We’re very excited about the partial solar eclipse happening right now(!! right now!!!) – so much so that Charlotte and I just half-blinded ourselves trying to look at it.
In dedication, here’s a song (and a video clip) that never goes out of style:
If there’s one thing John Butler Trio taught us, it’s to Treat Yo’ Mama With Respect.
(You all know what I’m talking about right? Right?? Right???)
And we’ve been thinking a lot about mamas over here at WP, with Mother’s Day peeking around the corner.
So we’ve decided to show a bit of our love, our care, our respect, by partnering up with the Women’s and Children’s Hospital this May, and donating 15% of every purchase from our online shop or our Kent Town store to the state’s best-known women’s and children’s healthcare facility.
It means every Wakefield Mother’s Day gift will be giving twice!
Don’t know about you guys, but that’s giving us the fuzzies over here.
(PS – Stuck for Mother’s Day present ideas? I have put together a few suggestions that mothers may enjoy – yes yes, feel free to pass them off as your own. Oh, and this one‘s back in stock too! Don’t click on that link, Mum – you’ll ruin the surprise.)
(PPS – We got you inspired? If you want to make a personal donation to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital Foundation charity, click on over here.)
Am I repeating myself? Because they’re ace. We’ve always known it, but it’s nice when they get the recognition they deserve, as is happening at the moment —
Hard on the heels of Margaret Merrilees’s shortlisting for the Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing, we now have not one but two longlistings from the Nita B. Kibble Awards as well!
The first is Rachel Hennessy, whose novel The Heaven I Swallowed was runner-up for the Australian/Vogel award before it was even published. Now it has been longlisted for the Kibble Literary Award for an established Australian female author. This is a HUGE deal, but then again The Heaven I Swallowed deserves every word of praise it gets.
The second is Margaret again! The First Week has now been longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award, awarded each year for a first published work from an Australian woman writer.
These are two powerful books, written by two of the most talented authors working in Australia today. Today, us Wakefieldians are feeling pretty bloody proud.
(Also a bit sick. Celebratory Easter chocolate is getting out of hand over here. Is it wine time yet? HAPPY EASTER, KIDS!!)
It’s true: Geoffrey Abbott’s Amazing True Stories of Female Executions contains some of the best collected tales of martyrs, murderesses and madwomen you’ll ever read.
It’s also pretty grisly stuff.
There’s the Reading Baby-farmer, who tied ribbons around the necks of her young victims and dumped them in the Thames, and the Yorkshire Witch, who sold potions for good health that turned out, incidentally, to be fatal.
Almost worse than the crimes themselves, are the punishments devised for the guilty. A description of thumbscrews explains the process of screws cutting into the wicks of the victim’s fingernails, concluding:
In some parts, Scotland in particular, thumbscrews were also known as pilliwinks, pilniwinks, penny-winks or pyrowinks: whatever their name, the result was pain.
Indeed. And then there are the witches’ bridles – the less said on that topic the better. And poor Margaret Clitheroe, a martyr whose hand was taken from her corpse and preserved in a reliquary. It appears that particular hand is lost, but here‘s St James’s, which I’m sure looks much the same, ie gross.
The problem with all this, is that I just. can’t. stop. reading.
Need another reason to come along to our pre-Easter sale? Well, there’s always the fact that you’ll get the chance to win one of these two bad boys:
Question is, books or chocolate? Delayed or immediate gratification? Oh, and there’s some awesome Fox Creek wine in there too.
God. Can I take both?
Guess who has just been shortlisted for the Glenda Adams Prize for New Fiction?
CONGRATULATIONS MARGARET! Not that anyone here at Wakefield HQ is surprised. The First Week is gripping, beautifully written, and stays with you for a long time after you’ve finished reading. Click here to read an extract.
We’ll be open 10am until 4pm on Saturday 12 April as well as standard hours for the rest of the week, with 20% off all stock!
Benny operates front of house at the Stanley Bridge Tavern, Verdun. He is a little Jack Russell, adopted by the tavern owners. They have a sign up asking people to ‘like’ Benny on Facebook, but he was apparently kicked off Linked-In for ‘not being a true professional’. This not only hurt Benny’s feelings, but is completely inaccurate. He is a consummate professional, entertaining and relaxing patrons.
For example, here he is keeping a Chesterfield soft and warm for the next occupant:
And here he is keeping guests company:
And here he is enjoying a glass of red as a knock-off:
What a handsome boy! He looks like he could do with a book to unwind with though. Maybe Dogs in Australian Art? (Benny would make a great model.) Or I Love My Dog and My Dog Loves Me? Quotable Dogs? Or City Dog Country Dog?
Thanks for the stellar service, Benny!
The thing about SA is that we like a good time.
(The Festival State, is what our number plates used to read, until someone thought that we were giving too much away.)
We like to party, we like to think, and we like to debate.
We also like wine.
Wakefield Press have released many wine titles that have gone on to become classics over the years. Trott’s View is the McLaren Vale book, and the book is as beautiful as the region. John Gladstones’s Wine, Terroir and Climate Change, on the other hand, is a wine industry bible, especially after it was inducted into the Gourmand Wine Books Hall of Fame in 2011. If you want to read James Halliday’s views on that one, just take a look at this pdf.
And now there’s Barossa Shiraz, by Dr Thomas Girgensohn.
I could tell you about how this is a groundbreaking book. I could tell you about Girgensohn’s years of research, his meticulous knowledge of a complex region. How this kind of project has never been done before.
But let’s be honest, Robyn Lewis’s review on VisitVineyards.com says it better.
And the book says it best of all.
Makes for delightful reading over a glass of Barossa red. Of course.
We get a lot of junk mail sent to the reception email. It’s the downside to a public email address: on the one hand it’s great that everyone can get in touch, on the other hand there are only so many search engine optimisation emails that a girl can handle.
Recently, however, I’ve noticed a change in tenor in our spam. A – fairly drastic, I have to say – change in tack. It started when I found myself accused of committing a felony:
Hillary’s so cheerful about our road incident! It really is, when you think about it, very kind of her.
But the felony was nothing on the cancer:
Well, that’s me done for. Guess I’m signing out for good, guys. It’s been great.
Love,
[email address removed] All rights reserved.
(SERIOUSLY! But if, by the by, you want a real insight into cancer, Geoff Goodfellow‘s the one to read.)