, more than 80 years after his first adventure. Egmont Publishing announced that Return to the Hundred Acre Wood will be published in October.

The Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread) in the UK has awarded 91-year old Diana Athill the five thousand pound first prize in the biography category for Somewhere Towards the End - an unflinching memoir encompassing the end of her sex life, the intimacies of ageing and the prospect of death. Other category winners were Sebastian Barry for his novel, The Secret Scripture; Michelle Magorian with her children's book, Just Henry; and two debut writers, Sadie Jones for her first novel, The Outcast; and Adam Foulds for his debut poetry collection about the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya - The Broken Word.
The Costa Book Awards is one of the most prestigious and popular literary prizes in the UK and is the only prize which places children's books alongside adult books in the judging.

The best selling book in Australia in 2008, according to figures from Nielsen BookScan, was 4 Ingredients, selling some 288,000 copies last year. In the UK, The Bookseller reports that Aussie authors did well with Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden at number 11 in the overall charts, followed by Markus Zusak with The Book Thief at number 15.

The prestigious Manning Clark House National Cultural Award for an Individual has gone to Alex Miller, whose most recent novel is Landscape of Farewell.

Upping the ante: A man at the centre of an international investigation into the alleged theft of a £15million Shakespeare volume was previously fined for stealing books worth £50.

According to Canadian news, Spider-Man is now poised to save the entire publishing industry. In the midst of the global financial meltdown at the end of 2008, one segment of the publishing industry not only remained solvent, but actually grew: comic books!

We're looking forward to some great releases this year, particularly David Malouf's first novel in 10 years!

3.11.09

PM's Literary Awards

The winners of the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards have just been announced, with three books and four authors taking out the Fiction and Non-Fiction prize categories!

If trying to do the maths, don't stress ~ there was a tie in the non-fiction category, the judges unable to separate House of Exile by Evelyn Juers and Drawing the Global Colour Line by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds.
The judging panel said: "With great intellectual authority and international research, Evelyn Juers, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell their stories magnificently."

Winning the Fiction prize for his book of short stories The Boat was Nam Le. The judging panel was "...impressed by the daring scope and excellence in execution, the generous breadth of its emotional and social traverse and the excitement generated by every story".
Deb.

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3.11.09

PM's Literary Awards

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