To kick off the start of the election year we have an updated edition of Mungo MacCallum’s The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers.
Here are some things you might not have known about our esteemed leaders.
Malcolm Fraser appeared in 1986 in the foyer of a somewhat sleazy Memphis hotel in search of his trousers, which stripped away much of his former gravitas.
Alfred Deakin was a passionate spiritualist, publishing The New Pilgrim’s Progress in 1877, which he said had been dictated to him by the spirit of John Bunyan himself. As a politician, he claimed to be receiving instruction from the ghosts of Sophocles, John Knox, Lord Macaulay, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill and (rather out of place in such exalted company) a former Victorian chief secretary named Richard Heales.
Looking for Christmas presents or some summer reading for yourself? Look no further! Here are our suggestions for great Christmas gifts and books to read over summer.
And don’t forget to support your local bookshop this Christmas. You can also buy Black Inc. books on our website.
The Happiness Show
Catherine Deveny
A smart, funny and heartbreaking novel about love and marriage, sex and friendship, and the messiness of second chances.
If you’re looking for a novel for your book group, you can find the reading group notes here.
Buy here.
Gaysia
Benjamin Law
As the child of migrants, Benjamin Law is curious about how different life might have been had he grown up in Asia instead of Australia. So he sets off to meet his fellow Gaysians and discover what it means to be queer in Asia.
From Thai ladyboy beauty contestants to celebrity drag queens to sham marriages, Gaysia is a fascinating quest by a leading Australian writer.
Buy here.
We interview John Tranter about editing The Best Australian Poems 2012.
What was the selection process like for The Best Australians Poems 2012?
Pretty much like last year: I sorted through the thousand or so entries that Black Inc. sent to me, and chose what I felt were the best: that is, the most interesting, or well written, or dramatic, or thought-provoking poems that I felt a general audience would like. I had to trust my own taste to steer away from poems with a minority appeal. I would hope that as the series develops, the admissions rules will be relaxed: at present, admissions are limited to poems published exactly in the last year. I'd like to see that extended to simply 'recent poems', anything up to a few years old. That way next year's editor - a new and different editor - could publish a poem or two that I may have overlooked from 2011-2012. And I feel sure that there will be more women editors in future years. It has been pretty much a male thing so far. But that will change. It's a great project, and I feel optimistic about it. The fact that it's open to absolutely everybody, and that the editors regularly change, makes it widely democratic, and perhaps that's why it is so popular.
We discuss The Best Australian Stories 2012 with new editor Sonya Hartnett.
What do you look for in a story?
I looked for a short story with teeth. There were a lot of beautiful pieces of writing submitted for the collection, and many of them had fine gentle plots, but I favoured stories that had a sharp and powerful punch, a real bite to them. There were a few exceptions, however: some pieces I included because they were particularly clever or wry or in some other way caught my fancy.
What are some of your favourite or noteworthy pieces in the collection?
It seems unfair to single anyone out - I'm fond of them all. David Astle's 'Oxtales' is strikingly original. Emma Schwarz's 'Sidney' made me cringe, as the author intended. Sean Rabin's 'I Can Hear the Ice Singing' is compellingly weird. But all of them are great - they had to be. Over 800 stories were submitted - only the best made the cut.
Read Ramona Koval's introduction to The Best Australian Essays 2012.
When looking for wisdom, it’s a good idea to range widely.
Writing in the years after the Great Crash of ’29, James Thurber noted that company heads had started to speak double-talk in low, muffled tones ‘because nobody knew what was going to happen and nobody understood what had.’
In contrast, the voices in these essays are strong. The language is direct and there is confidence in its expression. It made me wonder about what had happened in the year to elicit such certainty.
In politics, big moves detonated big responses. While the ‘coup’ against Kevin Rudd still smarts in some quarters of the Labor Party, there were arguments and counter-arguments about why it happened and whether it was inevitable. Two essays approach the nub of the matter from different sides of the fence. There was much analysis of big personalities. David Marr’s essay on the gladiatorial Tony Abbott may well make waves beyond 2012, as did his previous dissection of Rudd, which turned, for a while at least, into a political autopsy.
