Dunromin

The Cake-maker Virtuoso returned to us today.*
So to ease her transition from holiday mode, SB made the most exquisite Madeleines. Almost too pretty to eat.**



Also on display were the traveller's feet.



Notable for two reasons:
1) Look at those pretty new shoes. ***
2) Look at that foot tan! We are choosing to view it as a kind of companion to Noah's rainbow; that foot tan is a covenant that summer will return to Melbourne one day.



* Thank heavens. We were half-afraid she would abandon us for the sophisticated delights of Paris.
** Almost. Om nom nom.
*** Apparently the French lessons came into their own when enabling the traveller to say with confidence, 'Size 39, please'

Friday stuff and items

This time last Friday we were flying up to Sydney for our PARTY (more photos on our facebook page). This time THIS Friday we are preparing a list of excellent stuff and interesting items:

1) The Mothership has a beautiful new website design. It's clean and spacious and easy to navigate and quick to load. www.allenandunwin.com We think you should go to there*, look around, put your feet up, make yourself at home. While you're there, you should check out the beeyotiful Alien Onion linky button right there in the left-hand sidebar. How cute is it? We are well pleased.

Big cheers for everyone involved in the remaking of the website. It is a Known Fact that cockies fly bettter with new plumage.

2) If you are a fan of either Lois Lowry or Scott O'Dell (Author of Island of the Blue Dolphins. See item number 1 on this list.), then you should go and read Lois's lovely letter on Amazon. (You'll need to scroll down the page a bit.)

3) There is MUCH excitement in the House as we eagerly anticipate the welcoming of Joss Whedon into our fair city as a keynote speaker at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

4) And speaking of our fair city and its festivals of genius... Quick, quick, snap up a ticket for Animation Shorts 1 at MIFF where you can see the short film of Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing. A thing of beauty it is.

5) The Twilight Saga: Eclipse as told through lolcats. Entirely too too good. (via Bookshelves of Doom)

6) Speaking of cats. Look at this bookstore in Venice**...

*Unless, of course, you have just come from there. In which case, hello and welcome! Lovely to see you.

** Onion 1: 'Oh did I mention I was just in Yoorup? *carefree laugh* 'And there was--'

Onions 2-11: 'Dear colleague, enough now. Shhh. Ssshhhh.'

A New Prime Minister

's Literary Award Shortlist!*

We were very pleased and excited when KRudd announced two new categories for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards: Children's and Young Adult.

But today we were even more pleased and excited and proud when Peter Garrett (for JGill) announced the shortlists, and they were well seasoned with Onion authors.

Young Adult Fiction


Winds of Heaven by Judith Clarke

The judges said: 'The atmospheres and personalities Clarke poetically defines in The Winds of Heaven are haunting, the times richly evoked, and the plot beautifully developed to an optimistic, redemptive resolution.'


Children's Fiction

Cicada Summer by Kate Constable

The judges said: 'a time-slip fantasy written with the gentlest of touches... This is a beguiling treasure of a book; an old-fashioned 'secret garden' type of story, with fully realised characters, set in a beguiling dream landscape.'

**

Mr Chicken Goes to Paris by Leigh Hobbs

The judges said: 'an anarchic and exuberant work... Wryly comical and steeped in literary allusions, a love of architecture, and stylistic joie de vivre, this is a work for a wide readership, by one of Australia's most inventively original artists.'

**

Mannie and the Long Brave Day by Martine Murray and Sally Rippin

The judges said: 'Martine Murray's style of writing is so astute, with each word adding to the rhythm and the playfulness, the details rippling with quirky imagination, and Sally Rippin's glorious illustrations making this a total joy.'

--------------

We say: Huge congratulations to Judith, Kate, Leigh, Martine and Sally. We are in complete agreement with the PM** and her judging panel. And well done to all the other authors and illustrators who make up a fine shortlist.

* See what we did there? Aren't we clever?

** One probably doesn't get many chances in life to say that.

The Full Report

Spotted at the A&U 20th Anniversary party:

• Champagne
• Large and billowy cockatoos
• Views of the harbour bridge
• Smashing frocks
• Seafood
• Champagne
• Small bowls of tasty noms
• Authors
• Agents
• Booksellers
• Directors and CEOs
• A Miles Franklin-winning author, an agent, a bookseller and a chairman each making an excellent speech.
• Editors
• Publicists
• Designers
• Illustrators
• Printers
• Typesetters
• Publishers
• IT dudes
• Publishing assistants
• Financial wranglers
• Rights managers
• Sales managers
• Office managers
• Media types
• Literary mag types
• Luminaries
  
• Name tags*
• Seafood
• Champagne
• A luminous white suit
• Delicious little mushroom tart things
• Champagne
• A contortionist, a hoop twirler, a juggler
• Floor-length gowns
• An author showing everyone her Spanx**
• A live band
• Animated conversations
• Beautifully be-suited gentlemens
• Hordes of literati at play
• Snappy moves on the dance floor
• Seafood
• Champagne***
• A long queue at the cloakroom
• Goodbye kisses

And photographers...




* And eyes angled furtively to enable reading of name tags without appearing to ogle bosoms.
** For the curious. (If you DARE.)
*** We believe there were other beverages available, but we chose to focus our attentions on the champagne.

Happy 20th Anniversary, A&U!

I'm putting on my top hat,
Tying up my white tie,
Brushing off my tails.
I'm duding up my shirtfront,
Putting in the shirt studs,
Polishing my nails.

On Friday evening, Onions and Affiliates will be getting glad rags on, doing the hot-shoe shuffle, raising a glass and generally puttin' on the ritz to celebrate 20 years of independent publishing in Australia.

We expect it will be just like this:




Or maybe this*:




Or maybe even this:





Well, did you evah?

What a swell party, a swell party, a swellegant, elegant party this is!

We promise a full report afterwards, but in the meantime you may enjoy this:

*Sans the awful Mickey Rooney bits, obvs

Friday stuff and items

It's Friday, so we had a little look around and this is what we found.

Kate Gordon is making a nice big long list of writers who changed her world.

Lili Wilkinson is wearing her inner romance writer on her sleeve (or more precisely - at The Wheeler Centre).

Celine Kiernan is preparing to announce the winners of her competition.

Penni Russon is wrestling with boys names.

Kirsty Murray is making a nice big long list of must-blog-about-items.

Kate Constable is musing about primal instincts.

Karen Healey is all about the hunger.

Joanne Horniman is offering thanks to Simone de Beauvoir.

And, Jonathan Walker is inviting you to consider his etchings (well, Goya's etchings actually, but let's not quibble).

And in other news, we've had loads of emails pouring in the House to congratulate us for our winning ways at the ABIA's. We were especially delighted with these celebratory offerings from Elizabeth Honey.

A bunch of flowers, some boats and a cake, To share.

Paper daffodils! Glowing boats! Smiling cakes! Our new favourite things. Thank you ever so, Ms Honey. We gratefully accept your fine gifts.

Hoorays! Hurrahs!

So there was a swag of awards to be scooped up at the 2010 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) in Sydney last night - including Publisher Of The Year (we won! we won!). Happily, there were plenty of Sydney Onions on hand to do a healthy dose of scooping up of all manner of awards. Hoorays! Colour us very pleased indeed. And more than quietly proud.

And congratulations to one of our very favourite book stores, Readings Carlton who not only won Independent Bookseller of the Year, but who have also handily compiled the complete list of winners and shortlistings on their blog. Hurrahs! to you, Readings! Hurrahs to all the winners (especially ours), hurrahs to all those on the shortlists and hurrahs to all the readers out there who, like us, remain inordinately fond of curling up with a good book. Many hurrahs!

Two for the price of...

...well, two actually.

What we really mean to say is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: One book, two films. And at last, the trailer for HP7 has been released!

Harry Potter. The boy who lived.
Voldemort. The Dark Lord who won't die.

It's not quite David and Goliath. Harry's wand is hardly as humble as David's slingshot. But then again Goliath didn't have the luxury of Horcruxes to help with the whole immortality business.

But with only one destiny between them, an epic cinematic showdown looms.

So epic, JK Rowling's final installment of the Harry Potter series has been made into two films. Of course, it was actually two books as well...

(Adult cover edition)

(Kids cover edition)

But back to the films. Part 1 will be released on 19 November 2010 and Part 2 on 15 July 2011. Bring. It. On. Or as Hank Green* would say: Accio Deathly Hallows.

Phoenix tears on a broken nose indeed.



*Vigilant readers would have noticed that we accidentally attributed this piece of genius to John Green (Hank's brother). Oops. Clearly we were still blinded by our love for John Green's Paper Towns, which we concede we read some time ago - but the love has lingered.

Delighting your inner seven-year-old

Neil Gaiman's inner seven-year-old is as pleased as Punch. And with good reason. He certainly has more to be pleased about than Punch ever did.

Last night The Graveyard Book won the Carnegie Medal.


Neil does an excellent job of explaining just how big a deal this is.

"For my seventh birthday I was given a boxed set of the Narnia Books by CS Lewis. The last of them, 'The Last Battle' had the words 'Winner of the Carnegie Medal' on it. I did not know what the Carnegie Medal was, but I knew it was something important. It was the first literary award I had ever heard of. And if the Narnia books had won it, then it had to be the most important literary award there ever was. Somewhere deep inside me, but not too deep, a seven-year old version of me is amazed and delighted that he's written a book that was given the most important literary award there ever was. And nothing you can say about Bookers or Nobels or Pulitzers will convince him otherwise... I am glowing and beyond happy right now. Thank you world... and librarians."

So, his newly minted Carnegie Medal is sure to go straight to the pool room, where it will sit very handsomely beside his Newbery Medal.* Colour us impressed, Mr Gaiman. Colour us impressed!

And plenty of colourful cheers too for Freya Blackwood who won the Kate Greenaway Medal. Outstanding.

And while we're on the subject of cheers and colour and all things impressive. Here's to Julia Gillard. Australia's first female Prime Minister. We suspect her inner seven-year-old is amazed and delighted too. To celebrate this historic event Fiction Focus has posted a list of Top 10 female protagonists in recent Australian YA literature. What a good idea that is. We love a list. Wish we'd thought of it!


*It's the first time an author has won both these prestigious awards for the same book. Yep, pretty impressive.

A nice plain chocolate cake

Regular readers will be well aware that many of the cakes in the Cake-maker Virtuoso's catalogue are fancy.

Fancy. Fancy. Fancy.

Sadly, one of the Onions has a palate that Jed Bartlet might characterise as plain-spoken*. And a plain-spoken palate is often challenged by a fancy cake. So sometimes the Cake-maker Virtuoso makes a nice plain chocolate cake that has no challenging bits in it.

Well, when we say a nice plain chocolate cake we mean a nice plain chocolate cake that has one whole cup of dutch cocoa and one and a half cups of expresso coffee and one and a half cups of buttermilk. And, in the ganache,** 680 grams of 70% dark chocolate and one and a half cups of heavy cream.

And we believe the nice plain chocolate cake that the Cake-maker Virtuoso chose to make is actually known on the internets as The most AMAZING buttermilk chocolate cake EVER.

Despite this unanticipated fancification of the nice plain chocolate cake, the plain-spoken palated Onion ate hers all up.

* Others might characterise it as picky.

** That's icing for you plain-spoken folk. Or frosting for you USians.

A shout out to 'Singing My Sister Down'

Decision days. You know the ones. Those days that stop you in your tracks. Or propel you forward when you have stalled. Or keep you on track when you are contemplating a U-turn. The days where something really HAPPENS. Usually something unexpected, and when you cast your thoughts back to the time before the something happened, you wonder how differently life may have unfolded...

For me, Margo Lanagan's 'Singing My Sister Down' played the lead role in one of those days. It's the first story in Margo's superb collection of short stories, Black Juice.


To characterise 'Singing My Sister Down' as a gem is an understatement of grand proportions. It's a story that lures you in and then quietly tears you apart. It stays with you, haunting you with its beauty, its fine balance, and its breathtaking tragedy.

I first read it in manuscript form just over seven years ago. I was between jobs and toying with the idea of veering away from editing and into sports journalism. And then I read 'Singing My Sister Down'.

Everything else evaporated. It was a dramatic moment. I sat on the sofa in my friend's lounge room, with my recently reconstructed knee supported by a pile of pillows, and held the manuscript pages to my chest, and wept.

I read it again, hands shaking, eyes blurred. 'Singing My Sister Down' made it impossible for me to veer anywhere. It took hold of me and swept me into the House of Onion.

If you haven't read it, do. It may not be the catalyst for a decision day for you, but you won't ever forget it. Truly.

Thank you, Margo. For the gift of 'Singing My Sister Down', and everything that followed.

Italian items

So Rebecca James's Beautiful Malice already has a few different faces in the world. Above are the Australian, the UK and the US covers. And now the Italian publishers have released this gorgeous book trailer.




So, now that we've whet your appetite for Katherine & Alice and all that malice - here's a tasty extract to fuel it further.

And speaking of appetites, our Onion in Italy reports that the bookshelves in the book stores of Rome have a healthy appetite for the paranormal and are happily harbouring nests of vampires.*



In other news, our Onion in Italy, and her travelling companion, have taken time out from their tour of Roman book stores to sneak off to Venice. We concede we are a little envious.**




* We suspect this is the case in book stores the world over. We don’t blame Mr Cullen et al. We blame Buffy.
** We also concede that we did request that photos be made available for vicarious holiday-making, so we are most grateful to Tom Item for sharing in this manner.