THE TEXT PUBLISHING COMPANY JULY-DECEMBER 2014 Swann House, 22 William Street General [email protected] Catalogue design/production Imogen Stubbs Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia Publicity [email protected] Editorial/co-ordination Alaina Gougoulis p: +613 8610 4500 f: +613 9629 8621 Marketing [email protected] Cover art W. H. Chong textpublishing.com.au Rights [email protected] 02 Twenty Years of Text 19 My Grandfather’s Gallery Anne Sinclair 40 Game Over? Neil Strauss 20 This House of Grief Helen Garner 41 The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish JULY Dido Butterworth 04 Bobcat and Other Stories Rebecca Lee 22 The Snow Kimono Mark Henshaw 05 Summer House with Swimming Pool OCTOBER DECEMBER Herman Koch 24 Crucifixion Creek Barry Maitland 42 Paint Your Wife Lloyd Jones 06 Silence Once Begun Jesse Ball 25 The Surfacing Cormac James TEXT FOR YA & CHILDREN 07 Yours for Eternity Damien Echols & Lorri 26 Text Classics 44 Shimmer Paula Weston Davis 28 Well May We Say… edited by Sally Warhaft 45 The Astrologer’s Daughter Rebecca Lim 08 The Way We Work: Griffith REVIEW 45 29 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay edited by Julianne Schultz Elena Ferrante 46 The House of Puzzles Richard Newsome 09 The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka 30 The Rosie Effect Graeme Simsion 47 The Realm of Possibility David Levithan Clare Wright 32 A–Z of Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land 48 The Secret Abyss Darrell Pitt AUGUST Simon Barnard 49 The Broken Sun Darrell Pitt 10 The Climb Geraldine Doogue NOVEMBER BACKLIST, RIGHTS ETC 12 Arms Race Nic Low 34 Dame Maggie Scott Michelle Potter 50 fiction backlist highlights 13 Warning Sophie Cunningham 36 The Novella Project II—Forgotten Stories: 54 non-fiction backlist highlights 14 Demons Wayne Macauley Griffith REVIEW 46 edited by Julianne 56 YA & children backlist highlights 16 Savage Harvest Carl Hoffman Schultz 58 distribution SEPTEMBER 37 Midnight in Siberia David Greene 59 rights 17 Academy Street Mary Costello 38 First Impressions Charlie Lovett 60 The Text Prize 18 Before I Go to Sleep S. J. Watson 39 Three Stories J. M. Coetzee TWENTY YEARS OF TEXT IN 1990 DIANA GRIBBLE AND ERIC BEECHER, a book. This offer was a tremendous stroke of its title—Dead Meat. The novel was by Shane in partnership with among others the designer luck, because Di, Eric and Chong regarded Text Maloney and we published it in July 1994 under Chong Weng Ho, set up an independent print as a blank slate on which we could all scribble the new title of Stiff—which didn’t stop Chong media company called Text Media. The new our ideas about what an independent Australian from reverently photocopying a slab of raw steak company, based in Melbourne, had its own tiny publishing company might do. for the cover. Enter Murray Whelan, a fabulously book division, Text Publishing. Di offered me an The Text list, a joint venture with a original chronicler of Australian political absurdity. editing job there in early 1992, soon after I had now-vanished multinational publisher called Stiff has never been out of print and is now a returned from a couple of years in New York. I Reed, amounted to only a handful of non-fiction Text Classic. was in my early thirties, had co-edited a liter- titles when I joined, but the point of the enterprise Twenty years ago, what did we want Text to ary magazine for a decade and was finishing was to take risks and make up our own rules. We become? An imprint worth the candle. Australia had little money so we was apparently a place to distribute rather than could afford to be nimble, publish books. We set out to show that a local inventive and fearless. In literary house could succeed. We defined success late 1993 we severed the as remaining solvent while publishing books that joint venture, and started made a difference. Editorial and design were the again from scratch. We molten core of our business. We wanted to rise to planned an inaugural list the occasion of our writers. The quality of their of seven titles, and the work would not be separable from how well we first book we published as read them. Our role was to help them if we could an independent house was turn good books into great books, to publish them a debut crime novel by an with style, nerve and noise. unknown author. Publishing is an obsessive activity. There is no We had pulled the other way to do it well. You never stop learning how manuscript out of the to publish a book, how to create the paths that slush pile. We loved allow it to find the readers who still don’t know FROM LEFT: MELANIE OSTELL, DI GRIBBLE, MICHAEL HEYWARD, PATTY BROWN AND EMMA GORDON WILLIAMS. PHOTO BY CRAIG ABRAHAM / AGE, 23 AUGUST 1997. everything about it except that it will become essential to their lives. We spin 2 TEXT PUBLISHING JULY–DECEMBER 2014 TWENTY YEARS OF TEXT the thread that links the separate imaginative British publishing. Australian writers are better experiences of two people who may never meet: published in Australia than they were twenty the writer of the book and the reader who buys it. years ago, but many foreign writers still languish Our great good fortune at Text was to be here because their books trickle into the country. pursuing this obsession in a country bulging The system benefits publishers but often fails with literary talent. The writers began to come writers. It may not survive the current revolution from every point on the compass. We wanted to in the way that people find and read books. offer them an indelible publishing experience. In 2004 Text Media was sold to Fairfax. We steeped Text’s culture in our love of writers We were a decade old. What was to become and writing, and the meticulous craft of making of us? Penny Hueston and I negotiated to buy a book. Text Publishing from Fairfax and we formed unearth new talent and Every time we published a book we put a joint venture with a fellow independent, the to publish prizewinning something new into the world. We wanted to Edinburgh-based Canongate Books. The seven and bestselling books by find readers in as many places as possible. We years of partnership with Canongate were highly writers from around the world. discovered the addictive high of selling foreign productive for both companies but Text’s destiny Two decades later we remain solvent. Our rights. I would go into the office late at night and was to become fully Australian. In 2011, the culture stands for something, not least for the whip faxes off to publishers around the world founders of Lonely Planet, Maureen and Tony idea that it can be the finest thing in the world describing our wares. We danced in the aisles at Wheeler, acquired Canongate’s shares, joined our to walk beside a writer. Many talented people Frankfurt when we made a sale. It was not long board, and we began a new phase. work at Text and leave their fingerprints on the before email gave us entry to the sleepless global In recent years we have established the Text business. We can’t shake our belief that the wheel bazaar that defines publishing today. Classics, an astonishing adventure in discovering needs reinventing. At twenty, Text still feels to me The chance beckoned to create an interna- lost books, and set up the Text Prize for Young like the upstart outsider, the restless, impatient tional list, and we seized it. Much of our market is Adult and Children’s Writing, which has already and disruptive company I plunged into, heart and still controlled out of London but we, along with launched some dazzling careers. We have soul, all those years ago. other publishers, began to argue that Australia begun to publish books under the Text imprint had long ceased to be one of the far dominions of in Britain and North America. We continue to MICHAEL HEYWARD, PUBLISHER TEXT PUBLISHING JULY–DECEMBER 2014 3 BOBCAT AND OTHER STORIES REBECCA LEE WINNER, 2013 BELIEVER BOOK AWARD Meanwhile, Susan looked carefully into each of our faces. She was actually waiting for us to answer, to give reasons why people fall in love and get married. Nobody knows, I wanted to say. Nobody really knows. But that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to not do it. JOSHUA ARNOLD Rebecca Lee is the author of the A dinner party becomes the occasion for the critically acclaimed novel The City dissolution of more than one marriage. A woman is Is a Rising Tide. She has been published in the Atlantic and hired to find a wife for the only true soulmate she’s Zoetrope, and in 2001 she received ever known. A student’s act of plagiarism brings to a National Magazine Award for light her professor’s shadowy past. her short fiction. Originally from Saskatchewan, Lee is a graduate of In each of these acutely observed stories, through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the inner landscapes of her complex and flawed characters, now a professor of creative writing Rebecca Lee goes to the heart of what it at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. is to be human: to feel, to believe, to think, to love. At turns bobcatstories.tumblr.com heartbreaking and wise, tender and wry, Bobcat and Other Stories establishes Lee as one of the finest and most original voices in contemporary fiction.