Speakeasy

Our internets are currently down. Normal service should resume tomorrow.

…It took me half an hour to post that.

The Age Short Story Competition is open; if you’ve got an unpublished short story (less than 3,000 words long), have a go!

Entry details and more guidelines here, on The Age website.

The shortlists for the inagural Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced by Arts Minister Peter Garrett.

Fiction:

Burning In by Mireille Juchau (Giramondo)
El Dorado by Dorothy Porter (Picador)
Jamaica by Malcolm Knox (Allen and Unwin)
Sorry by Gail Jones (Vintage)
The Complete Stories by David Malouf (Knopf)
The Widow and Her Hero by Tom Keneally (Doubleday)
The Zookeeper’s War by Steven Conte (Fourth Estate)

 Non-fiction:

A History of Queensland by Raymond Evans (Cambridge University Press)
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James (Picador)
My Life as a Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman (Scribe)
Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769–1799 by Philip Dwyer (Bloomsbury)
Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers by Philip Jones (Wakefield Press)
Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer (Bloomsbury)
Vietnam: The Australian War by Paul Ham (HarperCollins)

The Age Book of the Year shortlist has also been announced; more info here.

Or maybe the comparison isn’t exactly useful. But like most of the Harry Potter volumes, Stephenie Meyer’s latest book Breaking Dawn is selling fast and selling out.

The latest in a series started by the best-selling Twilight, these young adult books follow a romance between a teenage girl and a hundred-year-old vampire. Breaking Dawn is the fourth and last book (preceded by New Moon and Eclipse), and everyone and their mother is reading these books. Every teenage girl, that is, and more than a handful of twenty-somethings. Why so popular? Who knows? Critics are questioning everything from protagonist Bella’s self-esteem to whether the writing’s even any good. But the books are readable, compelling, and Meyer seems to have struck that mythical vein of luck that seems to have more to do with bestseller-ing than anything. Oh, and the feature film of Twilight will be released in January 2009.