| After a few years of laying low in the wake of the ‘Deadly Woman Blues Fiasco’, I am now ready to climb back in the ring again. Later this year will see the publication of my eleventh major work, Suburban Songbook: Writing Hits in post-war/pre-Countdown Australia. Meantime, in February, the Visible Spectrum will publish a new expanded edition of my 1996 book Stranded... |
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| Suburban Songbook was in fact virtually all ready to go towards the end of 2018, but – happily I can say now in retrospect – it was scuttled because relations between the would-be publisher and I broke down. (‘Happily’ because this clown was the worst so-called publisher I’ve encountered in my entire forty years in the game [who is now effectively out of the game for that reason], and happily also because in the interim the book has become so much better, not different but just deeper, more comprehensive and way, way better.) So with the Songbook in transmogrification, when Steve Connell, my long-time American publisher at Verse Chorus Press, approached me last year with the idea of getting Stranded back in print, naturally I was dead keen. Stranded (Expanded) will be coming out through Steve’s new bespoke sub-imprint, the Visible Spectrum. The Visible Spectrum is designed as an outlet for a series of reissues, of ‘classics’, and so I’m just chuffed to be nestling alongside other fine writers and titles in the series like, so far, Susan Compo and David Nichols. Stranded (Expanded) is that, expanded, but in a very particular way: the original ‘integrity’ of the book is not compromised, meaning that the original text is not tampered with save for largely correcting errors of fact, but is appended with extensive footnotes. Which tell the real truth! Just wait! |
