Continuing on from my last column on whether or not writers should be paid for writing for the internet, this week I read an article about author Joe Simpson (Touching the Void), who decided to split from his publisher Random House over a dispute about ebook royalties. Random House were prepared to offer Simpson 25…
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And the Heart Says Whatever is a lightening rod of a book. Emily Gould’s life has been the stuff of cult films and teenage daydreams. She has beautiful tattoos snaking all over her upper torso and a don’t-give-a-fuck sensibility that, combined with her personal and professional experiences, make her an easy, lazy target for mockery and hipster-bashing….
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Joumana Haddad is a truly a remarkable woman. Born in Beirut in 1970, she speaks and writes in several different languages, is an advocate for women’s rights, is studying for her doctorate on the Marquis de Sade and also teaches Italian at the Lebanese-American University in Beirut. I was so inspired after I read and…
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In celebration of women’s voices, Lip is launching the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction. This is a themed fiction competition, open to all ages and genders. Rachel Funari, the namesake of the competition, was the founding editor of Lip. Tragically, Rachel went missing in 2011, while on holiday in Tasmania. We are launching the prize in…
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A debate which has been brewing for a long time flared up again recently: should writers expect to be paid for writing for publication on the internet? Online publications Mamamia and The Hoopla recently published pieces on why they don’t pay writers (Mamamia) and why they do (The Hoopla). The Mamamia article in particular seems…
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I imagine being the “crème de la crème” sounds tantalisingly delicious to children of an impressionable age. For one, foreign words to young ears always sound exotic and important, for another, it is the sort of phrase likely to be picked up from an adult, and most children wish to be older than they are,…
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Ida Jessen is a popular and award-winning Danish author whose 2009 work, The Children, has recently been published in English. Beginning in 1992, The Children opens with recently divorced Solvej renting a house in isolated Hvium so she can be with her daughter, Christiane. While Solvej is eager to find a place to belong, her…
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It’s like the Australian poetry scene’s twelve-monthly check-up; the so-called “best” of the year’s poems, as chosen from around three thousand submissions, with a little over one hundred making the cut. It is John Tranter’s second and final year as editor of the series, which changes editors regularly to keep the collections fresh. In his…
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The Fault in our Stars is one of those books. A book that’s hype and acclaim is deserved, and one that stays with you days after you have put it down. A book that makes you laugh just as much as it makes you cry and wonder why bad things happened to good (read: fictional) people….
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Happy Holidays! Christmas is almost here and I’m getting into the spirit. So stop fighting people for parks at shopping centres and turn off that Christmas movie with Jonathon Taylor Thomas, because I have some Christmas stories for you to get lost in. 1. A Christmas Carol I would be a bit of a Scrooge…
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Opera is one of those things you either love or hate. For most members of Gen-y, the latter view prevails; we have all heard the jokes of ‘fat lady singing’ and the likes. Yet, if there was ever an opera to challenge the view of the genre as out-dated and inaccessible, Opera Australia’s production of Salome…
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Christopher Bantick’s opinion piece ‘Sex with a child is not the stuff of the school curriculum’ has caused quite a bit of controversy. The article was penned last week and suggests that Gabriel Marquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera is ‘offensive because it says repeatedly that screwing … a child for art’s sake’…
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The Member of the Wedding (1946) is a tale of the search for belonging, played out against the individual struggle of adolescence, and the larger catastrophe of World War II. Frankie Adams is a lanky twelve year-old girl, desperate to find a group to belong to. She becomes fixated with the idea of joining her…
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I’d never really thought about it before, until I started reading Joumana Haddad’s Superman is an Arab, but Superman really is a disastrous invention. I’ve never been drawn to the character or the stories surrounding him and have never seen the movies, but still, why doesn’t it raise more eyebrows that Clark Kent is only…
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