Redbacks - Books with Bite

This month, Black Inc. is delighted to launch a new imprint: Redbacks – Books with Bite. Redbacks are short books on big issues by leading Australian writers and thinkers.

The series launched with Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia, by Andrew Leigh, and Why We Argue About Climate Change, by Eric Knight.

Here, Andrew Leigh and Eric Knight talk about Australian politicians, the mining boom and Australia’s economy, and why their new books have bite.

1. The Redback series is about short books with bite – with a focus on the big issues in politics across Australia. What is the most biting idea in your book?

Andrew Leigh:
The notion that inequality falls as well as rises. In fact, my 91-year-old grandfather, Roly Stebbins, has seen inequality fall for most of his life. Australia can increase prosperity without increasing the gap between rich and poor.

Eric Knight:
My biting idea is that freedom is the real reason why we argue about climate change. It is not the science or a sense of moral duty to one's children, even though that is the superficial sense in which the argument is framed. Francis Fukuyama once argued that we faced the end of history where ideas like economic freedom and liberal democracy were settled. I argue in this book that these issues have just resurfaced in more complex, wicked forms.

Toyo wins the 2013 Dobbie Literary Prize!

Congratulations Lily Chan! Toyo has won the 2013 Dobbie Literary Prize which awards a first published work by an Australian woman with a 'life writing' theme. Here are some photos from this afternoon's event in Sydney.

A writer is someone who writes: 10 ideas about short stories

Laura Jean McKay, author of Holiday in Cambodia, shares her tips for writing.

1. Write.

People will tell you to read and, yes, do that. After you write. Write in a journal. Write for a job. Write letters, poems, scrips, scraps, conversations, memories, parodies, stories that you will never use, novels that people will never read. Write.

2. Circle

Have you ever watched a dog getting ready for sleep? How they circle in their bed, scratch at it, sniff, stare for a while, circle again and then finally settle? Writing is like that. And I call that period of uneasiness, those muddy first words at the start of a story, circling. It’s important, then you get down to business (the story, not sleeping!).

3. Don’t wait for your muse to call

Waiting for a tram to arrive or for a tax return isn’t considered romantic, but the notion of waiting for the muses to strike or for yourself to be discovered is. Writing is active, the romance is in working. Of course there are days when I feel far away from fiction. I can see all the stories as if through a window but can’t get to them. There’s a lot of advice that says put down the pen and try again when you’re inspired. No. Those are the days when you most need to write.

2012 Ashurst Business Literature Prize

The Sweet Spot by Peter Hartcher has won the 2012 Ashurst Business Literature Prize!

Peter Hartcher received his award from the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull MP, Federal Member for Wentworth and Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband, last night in Sydney and our publisher Jeanne Ryckmans was lucky enough to attend. She shared some photos from the night with us:


Congratulations Peter!

Interview with Alan Sepinwall

We chat with with Alan Sepinwall about The Revolution Was Televised: From Buffy to Breaking Bad – the people and the shows that changed TV drama forever

Can you tell us a little about your book The Revolution Was Televised?

The Revolution Was Televised is about a period in American television starting in the late ‘90s when a collection of producers given an unprecedented level of creative freedom introduced the world to some of the best, most transformational drama series in the history of the medium.

How did TV become important to you? What makes TV important generally?

Growing up, it was this magic box in my living room that could transport me to all these places I would never go, meet people I’d otherwise never encounter, teach me, entertain me, etc. TV is a great communicator and a great uniter, though as we move into a more fragmented age of viewing, it can also be a great divider.

With the rise of high-quality narrative TV shows do you think film will catch up again or do you think the art forms now have quite separate cultural roles?

There are still complex and mature film dramas being made, but they tend to exist on the margins of our cultural discourse, whereas it’s hard to go someplace without encountering someone who is crazy in love with Breaking Bad.

You became a TV critic against considerable odds very soon after graduating - do you have any advice for aspiring TV critics?

Write - a lot. The more you write, the better your writing will get. And be prepared to do it for the love of it. Every major success in my career happened because I started writing something (the NYPD Blue fan site, my original blog, this book) on my own, without anyone paying me to do it. That sort of luck will not happen to everyone (I was in the right place at the right time a lot of the time), but if you’re not doing it out of pure enjoyment, then what’s the point?

If you had to choose, which of the shows discussed in The Revolution Was Televised would be your favourite and why?

Going into the process, I’d have picked The Wire as an easy winner. But part of the work of writing the book was rewatching a lot of these series, and being reminded how great they each were in different ways. I’d still say The Wire is the most consistently successful at realizing its ambitions, but I also have a hard time ranking The Sopranos behind anything, if you know what I mean.

The Revolution Was Televised is out now in print and eBook.