AustLit

'The lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice to stop the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster went to trial on August I. 2022. with Judge Florence Pan presiding. The trial included expert testimony from a wide variety of authors, agents, and publishing professionals. Closing arguments took place on August 19. A ruling is expected in November. The fundamental question is whether the merger will diminish competition to a significant degree and lead to lower advances and royalties for authors. Some highlights from the trial follow.' (Introduction)
 

'Claire G. Coleman's third novel Enclave seems, at first, deceptively simple. Coleman is an Indigenous Australian; Enclave follows Terra Nullius (published by Hachette in Australia, and Small Beer in the US) and The Old Lie (also Hachette). In this novel, the language is direct and seems to be telling the perhaps ordinary story of a girl gaming up in a deliberately isolated city. which is keeping itself separate because of disasters happening elsewhere in the world. AU very straight-forward, and a few chapters in, if this were your first Coleman novel, you might wonder if there's a "but" coming; if you've read her others. you'll be on tenterhooks, just waiting. There is a "but," of course; there's sentences like this: "Heat from the roadway blasted up to meet the head raining down from the open sky; these competing heats did not feud, they united. formed a gang, went looking for trouble." Eventually, life for Christine. the protagonist, takes a dramatic twist and exposes everything that she's been taught, and the reader has so far learned, as a lie.' (Introduction)