Ironfest introduces new attraction for 2012 – The Inaugural Ironfest Book Fayre

Ironfest is proud to announce the addition of a new attraction for 2012: ‘The Inaugural Ironfest Book Fayre’, organised by local bookseller Paul Phillips, whose bookshop, A Readers Heaven, is located in the East End Main Street, Lithgow. Numerous booksellers will band together to provide visitors a vast range and selection of literary delights.

The Book Fair should prove to be a popular addition to the hugely successful Ironfest weekend. Books of all fiction genres and a massive range of non-fiction works will be available and the organisers are expecting the total of books to number in the thousands.

Ironfest attracts thousands of visitors every year to the Lithgow region and organisers of the Book Fair believe that the inclusion of this new attraction will have a two-fold effect: to bring more visitors to Ironfest and the Lithgow region and, secondly, to provide a link between readers and local booksellers.

Ironfest has been recognized as an event of State significance & attracts people from all over Australia, and increasingly, the world. This year the festival will be held over two days at the Lithgow Showground over the weekend of April 21 & 22, 2012.

The event is truly unique; also comprising of major large-scale historical events, including an international jousting event and a colonial era battle re-enactment, as well as art exhibitions, stalls, live musical acts, a farmers market, street performance, technological displays, art making workshops, blacksmithing demonstrations and competitions, wood-chopping events, busking competitions, automotive displays, machinery exhibitions and lots more.

Ironfest is supported by Destinations NSW, Delta Electricity & Lithgow City Council, plus a host of smaller supporters.

Anyone interested in more information regarding the Book Fair, contact Paul Phillips on (0263) 524529 or via email at areadersheaven@gmail.com

Today, we are very proud to announce that we have been selected to be judges in Dan Poynter’s Global eBook Awards. 

The Global eBook Awards are more than an honor for the best eBooks published, they offer high-profile publicity for eBook authors, publishers and the eBook entered.

To break out of the pack and rise above the noise, your ebook needs to get read. Readers have to read it, love it, and tell someone else. This is “word of mouth.”

To be successful, fiction has to get read.

To be successful, nonfiction has to be brought to the attention of its category audience.

The Global eBook Awards are designed to help you achieve these goals. The Awards are more than a “sticker” they come with a built-in publicity machine.

Accepting entries: Now.

Eligibility: eBook released anytime on or before March 11, 2012.

Application deadline: March 12, 2012 (midnight Pacific Time).

Award ceremony in beautiful Santa Barbara: Saturday, August 18, 2012.

Submitting your eBook for a Global Ebook Award is a publicity investment.

For information on the rules of entry, please go to THIS page.

For more information on what eBooks are eligible, got to the Q & A page.

(This review references both the audio edition and the unabridged text edition.)

The Coen Brothers have long appeared masters of quirky American voices. Jewish, rednecks, hitmen, insurance salesmen, FBI officials – they’ve created a gaggle of characters. But there is the question of whether they’re better directors than writers, and get lucky with so many talented casts. John Goodman and William H. Macy can make most dialogue work.

Enter this collection of short stories by Ethan Coen. I was fortunate enough to get both the unabridged text and the abridged audio production, and happily compared how his prose read against how the actors performed.

First, the performers. Good Lord, what talent. John Turturro delivers two stories with dynamic aplomb. John Goodman is hilarious as the oversexed interloper and gossip in “It Is an Ancient Mariner.” Ben Stiller is wonderfully uncomfortable and regretful in”I Killed Phil Shapiro.” Steve Buscemi is a top-shelf scumbag for”Have You Ever Been to Electric Ladyland,” then turns around and becomes a farcical pulp detective for “A Fever in the Blood.” These short stories could all be terrible and would still be worth listening to just for the voices the actors draw from them.

I read the text first, to test my inner ear against the actors’ external ones. “It Is an Ancient Mariner” was where it first kicked, and where Coen shows some of his boldest prose moves. It’s written as a conversation with someone sitting down to a lunch counter, but we only ever hear the gossip’s side. He pauses for imagined reactions that grow increasingly scene-breaking, including halfway through in assigning a name to the unknown chatter, destroying the illusion that we’re talking to him. Yet the destruction isn’t off-putting; it’s funny. The whole story is brash in its games with how gossips speak, and how lurid the narrator will get. It soon results in pushing just how much you’d swallow for this conceit, rendering humor whether you decide it’s ridiculous or continue to suspend your disbelief.

That story is lurid, too. Coen compares sex with Marcia Ziegler to having your penis stuck in a paint mixer, and goes more absurd from there. In that sense, it’s a microcosm for how the entire collection handles rough material. Coen is comfortable writing orgasms and murders in almost grotesquely silly fashions. He’s also unafraid to write bigoted, homophobic characters who are so unrelentingly ignorant that some audience members will probably condemn the author. It’s a shame if they do. In the eponymous “Gates of Eden,” a sexist and self-indulgent detective enters getting lucky but exits soiling himself and with a butt covered in bee stings. In “Cosa Minapolidan” we see homophobia spun into a vengeful gang haggling over a corpse that may or may not have been gay when alive. Their problems, their morals, their toughness and their grit all exist in the same plane of ridicule.

Detectives, gangsters and inmates color many ofthe stories as emerging from the pulp traditional, either parodying it or paying some scatological tributes. There are rarer stories that fixate on the profound, like “A Morty Story,” about a boy being raised as a Jewish fundamentalist. His parents, religious instructors, orthodontist and teachers all seem to be wrangling him towards a cultural identity he doesn’t understand, and that may no longer exist the way they think it does. The certain dragging people towards uncertainty might serve as the theme of the collection – if you include all the cases of unduly convinced people self-destructing or being reduced to silliness. It’s a theme worth exploring, as are most of the stories within whichever version you decide to pick up.

_____

John Wiswell is the author of The Bathroom Monologues, which are a long-running experiment in flash fiction, list fiction, monologues, dialogues, essays and other prose composed entirely while he’s up and away from the computer for a short time. They began when he took bathroom breaks from studying in college.

John’s work has appeared at Flash Fiction Online, Weird Tales, 10Flash, Untied Shoelaces of the Mind, Every Day Fiction, BURST, Alienskin Magazine, Short.Story-ME, Tweet the Meat and Thaumatrope. In 2009 he was nominated for Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web for “Rorschark Attack.” In 2010 he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for “Sologamous.”

Find him at:

-Twitter, at http://twitter.com/Wiswell

-Facebook, at John Wiswell

On behalf of the management and staff of A Reader’s Heaven, I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our customers and friends a very Merry Christmas. May it be filled with love and friendship, family and fun.

We would also like to wish everyone a safe and prosperous 2012.

We are taking a short break over the holidays and shall return to the office on Wednesday, January 4, 2012.

If you have any questions during the holidays regarding orders and books, you can always leave your questions here, or use our Contact page on the website or even visit us on Facebook.

Over the last few months, our store has gone through a number of changes and innovations.

Firstly, we upgraded our exchange system – offering our customers a better deal on the books they wanted to trade.

Then, earlier this year, we kicked off an ordering option for customers who were looking for something new or something a little less new…we have forged some partnerships with book suppliers all over the world to help bring our customers the best service we can provide.

Not long after that, we started to get in to selling new books as well. When Angus & Robertson closed here in Lithgow, we lost a valuable asset – the ability to buy brand new titles. So, following their demise, we made the decision to help local readers get those new releases that they were accessing from Angus & Robertson.

Now, we are moving forward with a new website and online shop. It is a very exciting period for us – this has been a long time coming and we are proud to now be able to offer our books to people all over the country – and very soon, all over the world. While it may take some time to get the online shop stocked, there will always be the “Contact Us” option for customers to enquire about the availability of any book at any time.

So, feel free to browse what is here it the moment, drop us a line if you have any questions and keep an eye on our “News” section for updates on the online shop – even visit our Facebook page and see what is happening there.

I would like to thank Jo at Visual Evolutions for the work she has put in with the logo and layout. She does a great job and extremely helpful with suggestions and questions.

Also, a thank you to Ron at Central West Information Technology for his assistance with the website and for all the computer-related work associated with the shop.

I would like to thank Jodi Cleghorn and her staff for making this endeavour possible. I am a firm believer that independent authors and publishers should be given as much exposure as possible. I am looking forward to strengthening our ties with eMergent Publishing in the near future.

eMergent Books in Front Window

100 STORIES FOR QUEENSLAND

Publisher: eMergent Publishing, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-9871126-3-7 (ebook)

ISBN: 978-0-9871126-2-0 (paperback)

100 Stories for Quuensland has something for everyone, from slice of life to science fiction, fantasy to romance, crime to comedy, paranormal to literary fiction. Heart-warming, quirky, inspiring and funny, the stories between these covers will lift readers to higher ground.

All proceeds to the Queensland Premier’s Flood Appeal.

“One hundred beautiful stories. Our stories. When so much was lost or destroyed, this was created. That’s something that can never recede or wash away.”

~ Kate Eltham (CEO of the Queensland Writers Centre)

THE RED BOOK

Editors: Paul Anderson & Jodi Cleghorn

Publisher: eMergent Publishing, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-9871126-0-6

 In a small North American university town ten lives are intersecting…

Miranda reaps what she has sown. Mitchell understands there is no resisting fate. Clint dreams of forging a violent destiny. Elizabeth is about to make a discovery. Robin hides a terrible secret. Simon hasn’t slept in ten days. Sam is pursued by nightmares. Susie has lost everything. David has just been found. Jake atones for past evils.

Ten ordinary people struggling to keep their sanity in an insane world.

EIGHTY NINE

Editor: Jodi Cleghorn

Publisher: Literary Mix Tapes, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-9871126-6-8

1989: a cusp between decades.

The year the Berlin Wall came down and Voyager went up. Ted Bundy and Emperor Hirohito died. The birth of the first Bush administration and computer virus.

In San Francisco and Newcastle the ground shook, in Chernobyl it melted. Tiananmen Square rocked the world and Tank Man imprinted on the international consciousness. Communism and Thatcherism began their decline, Islamic fundamentalism its rise.

It was the year Batman burst onto the big screen, we went back to the future (again) Indiana Jones made it a trifecta at the box office and Michael Damian told us to rock on.

Based on a play list of 26 songs released in 1989 , Eighty Nine re-imagines the social, political, cultural and personal experiences at the end of the decade which gave the world mullets, crimped hair, neon-coloured clothing, acid-wash denim, keytars, the walkman, Live Aid, the first compact disc and MTV.

NOTHING BUT FLOWERS 

Editor: Jodi Cleghorn

Publisher: Literary Mix Tapes

ISBN: 978-0-9807446-7-5 (eBook)

ISBN: 978-0-9807446-1-3 (paperback)

In a devastated world, a voice calls out through the darkness of space, a young woman embraces Darwin, a man lays flowers in a shattered doorway, a two-dimensional wedding feast awaits guests, a Dodge Challenger roars down the deserted highway

…and that’s just the beginning.

Inspired by the Talking Heads’ song of the same name, Nothing but Flowers explores the complexities and challenges of love in a post-apocalyptic landscape; from a take-away coffee mug to a gun to the head, a fortune cookie to a guitar, the open road and beyond. Poignant, funny, horrifying and sensual, this collection of short fiction leaves an indelible mark on ideas of what it means to love and be loved.

All profits from the sale of this anthology go to The Grantham Flood Support Fund.

THE YIN & YANG BOOK

Editors: Paul Anderson & Jodi Cleghorn

Publisher: eMergent Publishing, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-9807446-9-9

7.30AM. THE INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL OF A MAJOR EUROPEAN AIRPORT IS POISED ON THE BRINK OF CHAOS.

7.35AM. PANGAEAN AIRLINES, EUROPE’S PREMIER CARRIER, IS PLACED INTO RECEIVERSHIP, CANCELLING ALL FLIGHTS AND IMPOUNDING THOUSANDS OF ITEMS OF LUGGAGE.

The Yin and Yang Book follows the complicated web of events stemming from a suitcase, a stolen van Gogh painting, one woman on the run from her employers and the consequences of her decision to stay or go.

FROM DARK PLACES – E.J. NEWMAN

Publisher: eMergent Publishing

ISBN-13: 978-0980744651 (Paperback)

Abby finds a creative solution to her father’s problems. Ben makes a pact with the Devil for a new Mum. Katie is pursued by unrelenting voices. John just found his colleague’s hand in a strange girl’s lap. Jarvis is falling apart on his wedding day. Rosalind comes face-to-face with her number one fan. And that is just the beginning.

E.J. Newman’s debut anthology is a dark and twisting journey across the urban landscape, mining the rich seam of human frailties with insight and humour. The stories traverse the magical and the mundane, where supernatural beings are indistinguishable from their mortal counterparts in their complexity and complicity.
(Temporarily Out of Stock)

Everybody likes to tell people about a great book they have read, right?

Everybody likes free stuff, too, right?

So, what more can you ask for than this current promotion?

Being a part of it is easy – all you have to do is send a review of your favourite book (or the book you have just read) to areadersheaven@gmail.com and the review we choose each week as our favourite will be featured on the blog and a copy printed and displayed in-store. Other reviews will be posted randomly throughout the week.

“What do we win?” we hear you cry. Well, that is very simple. For those living in Australia, you win a new release book of our choice, posted to you free-of-charge, and free promotion of your book, blog, website or whatever you choose. How is that? For a simple review, you can win a brand new book! Sounds brilliant!

For those outside of Australia, you could either win an Amazon Gift Card (I know this defeats the purpose of owning a bookstore, but international postage is a killer), and/or promotion of your book, blog, website or whatever you please…all for the simple task of writing about a book.

This is open to absolutely anyone – young or old, fiction or non-fiction, romance or children’s books – it doesn’t matter. As long as you are reading and sharing your love of books with others.

Feel free to share this promotion with your friends – the more reviews, the better for everyone.

Edited by Sasha Beattie

Brand new collection from Kayelle Press.

From thirteen Australian writers comes a collection of original speculative fiction short stories that will take you from the great unknown of our own planet, to the stars, and beyond to mystical fantasy worlds.  These stories of ‘hope’ include High Tide at Hot Water Beach (Paul Haines), Burned in the Black (Janette Dalgliesh), The Haunted Earth (Sean Williams), Eliot (Benjamin Solah), Boundaries (Karen Lee Field), The Encounter (Sasha Beattie), The God on the Mountain (Graham Storrs), Deployment (Craig Hull), Flowers in the Shadow of the Garden (Joanne Anderton), Blinded (Jodi Cleghorn), The Choosing (Rowena Cory Daniells), Duty and Sacrifice (Alan Baxter) and A Moment, A Day, A Year… (Pamela Freeman).

With a preface written by Karen Henderson and the introduction by Simon Haynes, these brilliantly crafted stories, combined with essays donated by Beyondblue and Dr Myfanwy Maple and Mr Warren Bartik, from the University of New England, are accompanied by short snippets of information on suicide.

Did you know approximately one million people die by suicide each year worldwide?

Suicide happens on a daily basis. It can affect you. Are you suicide aware?

Everything in this anthology is donated by Australians to help raise suicide awareness. All profits will be donated to suicide awareness.

“Hope” is available via Kayelle Press, Fishpond, Smashwords and Amazon.

As a reader of crime fiction, I am always looking for characters that are memorable, characters that stick in your mind long after the reading has finished and the book has been put away.

Smitty is one such character: he is a professional hitman, razor sharp, ruthless and very effective in his line of work. Yet he is also loyal and kind hearted to those around him. B.R. Stateham’s series of novellas and short stories are entertaining and will keep you wondering whether he is a good guy after all – or a cold-blooded killer.

Three Deadly Sins by B.R. Stateham:

“The newest installment of the Call Me Smitty series is a killer. In more ways
than one! Smitty is a professional hit man. Dark eyed, quiet; a killing machine that is as efficient as they come. Yet one who, at times, shows a surprising gentleness.
In Three Deadly Sins, featuring two short stories and one complete novella, Smitty is as ruthless as ever. But he is gentle to a young mother and her baby. He is loyal to a young man who wanted to be a friend. He saves the lives of two lovers who, madly in love, have no idea of the dangers their love have placed them in.
So is Smitty a hit man? Or a grim knight who steps out of the darkest shadows and showers righteous wrath onto those who justly deserve it? You decide. Smitty is waiting in the darkness . . . “

Three Deadly Sins is available at Amazon.

Also by B.R. Stateham

“With the eyes of a viper; as silent as a malevolent fog when stalking his prey–as deadly as the Angel of Death himself. That’s Smitty. Dive into the dark underworld that Smitty moves in. And remember to double-lock your back door
tonight when you go to bed. For you never know who stands in the darkness . . . waiting. The next dark glimpse we have into Smitty’s life is violent, emotional and heart wrenching. The story is more of the same Smitty grit, hard-boiled action and suspense you have come to expect and enjoy from author B.R. Stateham.” (From Amazon)

“In B R Stateham’s Insatiable, PI Roman Dalton gets a request from an old friend to help him solve a murder. A murder so horrible, so brutal, it had to be caused by a werewolf! Dalton is approaching his ‘change’ and at the same time trying to solve a vicious crime. How does he stop himself from leaping onto his friend, when the time comes, and making his old buddy an evening snack? How does he find and remove from the city a werewolf who happens to be much older, and far stronger, than he is–and not create a panic among all the potential meal tickets walking around? Find out in Drunk On The Moon Four: Insatiable by BR Stateham- based on characters created by Paul D Brazill.” (From Amazon)

Something Deadly and Insatiable is available through Amazon.

______________________________

I’m a fourteen year old boy trapped in a sixty year old body.  The mind is willing–the body says, “Oh no.  No, no, no!” I’m married to a wonderfully patient woman, have three grown kids and five grandchildren of which, naturally, are the most brilliant and the most handsome in the world.

Follow his blog at In The Dark Mind of B.R. Stateham or visit his Amazon Author page for a list of all his work available.

And to celebrate the release of Dead Men’s Harvest, we have all six of Matt Hilton’s Joe Hunter novels (including Dead Man’s Harvest) up for grabs. Also included is “Shooting to Live” – a book on unarmed combat Joe Hunter swears by. And a copy of a John Lee Hooker CD – Joe is a huge fan!!

To enter, just do one of the following:

1) Answer in 35 words or less the following question: “I want to win because…” Leave your responses here on the blog or on our Facebook page.

2) Drop your answers instore:

35 Main Street,

Lithgow, NSW

The most inventive and clever answer will take the complete set.

Unfortunately, due to the costs of overseas shipping, entries are Australia-only.

For more information about Matt and his books, visit his website (or read his bio) or follow his blog at Joe Hunter Books.