It's June, and winter is settling in for the long haul; time for the next instalment of the SPIN.

NEW RELEASES

July 7 sees the eBook only release of Unspeakable: A Feminist Ethic of Speech. Written by Betty McLellan, author of PsychOppression and HELP! I’m Living with a Man Boy, Unspeakable joins Spinifex’s growing fold of eBooks – more than 90 so far. Unspeakable is available in print format from OtherWise Publications.

Also next month we release The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Politics and Power, by investigative journalist and documentary maker Marie-Monique Robin. A powerful book (‘jaw dropping’ in the words of one journo we’ve been talking to), The World According to Monsanto shines a light on the practices of one of the most ubiquitous companies in chemistry and food supply.

AWARDS

Spinifex Press is proud to announce that Vandana Shiva, Spinifex author, environmentalist and activist, has been awarded the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize for her commitment to social justice.

Dr Shiva will travel to Australia to deliver the City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture in November this year and will make a short stop in Melbourne too, so watch out for more details of her events.

In addition, Lesley Thomson's book A Kind of Vanishing is a finalist for the People's Book Prize! We at Spinifex are crossing our fingers for her. Voting for the prize is open, and you can find the list of finalists and vote for your favourite at the website.

EVENTS

Spinifex authors Susan Hawthorne, Renate Klein and Melinda Tankard Reist will be attending the Stop Porn Culture! Conference in Boston this month. The conference is held over two days and discusses the damaging effects of porn on our society as well as its increased pervasiveness in everyday life.

SPINIFEX BLOG
Several new blogposts to catch up on this month:

Our publisher Nikki Anderson has written on movements in several countries – Australia included – to make it illegal for women to wear the burqa.

‘μεταdata’, a new poem by director Susan Hawthorne, is an amusing look at something that has been occupying our minds with Spinifex’s increased focus on eBooks.

We also have two guest posts. The first, ‘Women sit outside language’ is by Meanjin editor Sophie Cunningham. It looks at the way that women are still being cast as inferior and overlooked in our ‘post-feminist’ society:

Last year not a single female lead singer was included in Triple J’s hottest 100 survey. Catherine Strong explores the implications on this in her essay ‘The Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time 2009 and the Dominance of the Rock Canon’ in this issue [of Meanjin].

I could go on. I won’t. I’ll just say this: either women can’t sing, paint, write or think as well as they used to—certainly not well enough to offset their tendency to become less beautiful with age—or we live in a culture that does not like the things women say or does not know how to hear them when they say it.

‘How we are screwing up boys with violence, porn, drugs and alcohol’ by Melinda Tankard Reist, is an interview with Getting Real [link] contributor Maggie Hamilton about her new book on the effects of technology, drugs and increased sexualisation of society on boys.

The Spinifex blog can be found at the ‘News & Events’ link at the top of our website. You can also find our news page and the newsletter archive there.

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