I was mooched again yesterday and so I visited the post office during lunch with the aim of sending away the volume: to Perth this time. I also mailed off a photocopy of the Australian Literary Review to someone I met through LibraryThing. She lives in New York and it cost just on $11. She's interested in Australian women authors from the first half of the twentieth century. September's ALR didn't contain a story of that nature, but I think it highly beneficial to encourage such interest in our literature. Hence my largesse.

On the way back to my desk, I dropped in at the Chancellor's Committee Bookfest. Tuesday is a special day: you can gather up a box full of books and pay only ten dollars. So that's what I did. And it was all good stuff, too. Including my Saturday haul, that's 48 books for $54: just over a dollar per volume.

My New York correspondent also suggested I contact the Italian Institute of Culture in Sydney, which is the cultural office of the Consulate General of Italy. Her friend Danilo Sidari, who works there, could help me, she thought, to identify good Italian writers. Having studied Italian at university, I can read the language, but being absent from that milieu for a good twenty years, I'm ignorant of the quality material now being published in that country. He suggested these:

Women:
Marilù Manzini
Francesca Mazzucato
Paola Mastrocola
Dacia Maraini
Elena Stancanelli
Susanna Tamaro

Men:
Aldo Nove
Sandro Veronesi
Stefano Benni
Pino Roveredo
Domenico Starnone
Raffaele Nigro
Paolo Nori
Andrea Camilleri