Via normblog, here are the American Book Review’s lists of the 100 best first lines of novels [pdf file] and the 100 best closing lines of novels [pdf file]. These lists exist largely to generate debate, and indeed Norm himself could not resist saying that The Great Gatsby should have come higher and Mr. Sammler’s [...]
In the wake of a number of medical scandals, moves are afoot by the Australian government to take the medical boards out of state hands and turn them into a single national body. This is an excellent idea. But I hear that the Australian Medical Association is opposed to the move:
From reporter Sabra Lane for [...]
This year’s Ditmars were handed out in Perth on Sunday evening. The results have been posted on ASif! There are years, in a community the size of Australia’s, when the competition is, shall we say, not as fierce as it could be (no years or names shall be expressly identified*). Not this year. Every winner [...]
Recovered from the Wikipedia entry on trademark on 23 March 2008:
Click on the image for the full reveal. For an interesting argument that Wikipedia vandalism is not such a bad thing, here’s Nicholas Barker’s “The Charms of Wikipedia” from the New York Review of Books.
The makers of Heritage® chocolates would like to wish all their coulrophobic customers a very pleasant Easter.
The Denver Worldcon has just announced the 2008 Hugo nominees. Parochialism warning: it’s chock full of Australians.
For Best Novelette:
Greg Egan, “Dark Integers”
Greg Egan, “Glory”
For Best Related Book:
Shaun Tan, The Arrival
For Best Professional Editor, Short Form:
Jonathan Strahan
For Best Professional Artist:
Shaun Tan
The full list is after the break.
Arthur C Clarke died yesterday in Sri Lanka. Many people have written of the stories and novels that they remember fondly. The most common seem to be “The Nine Billion Names of God,” A Fall of Moondust, Childhood’s End, and “The Sentinel” and its offshoot 2001: A Space Odyssey. Others have mentioned his technical achievements [...]
I stumbled across this lovely little essay by Raymond Carver about writing.
I once sat down to write what turned out to be a pretty good story, though only the first sentence of the story had offered itself to me when I began it. For several days I’d been going around with this sentence in my [...]
Those of you who host their own WordPress blogs may have noticed a sharp upswing in user registration spam. This is when you get new users registered with obviously fake IDs. They are extremely irritating because raw WordPress has no way of removing them other than deleting them by hand.
At first these users puzzled me. [...]
