I’ve been interested to see what other authors and academics have to say (if anything) regarding the Witi Ihimaera story – C.K Stead has been interviewed by Radio NZ this morning and here’s a link to a small story from NZ Herald about that – http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10610275

Also there was a story on Stuff yesterday afternoon with a short interview with Witi Ihimaera – http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/3075602/Ihimaera-to-buy-back-all-copies-of-controversial-book

Unfortunately reading this clarified nothing and, in some parts, made me feel worse about this whole story. This is not an explanation of the sequence of events that led to this unwanted outcome, which surely would be not only easy to make, but pretty edifying for other authors and publishers looking to avoid these mistakes. Why the puffery?

The other comments on Jolisa Gracewood’s Public Address blog about this same intervew are good reading. http://publicaddress.net/system/topic,2220,busytown-a-turn-up-for-the-books.sm

Update:

Further comments from writers:

From Peter Wells on his own blog peterwellsblog: http://www.peterwellsblog.com/2009/11/all-at-sea-and-feeling-nauseous.html  (I particularly like “for once books and book people can be as shocking, tacky, mendacious and self serving as everyone else in the contemporary media.”  )

And from Peter Wells and Keri Hulme (who also commented on my post below) on Beatties Book Blog: https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=36622997&postID=3628966814265367186

Despite the feeling that this should never have happened, I am really enjoying reading the many opinions on this.