Puzzled
The Chicken Shock. The Swastika Accident. The Wrong Nick Hornby.
Just three episodes you’ll read in my new book, Puzzled, a scenic tour through a single crossword with side-trips and clue tips along the way.
The Scumbag Brouhaha. The Abracadabra Pyramid. The Headless Trout.
Puzzled is a cocktail of memoir, puzzle archaeology and how-to guide. With plenty of example clues and mini-puzzles to test your skill, this is a book that celebrates language and how to shape it.
The Steve Irwin Fluke. The Tarzan Debacle. The Narnia Theory.
Clue by clue, chapter by chapter, Puzzled meanders through a central puzzle, encountering the dozen or so different wordplay recipes, as well as stumbling on Lolita, Nostradamus and The West Wing.
The Warragamba Bungle. The Binocular Woman. The Spanish Watchman.
Hear about how crosswords evolved from a modest diamond drafted back in New York in 1913 to the chequered mayhem we love today. Read of the great clues, the great stuff-ups, the taboos and scandals, the marvels and coincidences. From the booby-trap crossword of Sir Max Beerbohm to the tangled crossword poems of Peter Valentine, Puzzled is a ride worth catching for anyone who loves words or puzzles.
Sleepers Almanac 6
A love story, sorta, where boy meets woman, boy and woman both love insects, boy and woman get more and more insect-like – and then things turn odd. That’s the plotline for Nymphomaniacs, a new short story appearing in the latest Sleepers Almanac, my third story across the series.
Looking forward to reading the volume, which has only now just hit the stores this September 2010. Already the murmur is buzz-like, with a roll-call of both familiar and fresher authors, including Cate Kennedy, Jon Bauer and that meta-fiction trickster Ryan O'Neill.
Lou Swinn and Zoe Dattner – the Sleeper Sisters – have also been busy converting their backlist of almanacs into an app. That’s some 200 stories and cartoons for six bucks, which is must-buy lunacy, and great for spreading the word of Aussie fiction beyond these shores.
Look for more about this experiment once I pounce on the donwload button and give it a whirl. But to glean more about this SPUNCky outfit, their regular salons and media events, or maybe for your chance to submit a piece for Sleepers #7, drop by here.
Offbeat Australia
Offbeat is that guide you need when you have the other guide, an alternative view on almost anywhere you visit in Australia. Mermaid statues. Pebble churches. Tram hotels. Secrets and scandals. Ghosts and graffiti. The guide is distilled into 400 pages, over 1000 entries form Airborne to Zany. A glovebox must for your next Australian road-trip with a difference.
What other guide can suggest such out-there ideas as:
•sleeping with lions •joining a riverboat postman on his route •renting a cave for a night •amusing the kids at gruesome hideouts, quirky mazes and alien craters
Mixing travel with trivia, history with mystery, Offbeat Australia is the ideal glove-box companion as well as a fascinating read for the armchair traveller.
One Down One Missing
Join a murder taskforce in the hunt for the killers of Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller. Co-written with Senior Constable Joe D’Alo, this true-crime thriller follows every twist and shock of a remarkable investigation, back in Melbourne, 1998. The dead ends, the red herrings, the unlikely breakthroughs: this is your back-stage pass into an exclusive team, and what chilling truths they uncovered.