Posts Tagged ‘ young people ’

In-flight Reading

… Maybe I’m naive, but I was surprised that T C Boyle’s story in this week’s Harper’s was boring. I’ve heard good things about T C Boyle, and about Harper’s. Combine that with a story titled ‘What Separates Us From The Animals’ and I thought I was in for a sure thing. The reason I treat myself to a foreign [ READ MORE ]

Optimism is Compulsory

This article on Dave Eggers’ optimism about youth literacy and print books (via @Mean_land) made me think of the title of his unfinished Salon.com serial, The Unforbidden is Compulsory, or, Optimism: for Eggers, it would seem, optimism about print books is compulsory, and should not be forbidden. Elsewhere (almost everywhere else), it seems the trend is [ READ MORE ]

Garth, I Mean, Ben! Ben Brooks!

For ages I had this article open in my browser at work because I am loosely interested in keeping in touch with developments in experimental fiction: some days I just want to read a good book, of the ‘lyrical realist’ variety mentioned in the article – the kind of novel we inherited from the nineteenth [ READ MORE ]

REVIEW ‘Clinching’ by Emmett Stinson

Yesterday afternoon, waiting for an author who was waiting on the other side of the cafe, I had a chance to read ‘Clinching’, a story by Emmett Stinson in the first issue of Kill Your Darlings.1 Emmett, at 30-odd, is on the cusp of SIB’s definition of ‘young writer’, but I’ve been encountering his work since [ READ MORE ]

Wombat Stew – I Mean, Stone Soup!

There’s a magazine that publishes writers even younger than Voiceworks: Stone Soup, published out of Santa Cruz and described by someone as ‘The New Yorker of the 8 to 13 set’. In the interests of SIB’s subtitle, I wonder if they have an adult readership. They reckon their circulation is at 20 000, with library subscriptions [ READ MORE ]

Voiceworks 81, Birthmark

Tom Cho launched Voiceworks in Melbourne last night, and apparently he said ‘Whitney Houston once sang: “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.”’ It gives me hope to know that Voiceworks is facilitating the expression of the sort of people who understand and value this. Tom [ READ MORE ]

Why Pulling Prizes Is Okay Sometimes

Over at Virugle there is a mostly-one-way discussion being had about how terrible Australian Book Review is for deciding not to award the inaugural Young Calibre Non-fiction Prize – an essay prize that matches their esteemed Calibre Prize, but for writers under 21. Unfortunately, apart from a questionable call for transparency, I don’t get a [ READ MORE ]

Boating! I Mean, Agenting!

In my last post about Nic Low’s manuscript I described ‘Tailings’ as ‘a beautiful duck, wearing a tiara … bobbing up and down on [the sea of mediocrity] … that results from the seemingly indiscriminate publication of some 12 000+ books per year in Australia’. I now realise that’s a bit harsh: Australia has a proud [ READ MORE ]

‘Tailings’, by Nic Low

Something else I’ve been doing lately, while not being a high-flying literary judge, is reading Nic Low’s novel manuscript, ‘Tailings’. Because I’m a youth-literature crusader and everything. Nic is not exactly ‘a youth’, but whatever. I’m familiar with some of Nic’s other arts work, so I was delighted when he asked me to read and [ READ MORE ]

Hearsay Literary Annual

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been co-judging, along with Stefan Laszczuk, a short-story prize run by the editors of Adelaide University’s student magazine, On Dit. Of course I put my hand up, because now I am a fusty old ex-Voiceworks editor, desperate to get my hands on the raw content of young, emerging Australian [ READ MORE ]

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