Book reviews, new books, publishing news, book giveaways, and author interviews

Christmas Press heralds a return to traditional picture book publishing in Australia

Christmas Press heralds a return to traditional picture book publishing in Australia

If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! 'Theres not a lot of traditional material for kids being produced in Australia,' says Sophie Masson, one of the co-founders of Christmas Press, a new boutique picture book publisher with a focus on...

Interview: Pierre Proske on the Unfinished Phrase iPhone App

Interview: Pierre Proske on the Unfinished Phrase iPhone App

  If you were to ask me to name one of the more unusual collocations in the English language, 'exquisite corpse' would have to be one of them. Fortunately for those of us of squeamish constitution, it refers not to some sort of questionable forensic titillation, but rather to a type of collaborative story-telling whereby participants would turn by turn...

Daniel Dalton on Creatavist and multimodal story-telling

Daniel Dalton on Creatavist and multimodal story-telling

Late last year I attended a lecture with David Shields, author of Reality Hunger and ardent and vociferous proclaimer of the death of the novel. In Shields view, authors wishing to create new and relevant work work need to turn away from what he sees as the outmoded and irrelevant nineteenth century approach to the novel, and instead look at breaking...

Interview: Sandra Antonelli on advocating for older protagonists in romance fiction

Interview: Sandra Antonelli on advocating for older protagonists in romance fiction

Local romance author Sandra Antonelli and I have been in touch over Twitter and through the site for a while now, but first properly connected over an interview I did late last year with author Maggie Dana about middle-aged protagonists and their representation in fiction. This is, as it turns out, Sandras area of expertise, and is something that she...

Interview: LA Johannesson on writing technological romance

Interview: LA Johannesson on writing 'technological romance'

One of the topics that I find endlessly interesting in fiction is the lengths that many authors will go to in order to avoid dealing with modern technology in their work. A functioning mobile phone, for example, can easily put an end to a disaster or adventure story, so its little wonder that characters either lose them, forget to charge them, or break...

Interview: Steven Lochran on the superpowers of superhero fiction

Interview: Steven Lochran on the superpowers of superhero fiction

' Late last year I chatted to Steven Lochran about the release of Vanguard Prime: Gold Rush, the first in a high-octane series that blends the pacing of Percy Jackson with the superhero cred of X-Men. The second in the series has just been released, and its a glorious ride of explosions, super-sonic travel and some very grey moral decisions. Having...