Non Fiction
Worldly Philosopher by Jeremy Adelman & The Essential Hirschman edited by Jeremy Adelman
A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
Westerly, vol. 59, no. 1 edited by Delys Bird et al.
Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton & HRC by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
Power Failure: The inside story of climate politics under Rudd and Gillard by Philip Chubb
Gravity by Mary Delahunty & Rudd, Gillard and Beyond by Troy Bramston
Ben Ball was born in Melbourne in 1970. He grew up in London, New York, and Sydney, and went to school in all of these places. He completed an Arts/Law degree, in Australia, ‘more or less entirely to create the pleasing symmetry B. Ball, BA, LLB’. In the United Kingdom he undertook an M.Phil in Contemporary English Literature. Ball worked in London in publishing for more than a decade, with Bloomsbury, Granta, and Simon & Schuster. He returned to Australia when he began working for Penguin in January 2006. In 2011 he became Penguin’s Publishing Director.
... (read more)One afternoon some three decades or more ago in a stuffy conference room at W.W. Norton & Company, the New York publishing firm where I then worked, the semi-annual sales conference was underway. Assembled were the national sales reps and the marketing team, members of the editorial board, the publicity director and senior publicists, and our president and chairman. A formidable array for editors to face – especially young ones, as I was then – as they presented their upcoming books on the next seasonal list.
One had about three to five minutes tops (though this was often honoured more in the breach, to the exasperation of the audience) to get across to the reps – a fairly jaded lot, but for the most part tolerant of newbies like me – an idea of a book’s content; its main sales points; a run-down of competing titles; any scintillating pre-pub blurbs one had been able to secure; and a conviction-filled guarantee that the author was an absolute certainty to be interviewed on the Today Show.
... (read more)What makes a story compelling? When I was an undergraduate student at Deakin University, I was fortunate enough to be instructed in fiction writing by Gerald Murnane. His key criterion for the worth of a story was its capacity to mark his memory with an enduring image. Over time he used to cull books from his shelves that failed to impress him in this way.
... (read more)