And because I’m something of an oversharer, here are some of the cultural highlights of my year. With Oprah out of the way (bless), it’s time for Hannah’s Favourite Things of 2011. Cue the hysteria.

On the Telly

Rule Brittania

In recent years I have acquired a Welsh-and-Irish family, who, besides teaching me to ridicule the English and imbibe vast quantities of lager, have introduced me to bacon butties with brown sauce; words such as ‘mewlin’ (disgusting, gross), ‘cwtch’ (a cuddle, cosy – as in ‘I’m all cwtched up’) and ‘lush’ (delicious, cute, wonderful); pickle-flavoured Monster Munch; and the glories of UK television.

Thanks to my Welsh cohorts, the internet and DVDs posted by relatives still stranded in Old Blighty, I’ve been introduced to the comic genius of Gavin and Stacey, the slapstick of Miranda, the oh-so-wrong-yet-brilliant twattish group of teenage boys in The Inbetweeners, the deft wit of Graham Norton, the skilfully-written spookfest that is The Fades and the misadventures of Father Adam in Rev. Many of these shows have been around for a few years, but most premiered here only this year, and some have not yet even reached our southern screens. For anyone who is already a fan of Skins, The Office, Extras and any number of fantastically addictive UK series, I urge you to seek out these ‘newbies’.

Vote Knope

In the past she’s been primarily thought of as Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live sidekick – the Hillary Clinton to Fey’s Sarah Palin – but since 2009, with the release of Parks and Recreation, Amy Poehler is getting a lot more recognition for her comic ingenuity. And rightly so. The NBC series follows the endearingly optimistic mid-level bureaucrat Leslie Knope (Poehler), as she battles red tape and local-government apathy in her attempts to make a difference. Unsophisticated, trusting and prone to getting herself into ridiculous situations (fighting for the rights of gay penguins, losing a miniature pony, shooting her boss), Leslie is one of the most appealing comic characters to have come out of the US in recent years. Season four, which premiered in 2011, was the best yet.

On the Radio

Laura Marling

I am a long-time admirer of this shy songbird from England. I wrote much of my novel manuscript with her second album, I Speak Because I Can, on repeat in the background, both for its absorbing melancholy and for its lyricism, which I hoped to similarly absorb and transfer to the page. 2011 saw the release of her third album (three albums and she’s only 21 years old!), A Creature I Don’t Know. While less reminiscent of the dark nights of the soul, cups of tea, anxious lovers and Hardy-esque scenes of pastoral idyll featured in her previous work, A Creature is exquisitely crafted, and full of the haunting lyrical genius Marling fans love her for.

2011 was also a good year for Marling’s nu-folk ex, Charlie Fink, and his band Noah & The Whale, whose third album Last Night on Earth was released to great acclaim. Other recent albums that have been getting a lot of airtime in my house include Florence + the Machine’s Ceremonials (particularly good for those times when you want nothing more than to run around a paddock in chiffon and lace), Boy and Bear’s Moonfire, Adele’s 21 (I dare you to watch this and not be moved), Bon Iver’s self-titled album and Example’s dubstep Playing in the Shadows (surprisingly suitable for domestic chores).

On the Shelf

Ron Rash

It’s a wonderful thing when you discover a writer whose work enchants you so much that you are immediately compelled to read everything they have ever written. Earlier this year I read US author Ron Rash’s novel Out of Eden in preparation for a Kill Your Darlings interview (Rash later contributed a short story to Issue Seven of KYD), and was so impressed by the precision and beauty of his prose that I then read all of his other books one after the other. Then, significantly, I gave his books to my friends and family to read. For someone who has nightmares about beloved books being lent and never returned, this is truly an indication of how highly I value Rash’s work – my desire that others read and love his writing overrode my fear of the novels being lost, or returned with spines so badly cracked they look like they’d been a chiropractor’s guinea pig.

Jill Dawson

I first encountered UK author Jill Dawson when I read her novel Fred and Edie (2000) for my PhD research. Fred and Edie took the real-life story of Edith Thompson, who was hanged in 1923 in Holloway Prison for her role in the murder of her husband, Percy, and treated it with such insight, imagination and pathos that I was immediately hooked. It remains one of the few books that have made me weep in public (I finished it on a train).

This year I also read Dawson’s The Great Lover (2009), a beautifully rendered representation of the life of poet Rupert Brooke; and her newest and seventh novel, Lucky Bunny (2011), a romping tale narrated by Queenie Dove, a fictional East-End thief, which touches on everything from the Bethnal Green tube station disaster of 1943 to the shady Soho nightlife of mid-twentieth century London. Queenie’s voice is one of the most compelling I’ve encountered all year; its authenticity is testament to Dawson’s prowess as a novelist.

… and others

At the beginning of each year I promise myself that I will read at least a book a week, and each year I fail. This year I read approximately thirty-five novels, some of which were classics I ought to have read a long time ago (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Middlemarch, Moll Flanders); others were damn fine debuts (Amy T Matthew’s End of the Night Girl, Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party, Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game, Bernie McGill’s The Butterfly Cabinet), while yet others were horrible works I should never have even considered reading (Skins: The Novel – just don’t … ). There were also a variety of books I picked up when I should have been doing work (Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, Jay Griffith’s Love Letter from a Stray Moon).

My bookshelf is still crowded with unread novels, my bedside table stacked with half-read tomes pocked with dog-ears and bookmarks, and I know that despite my best intentions, I won’t get to half of them in the new year. But never mind. Half the fun is knowing that they’re there, waiting for me, once I’ve finished chortling at YouTube clips of Leslie Knope.

Hannah Kent is Deputy Editor of Kill Your Darlings.

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed the fantastically friendly author Steven Amsterdam (Things We Didn’t See Coming and What the Family Needed) at my home office for the Kill Your Darlings podcast. While I was setting up, his observer’s eyes were darting around with great enthusiasm. ‘I’m just putting it all together. The new Isobelle Carmody book, Miranda July, Zadie Smith essays,’ he said, deftly sketching a personality outline from the books he could see sitting about on shelves and stacked in Jenga-like towers.

Steven’s active curiosity made me see the room, which I’d previously thought relatively ordered and neutral, through his eyes. My office detritus was as telling as a Meyers-Briggs test result: the Carmody-July-Smith combination (female indie reader with with a fantasy bent); a year-old unopened McSweeney’s Issue 36 head (lazy); Stieg Larsson trilogy (tragically behind-the-game mass-market tastes); a dishevelled sheaf of paperwork, thankfully stashed behind the chair he was seated in (bad at filing).

‘Wow, that’s…ha ha,’ I said, trying to stay casual but feeling more exposed by the second. I had become painfully aware that Geoffrey Robertson’s Crimes against Humanity might give the wrong impression (worthy and interesting, but unread – and not even mine). And as for the battered but rarely used Collins Robert French Dictionary – well, that just spoke to all kinds of unholy pretentiousness.

We proceeded to the interview, which was great (it will be online tomorrow). On the way out, Steven laid eyes upon my copy of Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, a book he said hadn’t made a huge impression on him – ‘It’s her non-fiction I take with me.’ I agreed that it wasn’t my favourite of her books, but that I’d appreciated the intensities of certain scenes and characters. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad prompted a short and agreeable exchange of opinions regarding the technique (‘enjoyable’) and subject (‘meh’) of that book.

It occurred to me that I’ll increasingly be having conversations like this online. Of course, we all already flit from blog to Tumblr to bookshop website in search of new books and opinions about them. But many of us now say, ‘Hey, what did you think of this?’ through specialist sites like Goodreads or Shelfari, where users can rate and comment on books. Kobo Pulse, a social reading platform, allows you to share passages you like with friends through social media and check out what people in your networks are reading.

Though these possibilities are exciting, there are a few losses I’ll be mourning. Finding out about someone’s reading tastes by looking at a physical bookshelf is simple, unmediated. It doesn’t matter if my e-reader has run out of batteries, the wi-fi isn’t working or if you and your reading buddy are members of different social networking sites.

And one thing I’ve learned about e-books is that I’m way less interested in whether they endure. I am a strict non-marker of hard-copy books – no marginalia for me. Not so with e-books, which can be highlighted and unhighlighted, dog-eared and undog-eared, pages turned to eternity without any danger of leaf litter. I’ve also discovered that I can delete them without feeling bad. But paper books are different. Even the ones I didn’t enjoy stand to attention like a monument to my diligence and eventual boredom. This means that putting one’s iBooks on show doesn’t afford the same accidental licence to judge that an unhideable wall-to-wall bookcase does.

I also find it a bit sad that my imperfect personal library will henceforth be divided between an Ikea bookshelf and a digital one. (Possible business opportunity: designer e-shelves?) Of course, I can now hide my less-savoury reading habits in my digital device. But insightful conclusions about my personality, like the one Steven made from looking at my wood-and-tacks bookshelves that day, will be based on less complete information, at least while we grow more familiar with digital reading.

And that future familiarity is a certainty. I know that almost all book lovers will adapt to these new avenues for book perving and literary discussion. Similarly, the possibilities that e-readers and their platforms offer for social reading will continue to adapt to what readers want. In ten years, or maybe five, we’ll probably all be directly tickling each others’ synapses when we want to discuss The Golden Bowl or the latest thriller.

Until then, though, I might see what I can do about getting Tyra Banks’ Modelland – as an e-book.

Estelle Tang is the Online Editor for Kill Your Darlings.

Snap up KYD at this special price here, for a limited time only.

Give the perfect gift to your friends and family: a subscription to Kill Your Darlings. Not only will you be giving a yearly dose of KYD goodness (with a saving of 30% off RRP and free postage) but from now until Christmas Eve you can also keep a present for yourself! There are three brilliant books to choose from. 

Her Father’s Daughter – by Alice Pung

At twenty-something, Alice is eager for the milestones of adulthood: leaving home, choosing a career, finding friendship and love on her own terms. But with each step she takes she feels the sharp tug of invisible threads: the love and worry of her parents, who want more than anything to keep her from harm. Her father fears for her safety to an extraordinary degree – but why?

As she digs further into her father’s story, Alice embarks on a journey of painful discovery: of memories lost and found, of her own fears for the future, of history and how it echoes down the years. Set in Melbourne, China and Cambodia, Her Father’s Daughter captures a father–daughter relationship in a moving and astonishingly powerful way.

Pop Life: Inside Smash Hits Australia 1984–2007 – by Marc Andrews, Claire Isaac and David Nichols (Affirm Press)

‘Smash Hits was the magazine for pop fans’ – Kylie Minogue

For Australian teenagers of the 1980s and 1990s, Smash Hits magazine provided a fortnightly fix of fun, glamour and pop. It had more fizz than a sherbet bomb, and hundreds of thousands of Australian teenagers were hooked.

Pop Life is an insiders’ view of the Australian pop lovers’ bible, from its bubbly beginnings to digital demise. Three former Smash Hits writers and editors take an affectionate and irreverent jaunt down memory lane. And reveal how they, Australia and readers have changed along the way.

Life Kills – by Miles Vertigan

Life Kills follows the dark journey and twisted mind ravines of a mysterious unnamed terrorist as he goes about his business. On his flight, stewards Bubbles and Sparkles, pilots Brad and Chad, and a bunch of burnt out z-list hackster celebrities face their own particular brands of demons.

Life Kills is a unique work of dark and comedic avant-garde literary fiction, in the mode of Hunter S Thompson crossed with Kinky Friedman. It ridicules the many contradictions in the way people live their lives, with an authentic humour that belies the anger boiling beneath the surface. For hipsters, boomers, and anything in-between.

What are you waiting for? Click here.

Happy Halloween! Just a reminder that there are still two weeks left before the next Kill Your Darlings Culture Club podcast (airing November 14), in which I’ll be discussing Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote with Text Publishing’s Caro Cooper and The Lifted Brow‘s Ronnie Scott – yes, it’s a special editors’ edition!

A progress report from me: there’s no denying that this is a brick of a book. At 900+ pages, it’s been an every-spare-moment kind of read. But for a novel that may be more demanding of your time than most – Jonathan Franzen has said he couldn’t finish it – it’s really delightful: full of adventure, articulate dialogue and insanely well sketched characters. It’s also episodic, with hundreds of chapters and several parts, and it’s not the kind of book that will be spoilt if you listen in to our discussion without having finished reading it. I dare say you could join us even if you haven’t read it at all (though it’s so enjoyable that I’d recommend it to anyone).

Who is this mad sage, Don Quixote? What drives him to leave his town and become a knight errant? Join us on November 14 as we discuss Don Quixote, perhaps one of the greatest novels of all time.

It’s hard to believe, but a little over two years ago Kill Your Darlings – pale and naive – had the audacity to launch into the Australian literary community. It wasn’t our first issue that marked this date, but our first Melbourne fundraiser, a literary trivia night, at the Pumphouse in Carlton. It was a modest but happy affair, and we managed to raise a good portion of funds to go towards the printing and contributor costs for the inaugural issue. The remaining money required to put together the issue came from the KYD team’s own piggy banks.

We’re all still pale (probably more so) but we’re certainly little less naive about the machinations of independent publishing. To be sure, it’s a model we love – there’s flexibility, innovation and diversity, as well as the thrill of the daily challenge to get new and engaging content out there. Like most indie publishers, KYD has never been about profits or making millions. We’re all about celebrating and rewarding quality writing from new, emerging and established Australian writers – writing that bucks trends, is fresh and little bit sassy; stories and commentary and opinions that speak to a diverse and intelligent reader. You.

While we’re in it for the love of it, and we’re having a ball bringing out the quarterly issue and daily web content, we’re not going to kid anyone: it’s tough going. The margins for this kind of venture are very small.

This year, we’ve been lucky enough to be supported by the Australia Council, who awarded us funds for our contributor payments. And while this alleviated certain pressures, there are many other costs involved. There are also other aspects of Kill Your Darlings we’d like to make more appealing to our readers and subscribers, such as bringing our event series to states outside of Victoria and South Australia; organising seminars and workshops across all genres; participation in festivals around the country. But highest on our agenda is the desire to start paying our online writers for their content, because we believe passionately in professional and financial recognition of writing as vocation. We’re not currently in the position to do that, but we hope it’s not too far off. And, of course, we want to keep bringing you Kill Your Darlings for many years to come.

But we need your help! We’re putting out a call for additional support. On our homepage, there’s currently a DONATE button where you can nominate an amount of your choice – no sum is too small. Every dollar you give will be going straight into ensuring Kill Your Darlings endures, and with it, the voices of Australian writers.

Thank you for reading. Please don’t hesitate to contact Kill Your Darlings directly if you have further queries about this post and donating on info@killyourdarlingsjournal.com.

Rebecca Starford is the editor of Kill Your Darlings.

By way of disclaimer, as well as my role at Kill Your Darlings, I’m the associate publisher at Affirm Press, a small independent publisher based in Melbourne. I’ve been managing our Long Story Shorts project, a series of six individual collections of short stories by new and emerging writers including Bob Franklin, Emmett Stinson and Gretchen Shirm.

This month, we published Irma Gold’s Two Steps Forward, the final book in the series. Affirm Press is using social media over the coming weeks to start conversations about all-things short fiction, and we’ve also put together a book trailer, thanks to filmmaker Daniel Cahill.

I’ve seen book trailers popping up from time to time. Some are very good; the shorter, the better, is my usual assessment. But there are a few, longer ones – they’re almost short films – that have caught my attention.

The first is the bizarre and hilarious mockumentary trailer for Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel, Super Sad True Love Story. Celebrity cameos abound (Edmund White, James Franco); it generally takes the piss out of the book world. And while it’s very difficult to gauge the effectiveness of print advertising (whether people are looking at the ad, let alone being persuaded to buy the product) or even online, static adverts (despite the click-through statistics), the Super Sad True Love Story book trailer has been viewed nearly 180,000 times.

Similarly, the Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters book trailer has been viewed 315,000 times. The book, which is a parody of the Jane Austen classic, lends itself very well to book-trailer form – it’s downright silly, with opportunities for gags with every turn of the page.

The thing is, traditional advertising is expensive – most print advertising is out of reach for smaller publishers; larger publishers are starting to look elsewhere to promote their books. What I like about book trailers is that they are experiential – you’re taken somewhere, briefly, with the video. Will I buy the book? I don’t know. But I remember it; and as a publisher I know that a book trailer is easier to promote than a traditional advertisement. And for the cost of a full-page advertisement in a trade magazine, you can engage the creative innovation of an emerging filmmaker, editor and script-writer – and, with a strategic promotional drive, most likely reach a far larger audience.

Rebecca Starford is editor of Kill Your Darlings and Associate Publisher at Affirm Press.

By next Tuesday you must send us the topics you would like to cover. Please write them in the comments below this post. …
This is an opportunity to put yourselves to the test, also to become our freelance contributors and to begin a relationship with the magazine. Others amongst you began in this manner, and now work with us on a regular basis…

Readers have responded in force to this seductive call, with 72 pages worth of comments from aspiring Vogue regulars now cramming the bottom of the post.

This idea left me aghast. Though it’s a great idea that has certainly inspired a lot of writers, who might otherwise feel that they mightn’t have a chance in hell of getting the attention of a Vogue editor, the idea of pitching in public makes me feel like I’m in that dream where I’ve forgotten to put my clothes on, and everyone is looking at me.

What about you? Would you pitch ideas on a blog? Would you feel comfortable pitching in plain sight?

[via The Cut]

Normally $18, until 31 August only $10 each! (and we’ll cover the postage too)

Click here to purchase issues Two, Three and Four at only $10 each and make sure you’ve got the full KYD set.

Issue Two RRP: $18 now just $10

Welcome to the new Kill Your Darlings website! We’re delighted to have such a great new home. Please feel free to poke around – go on, get comfortable. Thanks to Studio Skiing for our new website. We love it!