They've announced that Too Much Lip, by Melissa Lucashenko, has been awarded this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award, one of the leading Australian novel prizes.
It doesn't appear to have a US or UK publisher yet, but see the University of Queensland Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
(Updated - 3 August): See now also a brief profile by Stephanie Convery in The Guardian, Miles Franklin 2019 winner Melissa Lucashenko: 'We need a revolution'.
The Small Press Network has announced the shortlist the 2019 Most Underrated Book Award, which: "aims to uncover and celebrate the hidden gems of Australian publishing".
I like this idea -- though I can't help but note that, from a foreign perspective, pretty much everything local published in Australia qualifies as 'underrated', with no or few US/UK editions of Australian fiction from any Australian prize long- or shortlist available (see this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist, for example).
Online editing | Anarchist adaptation
Online editing
Jozef Imrich published his book Cold River as an e-book last year, but wasn't satisfied with the results -- admitting that the book could use considerable editing.
He's taking an interesting approach to getting that done, publishing the book online (athttp://coldwarriver.blogspot.com) where he's soliciting outside help to fix things up (join in !) -- as well as in this way allowing readers to track the progress and changes of this work-in-progress
Via, I'm pointed to Angela Haupt's piece in The Washington Post on The Bookstagrammers and BookTubers changing the way we read.
And here I thought I was too old and set in my ways to change the way I read !
This begins with the saddest literary-related question I've come across in a while, even if it's meant tongue semi in cheek:
To put a literary spin on an adage: If you read a book but don't post about it on social media, did you really read it ?Is this what we've come to ?
My 'social media' presence is limited to Twitter (useful for actual (literary) news, if you can scroll past the political and other opinions); I am decidedly not a picture-person, so I have little use for Instagram (much less moving pictures, i.e. YouTube) -- though I do post the occasional screen- or (mostly) text-grab, and even a picture here and there.
I do see some purpose in posting pictures of books -- I sometimes do it -- because it's easier/takes up less space than listing lots of titles. I don't quite get the idea of just posting pictures of books, with limited additional commentary/information, but if that's what people like ... well, that's fine. Hey, anything that provokes more interest in books .....
Though of course I do wish the interest were specifically in reading, rather than just books as objects/props .....
Obviously (or at least hopefully) many 'Bookstagrammers' are also interested in the reading part, but the platform does ... tend to favor appearance over content. (As the look of this website surely tells you: I'm all about content, and almost completely indifferent to appearance.)
The nature of the complete review site does mean that I actually do post-on-social-media every time a new review goes up -- it's an automated Twitter-feed -- though I don't mention every book I've read; in either case, it doesn't make the reading-experience any more real or notable, much less validate it in some way. (I would also note that it doesn't seem particularly significant, either: at best a couple of dozen people -- a fraction of the number of my 'followers' on Twitter -- will click through to any given review; the overwhelming majority of readers still come either via search engine search or simply through the front door, i.e. regularly check out the site directly. And somehow I doubt that if I started posting pretty pictures on Instagram -- don't worry, it's not happening -- I'd be changing 'the way we read' either .....)
