I am involved in a project with Cengage Learning, which published the Dictionary of Literary Biography ed by Selina Samuels. Cengage is a leading publisher of library reference, literature research databases and primary source collections in digital, print and microfilm format. Existing resources include: Literature Resource Center, Literature Criticism Online, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the Scribner Writers Series, and British Literary Manuscripts Online, among others.

They are now putting together a 3 volume set titled The 21st-Century Novel: The First Decade, to publish in 2011. They are looking for a list of 30-40 novels published by Australian writers from 2000 to 2009. They state that these “should be works of high literary merit and significance, suitable for study in an advanced high school or university undergraduate class”. They have compiled a list of 17 books themselves (pasted in below) and have asked me to add to this. I would very much appreciate your suggestions for additions to this list. You can send them to me direct (e.mcmahon@unsw.edu.au).

Many thanks, Liz

• Ballad of Desmond Kale, The Roger McDonald
• Breath Tim Winton
• Carpentaria Alexis Wright
• Dark Palace Frank Moorhouse
• Dirt Music Tim Winton
• Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish Richard Flanagan
• Great Fire Shirley Hazzard
• Journey to the Stone Country Alex Miller
• Secret River, The Kate Grenville
• Shanghai Dancing Brian Castro
• Slap, The Christos Tsiolkas
• Spare Room, The Helen Garner
• Tender Morsels Margo Lanagan
• Time We Have Taken, The Steven Carroll
• True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey
• Truth Peter Temple
• White Earth, The Andrew McGahan

Speakers: John Tranter, Professor Philip Mead (University of Western Australia) and Dr Kate Lilley (University of Sydney).

Wed 22 September
5:30 for 6pm
John Woolley Common Room
Science Road
The University of Sydney

See here for more information.

RMIT’s School of Media and Communication is developing a project in partnership with Nielsen Bookscan and other industry organisations.

Through negotiated access to data in the BookScan system, it will develop and make available publicly for the first time a comprehensive statistical mapping of retail book sales in Australia for the ten-year period January 2002 - December 2011.  It will build on the recently published University of Melbourne Book Industry Study by providing sales tracking and measurements data at individual title level.

Nielsen’s BookScan gathers statistical information from booksellers on a weekly basis and makes this information available to its commercial subscribers according to the level of their subscription. The data is organised under top line Level One categories. Each of those Level One categories is broken down into a number of Level 2 categories, and each of those Level 2 categories into Level 3 categories. The database also correlates these categories across a number of variables, including ISBN, title, author, volume, value, recommended and average selling price, format, publisher and imprint, etc.

The statistical map will make available for the first time essential data on book sales in Australia covering the first decade of BookScan’s operation. It will provide year by year information and cross-year comparison for the top 500 books sold over the period, the top 250 books in each of the three level 1 categories (fiction, non fiction, children’s/young adult), as well as the top 100 books in each of a number of other nominated categories.

The key features and trends revealed by this data will be of strategic importance in the Australian publishing industry and in determining Australian cultural policy. The data and the analyses being made of them will be of crucial relevance to a number of key community, cultural and policy issues being dealt with in Australia, including government policy and regulation, specialist publishers and publishing categories, scholarly research, industry competition, literacy education, local and international copyright, and library acquisitions.

The project is being developed within RMIT’s School of Media and Communication by Michael Webster, Associate Professor Peter Horsfield and Dr Brigid Magner. It is expected to be published early in 2012.

In developing the project, we are interested in hearing from ASAL members about the Level 3 category data that might benefit their research interests. Attached is a list of Nielsen BookScan categories.

You’re invited to highlight the Level 3 categories of interest and email the document to brigid.magner@rmit.edu.au. All emails will be acknowledged.

Hopefully you have had the opportunity to read the Teaching Australian Literature report that was released in July this year. The TAL project has now established a forum for collecting feedback and comments. The forum can be found at: http://teaching.austlit.edu.au/?q=talsurveyforum.

So please post your responses to this important report and help to generate discussion around the important issues it raises.

The report itself can be found at: http://www.altc.edu.au/resource-teaching-australian-literature-survey-utas-2010.

Paul Genoni

President, ASAL

SHARP Brisbane

28-30 April 2011

The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

The twentieth century began in the midst of one print revolution and ended in the midst of another. This conference aims to bring together research on topics in book history, publishing studies, media studies and histories of reading from across the “long twentieth century”-from the closing decades of the nineteenth century to the opening decade of the twenty-first. It will look back from the digital age to the print and broadcast revolutions of the twentieth century, and examine the diverse experiences of print modernity across the globe.

Dramatic developments in publishing in the late nineteenth century coincided with equally dramatic changes in the nature of authorship, reading practices, print markets, education, and the international trade in books. The rapid expansion of print culture was central to the transnational experience of modernity, and deeply enmeshed in the rise of distinctively modern forms of entertainment, consumption and communication. Perhaps only now do we find a comparable moment of change and challenge. The digital age has signaled a new print revolution. Once again, the international trade in print and intellectual property is at stake in a globalised market and mediascape. Once again, publishing, reading and writing find themselves refigured by powerful new technologies, and previously unimagined forms of communication and entertainment. Once again, the language of crisis is all about us, as the complexion of the book is renewed amidst new cultural forms and formations.

The Long Twentieth Century seeks proposals for 20-minute papers and 90-minute panel sessions on any aspect of book history or print culture studies addressing the conference theme. Possible topics include:

• “Modern books” and “modern readers”-print cultures and modernity
• The print diaspora-colonial and postcolonial book and readers
• Asian modernities-print and digital revolutions in Japan, China, India and beyond
• From print technologies to reading devices-transformations of the book
• Print and screen cultures-aesthetics, adaptation, convergence
• High, popular and middlebrow cultures-the democratization of book talk
• Bestseller lists, literary prizes, and “modern classics”-new definitions of literary value
• Books and government-policy, piracy and intellectual property
• The “business of books”-globalization and changing industry structures
• Institutions and instruction-histories of literary education
• Redefining periodical cultures-newspapers, magazines, blogs and digital time
• Transformations in the “world republic of letters”-cultures, careers, corporations
• “Deprovincializing Europe”-local, national, transnational histories of books and reading
• Web archives and libraries-the ideal of a universal library and the politics of digital reproduction

Papers addressing book history in Asia, Africa, and post-colonial cultures are especially welcomed, alongside those addressing Anglo-American, European, and Australasian contexts.

Please submit abstracts to the conference conveners at UQSHARP2011@gmail.com by 1 November 2010.

See here for a pdf version of the call for papers.

Applications for Summer Scholarships at the National Library of Australia are now open, closing on 30 September.  For the first six weeks of every year, 3-4 lucky young Ph.D. students are able to immerse themselves in the Library’s rich Australian and other collections to support their research.

More information on the Scholarships and the application form are here:

http://www.nla.gov.au/grants/summerscholars/

You are invited to the first Melbourne Salon at the Alliance Française de Melbourne.

Speakers:

Jean-François Vernay is a Franco-Australian essayist based in New Caledonia, who specialises in Australian literature. Jean-François will be speaking about his latest book Panorama du roman australien:  des origines à nos jours 1831-2007 (Hermann Press, 2009), which he describes as “a labour of love” which took 10 years of research. This first survey of Australian fiction aims to give European readers an overview of Australian literature, and is now available in English as The Great Australian Novel - A Panorama (published by Brolga, 2010).

In an article in The Age last year, Jean-François is quoted as saying that his aim in the book was to engage the reader in a kind of conversation. “I wanted to adopt a sort of casual tone. … I wrote the essay using the tone of a novel, which makes it entertaining, I hope, rather than just a collection of literary facts.”

As the founding editor of the journal Correspondances océaniennes, Jean-François has also published numerous articles and book reviews on contemporary Australian fiction, and has been promoting Australian culture for over a decade. His first book Water From the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch (Cambria Press, 2007) has been critically acclaimed in Australia.

Elaine Lewis founded the Australian Bookshop in Paris in 1996 to promote Australian writers. Between 1996 and 2001 she organised more than 70 readings for visiting Australian authors, artists and musicians. During this time, Elaine’s work included writing freelance articles for French magazines and speaking to groups of French people interested in Australian writing. Her book Left Bank Waltz: the Australian Bookshop in Paris was commissioned and published by Random House Australia in 2006.

Elaine’s love of the French language led her to commence translating poetry from France, Belgium, and Canada; her translations have been published in France. She is currently committee member of the Franco-Anglais Poetry Festival Association (a translation festival held annually in Paris since 1977), AALITRA (the Australian Association for Literary Translation), the Melbourne PEN Centre, and Deputy Editor of ‘Explorations’, the journal of ISFAR (Institute for the Study of French Australian Relations).

Chair: Kerry Mullan is coordinator of French Studies at RMIT University. The Melbourne Salon is a joint venture between RMIT, ISFAR and the Alliance Française de Melbourne; it aims to create a place where curious and open-minded people can engage in French-Australian cross-cultural dialogues.

Please join us for what promises to be a very special inaugural Melbourne Salon.

Cover charge $22 payable on the night (includes cheese and wine)

Bookings essential.  RSVP: kerry.mullan@rmit.edu.au. Numbers strictly limited.