David Carlin is appearing at this weekend’s Writers at the Convent festival in Melbourne’s Abbotsford Convent. His creative memoir Our Father Who Wasn’t There, about the death of his father Brian when he was only six months old, struck a chord in the Bookseller+Publisher office, with me discussing it this morning on Triple R’s Breakfasters and Angela Meyer reviewing it on her Literary Minded blog. Christos Tsiolkas describes it in his cover quote as a ‘memoir and detective story’. A moving work, with a structure and pace to keep you reading,  in which Carlin both discovers and creates his lost father.

Tags: nonfiction, review, scribe Category It's all about us |

Is there a trail you follow when you read? Does a book’s closing paragraph leave a question that you hope another’s work might answer? Or do the books stack up, haphazard, their place earned by a pretty cover or the author’s work gone before?

I began the year with a woman whose company I was surprised to enjoy, neurotically dissecting marriage and the fear and default longing it provokes. In the white beach heat of the New Year I pursued Frankenstein’s monster for the first time across the ice, tiring of the endless gnashings of teeth, the pleas for pity, the cries of ‘poor wretch’. I opened—with the guilt of an unforgiveable delay—a novel so much closer to home, that I had been warned I would love and hate. I loved and hated it. In the end its author lured me to his next work, in a collection that made me cry for the complex sadness and wonder of siblings. Then I followed the most haunting and violent of those stories to its young author’s endlessly lauded debut, where I sat and heard all the things he knew, and admired and fell into the spaces of all he’d left out.

I finished homesick for my own city again and visited parts of it I’ve only seen from the outside, watched it slowly turned inside out, familiar and far away. A chance appointment put a grim and fascinating tale of underbelly Tokyo in my hands and I devoured the pages of it in a day—guilty all the while for the entertainment wrought by its horror—and was left looking for a woman’s voice in the debris, her experience of a profession that confuses and shocks. The voice I found when I went looking for it was a beautiful one, full of poetry; sad, sweet and gentle with itself, unafraid. It told of skin and self and a wearying of addiction and emerged at the other end, but how many others could it speak for? Perhaps none. An escape, then, to the efforts of so-called ordinary people to create meaning and beauty from the hard, mismatched pieces of life. And then home again, to a true story of meaning built from the accumulated love of a lifetime.

Next comes a road of bleak beauty through a charred world. Who knows where it will lead.

Category It's all about us |

Well, it’s taken all the supposedly archaic understanding of pagination, bindings and stock weight we could collectively muster, but it’s been worth it. New-look magazine (that’d be ever-so-slightly larger pages and a fancy tear-out Junior section) just arrived in the office, and damn, we think it looks fine. (Kudos to Penguin for such a purty cover.)

Mmmm, new-magazine smell …

Tags: Bookseller+Publisher, junior, penguin, puffin Category It's all about us |

Back in June 1921 when Bookseller+Publisher magazine was founded by D W Thorpe, it went by the delightful name The Australian Stationery and Fancy Goods Journal. We kind of wish we could still call it that. Since we can’t, Fancy Goods has been named in honour of that original unwieldy-yet-charming title. You won’t find as many fountain pen mentions as you might have in the pages of the Fancy Goods Journal, nor many references to Hotchkiss staplers, or something called ‘mucilage’—but you will still find plenty on the topic of books, written by the Bookseller+Publisher team and our friends in the trade. We hope you like it.

Category It's all about us |