Isn’t it a busy book news day today?
The finalists in the 2010 NZ Post Book Awards have been announced.
The Kindle is now a measly US$189! And still not available to ship to NZ! It’s not like we have electricity or the interwebs down here, anyway, right?
And last, but most certainly not least, Victoria University Press is starting to release titles as e-books – which is quite frankly one of the most interesting pieces of e-book news for a long time!
Victoria University Press is delighted to congratulate Anna Taylor winner of the (NZSA) Best First Book Award for her book of short stories Relief.
To celebrate, we are excited to announce the release of Relief as our first e-book, along with praised new author Pip Adam’s short stories, Everything We Hoped For.
We are also thrilled to congratulate Bernadette Hall and Brian Turner, poetry finalists, who will have e-versions of their books released with further VUP titles in the near future. All our e-books are available via our on-line catalogue at http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup/ in conjunction with me-books.
Relief introduces an astonishingly mature and confident new voice in New Zealand fiction. Emily Perkins says: These are wonderful stories, exquisitely observed and recorded with delicacy and wit.
The stories effortlessly mix the menacing and the comic, and handle real-life situations with warmth and subtlety. A little girl out of her depth in her friendship with an adult neighbour; an armed intruder thwarted by a bee; a woman determined to believe in her brother’s goodness under the shadow of accusation; a Christmas dinner guest who will eat only peas.
Anna Taylor was born in 1982. She completed the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2006, and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for the manuscript she wrote during that year, which became Relief.
Taylor has produced a superb debut collection, is unafraid to turn calamities into blessings, and writes with the elegance and composure of a silversmith. I can’t wait to read what she does next. - Paula Green, NZ HERALD
