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- Article Title: US Reporting
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A new catalog with a group of kangaroos posed gracefully on the cover has recently gone out to American libraries, academics and suppliers interested in Australian books. It contains the new Spring offerings of the University of Queensland Press, still the only Australian publisher with its own US offices. Unlike most university presses, UQP publishes fiction and poetry as well as the more typical scholarly monographs. Pearl Bowman who runs the New York-based operation is a rare combination of dynamism and intelligence and sensitivity. At the moment she is campaigning to get other Australian publishers to operate individual or cooperative ventures in the US and hopefully stem the flow of successful authors who depart to greener pastures of foreign publishing houses. (See what Mark Rubbo has to say about this in April ABR.)
UQP has about 400 titles currently on sale in the US and there have been some surprising bestsellers on the list – Alan Chalmer's What is This Thing Called Science? and Roger Kitching's Systems Ecology which has made its way into many American classrooms.
The US tour of our esteemed editor, John McLaren, was a great excuse for an expats and Austrophile get-together at Aesop's Table on New York's Upper West Side. Among those present were Marian Arkin, treasurer of the newly-formed American Association of Australian Literary Studies currently working on a book about Henry Handel Richardson, Roy Thomas busy promoting Randolph Stow through his Taplinger Publishing Company and the Literature Board's new agent in New York, Selma Shapiro.
‘Marsupials sell well, said the new owner of my local bookshop. She was referring to the popularity of children's books about Australian animals. Recent offerings include A Koala Grows Up by Rita Golden Gelman, Wallaby Creek by Joyce Powzyk and Wombat Stew by Pamela Lofts about a dingo who catches a wombat and decides to make a ‘gooey, brooey/ yummy, chewy/ Wombat stew!’
Ann Morrissett Davidon softened the critic's blow with a delicate simile in her New York Times review of The Heart in the Casket by Colleen Klein: ‘Like a small gem that is lovely but flawed, this story delights but dissatisfies’. Klein writes a modern fairy tale set among the fauna and flora of her native Australian landscape and its joint US publishers – Century Hutchinson/David & Charles – are happy with its reception so far. What did I tell you about marsupials?
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