Beverley Farmer's 'The Bone House' (essays) and Nicholas Jose's 'Original Face' (novel) are both just out from Giramondo and seem to have been designed almost as companion volumes, with beautiful, spooky, startling images of human faces haunting their covers.
Jennifer Maiden's new volume of poetry 'Friendly Fire' is also recently published by Giramondo.
Marion Halligan's 'The Apricot Colonel', like her previous novel 'The Point', is a culinary murder mystery, billed by publishers Allen & Unwin as an 'entertaining romp through murder, fruit bottling and the dark arts of book editing' -- out in February.
Kerry Greenwood's also working in this unique sub-genre -- although I guess you could say 'The Silence of the Lambs' is a culinary murder mystery of sorts, and even more so 'Hannibal'. Greenwood's third novel about Corinna Chapman ('baker extraordinaire and amateur sleuth'), titled 'Devil's Food', is due out in January. Still on crime, Peter Corris has a new Cliff Hardy book, 'Saving Billie', out in December. Both also Allen & Unwin.
Black Inc's annual volumes of 'Best Australian [Insert Plural Form of Genre Here] 2005' are just hitting the shops: the stories are edited by Frank Moorhouse, the essays by Robert Dessaix and the poems by Les Murray.
Also from Black Inc, Craig Sherborne's memoir 'Hoi Polloi', and also in the memoir category, Frank Moorhouse's 'Martini' from Random House.
This is SO not a comprehensive list -- noted highlights merely.
On Radio National's "Books and Writing" program (23 Oct 2005), Ramona Kaval talks with Nicholas Jose about this very book cover, which I admit is very interesting:
ReplyDelete"It’s not often on Books and Writing that we talk about the cover of the book but in this case it’s such a striking image that’s been used that I feel compelled to mention it. The image is from a work by the Chinese-born sculptor, Ah Xian, who’s been living in Australia since 1990. It looks like a mask of an oriental-featured man and it looks as though it’s made out of a mixture of strawberry and vanilla ice-cream all marbled together, until you read the first page of Nicholas Jose’s book that is, and the first few sentences.
"With a few incisions the skin of a human being may be removed in a single piece. So Daozi had heard. A surgeon could do it, a taxidermist, a butcher.
"Suddenly that makes the face on the cover of this book look like a skinned animal and it made it kind of scary to open the book again, which I guess is a good thing if you’ve written a thriller."
The transcript of the chat is on the website, though the podcast has been taken down.