A horribly late post but better almost a year late than never! Professor Yoshinobu Miyamoto, a paper engineer and Professor of Architecture at the Aichi Institute of Technology in Japan, visited Sydney in June last year to present at the Paper Convention Collective‘s A4 Paper Festival. He is famous for creating amazing paper models like […]

For some unknown reason, I go around collecting different editions of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I bought my first copy of the novel at St Mark’s Bookshop in New York, read it on the plane home and I haven’t stopped buying since. I’ve just discovered this great series of Evelyn Waugh cover designs by Bill […]

This was always going to be a biased review. Murakami is one of my literary idols. In the past few years, I’ve read more books by him than by any other author and his work has had a strong influence on my own fiction writing. So I was one of the fans eagerly counting down […]

Happy Belated New Year! Thanks to all of you who subscribed to this blog in 2011. It has had about 3,000 hits since my first post in July last year, which is a rather nice figure. I have to admit, though, that many of the hits originated from kooky Google searches such as “fantastic breasts” […]

I was in Melbourne on Thursday for the launch of The Sleepers Almanac No. 7 at Bella Union Bar, Trades Hall. The evening kicked off with a hearty welcome from Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner, editors of the Almanac and founders of Sleepers Publishing. Jessica Au, author of Cargo, launched the book. (I got her autograph!) Here […]

If you happen to be in Melbourne this Thursday, 1 December, then I’d love to catch up with you at the launch of The Sleepers Almanac No. 7. Jessica Au is doing the launching honours and there will be readings from the anthology by Rosanna Stevens, Eric Dando, Bram Presser, Pierz Newton-John and myself. (I’ll be […]

Hey kids that’s a snap of my old pal buddha havin a giggle at a hipster party we were at and next to him is that new book by miles vertigan called life kills which i’d heard sorta avoids the middle path but is zen funny so anyway the minute my copy came in the […]

Sometimes I have the good fortune to meet my mentors in person and not just in the books they write. Christopher Vogler, author of The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, visited Australia in October this year. When I discovered he was giving a seminar at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), I […]

An exciting package arrived by courier yesterday from Random House. Inside was a copy of the hotly anticipated English translation of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, which will be available in Australian bookstores on 1 November. Random House has selected me, and a number of other Australian bloggers, to review 1Q84 as part of its online “Murakami […]

It’s a happy day whenever a new supply of Book Darts arrives in my letterbox. I’m a Book Darts addict. Gone are the days of slapping post-its throughout my books and making them all end up looking like this poor copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which also had the unfortunate experience of weathering a spilled […]