Mary Varnham surveys the reviewing industry from behind the publisher’s desk. Save me, please. A publisher writing an article about book reviewing and reviewers is akin to a chef writing about restaurant critics: may as well stick your head in…
Novelist Damien Wilkins on the ups and downs of reviewing other writers. The first book review I wrote was for the New Zealand Listener in 1986. It was of Russell Haley’s novel The Settlement. I’d just spent two years in…
Call me Hairy Past back-page contest entrants showcase their talent. Wince-making dedication To my late wife without whose unfailing stimulus and example this novel of infidelity and retribution could never have been written. Christine Johnston Haiku…
Paula Browning looks at the state of copyright in this country and where it might be headed. Have you ever noticed how people’s reactions to different forms of intellectual property vary? If Fisher & Paykel takes action to enforce one…
Joan Rosier-Jones agonises over Coptic bookbinding. A student of mine once wrote a delightful story called “The Capsicum Conspiracy” for his daughter’s ninth birthday. His wife went on the internet and learned how to bind it into a book, and…
In the second of a two-part series, Chris Else examines the case for an evolutionary explanation of art argued in two recent books. Back in my university days I had a friend called Murray, a sardonic sort of bloke with…
Was Jane Austen a plagiarist? Jocelyn Harris investigates. Creative writers present their texts as singularly their own. Readers, in return for what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief, expect to be delighted and surprised by their freshness. But if…
Mark Williams re-assesses his position on Ihimaera’s borrowings and reworkings. Reviewing a book on modernism by C K Stead in Landfall in 1986, Ken Ruthven revived the old saw that one cannot step in the same river twice, meaning that…
Paula Boock surveys the pros and cons of moving from the dark side of TV script writing back to the novel. Damien Wilkins accuses me of being a scriptwriter at heart. Despite my protestations that this year I am writing…
A new history of homosexuality prompts Peter Wells to look back on his early life as a gay New Zealander. It’s probably a reflection on the heft of a book that it makes you question your own sense of…
Moments of brilliance — Mary Varnham
Mary Varnham surveys the reviewing industry from behind the publisher’s desk. Save me, please. A publisher writing an article about book reviewing and reviewers is akin to a chef writing about restaurant critics: may as well stick your head in…
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