Fully wet-suited and flippered, we will present to you:

1) Norwegian novelist JOHAN HARSTAD.

Johan’s first novel, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? has been described as “A modern saga of rocketships, ice floes, and dreams of the Caribbean.” It’s won awards, and has even been made into a TV series starring The Wire’s Chad Coleman. We’re incredibly lucky to be able to host Johan at PPR this March.

2) Boxer, baker and BMX-rider MONIQUE SCHAFTER.

Monique is a Walkley Award winning producer/reporter who co-hosted the ABC’s current affairs program Hungry Beast. Monique writes a weekly column for Australia’s highest circulating queer newspaper, Star Observer, and currently works with “grown ups” on 7.30.

3) Associate Artistic Director of the Tamarama Rock Surfers, playwright, performer and Australian acquisition from the United Kingdom, PHIL SPENCER.

Phil Spencer was responsible for curating the recent and very excellent Horse’s Mouth festival at the Old Fitz last year, for which he also baked a cake on stage, and stuffed his audience full of sugar. We’re not saying he’s going to do the same at PPR, we’re just saying that’s the type of person Phil is.

4) New Scientist reporter and soon-to-be researcher for ABC’s Catalyst, WENDY ZUKERMAN.

Apparently, Wendy will be reading a story about using decomposing pig carcasses to predict the time of death of a drowning.

We promise there will be no props or audience participation for Wendy’s story.

Also, don’t forget to bring your own one page stories. Think ice floes, whales, pirates, offshore processing of refugees, Atlantis, islands, underwater caves, krill, lonely polar bears, & etc.

If you would like to get your chops up recording live audio and producing it into web and radio-friendly sound files people would download, re-listen to, or crash their cars into telegraph poles over, then Penguin Plays Rough would like to talk to you.

Perhaps you are studying Media, or perhaps you have experience recording bands, or producing stories for radio already. Perhaps you don’t have any experience, and are very keen to get some. We’re interested in whoever sounds like they have the time to commit, the ability to develop their skills, and the eagerness to add their own ideas to PPR.

The position would involve:

• Attending each Penguin Plays Rough (which usually falls on the third Saturday of each month), and recording each of the stories into our Zoom recorder. Or yours, if you have a fancier one.
• Saving each file in the PPR dropbox and producing the best stories into radio-friendly/ podcast-able packages. Possibly three – five each month. If the audio is recorded well, all the files will need is a top and tail.

and possibly

• Uploading the audio onto our blog, with a small spiel.
• Liasing with the EPs from programmes such as FBi’s All the Best, and 2SER’s Final Draft in regards to airing the audio on radio.

depending on your time, and what you would like to get out of the role.

The position is currently unpaid, however the successful applicant will receive an even split of the door takings at the live events (usually around $50). Also, this year Penguin Plays Rough is committed to hitting the funding bodies up for some hard cash, so that we can pay everyone properly, and then maybe go to the Hebrides for a holiday. Just joking Australia Council. Lucy, put that travel brochure down.

If this sounds something you can commit to over 2012, please email Pip at penguinplaysrough@gmail.com, outlining your experience, what you can bring to the position, and what you would like to get out of it.

4 Lackey St, St Peters.

January’s PPR is all about going places, and getting lost. Or going places to get lost. It’s about road trips, back-route highways, ghost towns, or paths that connect people the long way round.

Featuring stories by:

HADLEY (from Mr Fibby) of Our Nation’s Capital. He performs stories in a band and runs a radio show and is currently busy piecing together the You Are Here festival due to explode all over Canberra in March. He will have to travel up a highway to get here. You can’t get much more Method than that.

ZOE NORTON LODGE of the Many Talents including NYWF Co-ordination, theatre making, editing, producing, and writing of hilarious and delightfully odd stories. Zoe can be found at Story Club, and published in Our Book, Going Down Swinging and Seizure Magazine.

FELICITY CASTAGNA, who can be found in Our Book, and whose collection of short fiction, Small Indiscretions, was published by Transit Lounge last year.

ROB WILSON of the Sonorous Voice. Rob usually writes poetry, and some of it can be found in the second Ampersand Magazine and on the Red Room Company’s website. But this time round we’ve bullied him into writing us a story.

SAM TWYFORD-MOORE who has also been published in Our Book, as well as in Meanjin, the LA Review of Books, the UTS Writers’ Anthology, and all over the twittersphere. He also runs a podcast called the Re-Readers with Rebecca Giggs and Fiona Wright.

In the meantime, YOU should get writing a one page story about highways, and WE will try to dream up some kind of highway-related novelty drink.

You may or may not hear a brief history of teleportation, what happens when geometry has its own country, find out about the superpowers of cockroaches, experience a projection of what might happen just before the Apocalypse, and learn why Pythagoras concealed irrational numbers from his minions.

Featuring:
New Scientist Magazine’s Wendy Zukerman
Seizure Editor in Chief Alice Grundy
Theatre Director Jimmy Dalton & sound design genius James Brown
the rather intelligent and quite amusing Adam Yardley

and the first ever public appearance of sci fi author Terence Bumbly.

As we have limited ourselves to a mere five programmed readers, we require YOU to write a one page short story about all the other parts of science we haven’t covered above, of which, we have been assured, there is much to say.

You will also be able to purchase blue drinks, the latest and most futuristic SEIZURE MAGAZINE and see a theremin up close in the metallic flesh.

When? Saturday November 19, at 8pm.

Where? At the PPR laboratory, otherwise known as 4 Lackey St St Peters.

Why? Because you have a thirst for knowledge. Because you are Carl Sagan, in short pants. Because the Universe is a big place, and there’s a lot to say about it.

We’re also doing another right thing by telling you that Grolsch are very generously stocking us with beer. This is because they know you are all todieforgorgeous and will look good in pictures holding their beer. Which is a compliment you should take. Also by telling you that the ladies who run the Schoolhouse Studios are hosting our party for no money, promissory notes or promises of firstborns. All these things are proof that Blanche was right when she said you can always depend on the kindness of strangers.

Here is a picture of Grolsch, so that you can see what the word looks like in a different colour and font:

Another stranger who is kind is Amy Espeseth. She’s stepped in at the last minute to cover for Emmett Stinson, whose wife’s about to have her first sprog. Amy’s written not one, but TWO stories for us, because Pip stuffed up and gave her the wrong story to read in the first place.

See you tomorrow, Melbourne. We might even feed you penguin biscuits. Penguin biscuits with little white jackets and EVERYTHING.

As it turns out, four months is also how long it takes for the How Fun Was the Sydney Book Launch stories to start boring the socks off flatmates/ lovers/ family members. And as Nick Sun warns us in “The End,” it is this kind of nostalgia that will bring this fucking country to its knees*. So then, what choice do we have but do the whole thing again, but in another city, so it’ll be like the First Time, every time, forever. Or at least until we run out of Australian cities. Or until pull our fingers out and make another book. Whichever comes first.

So: ding ding ding: ROUND TWO of the launch festivities is going to take place on a BASKETBALL COURT in a SCHOOL in ABBOTSFORD, MELBOURNE. Or, more specifically at 97 Nicholson St. There will be a band, which might sound like this, but which probably won’t be locked in until the last minute.

And now for the details which are locked in, and which we should have told you in the first paragraph of this post:

If y0u come to our launch at 8pm on Friday September 23 you will not only hear Luke Carman, Zoe Norton Lodge, Felicity Castagna, Sam Twyford-Moore, and Vanessa Berry read their stories from our book, but you will hear BRAND SPANKING NEW responses to those stories by Going Down Swinging’s Geoff Lemon, the Lifted Brow’s Ronnie Scott, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award winner Amy Espeseth, HEAT’s Fiona Wright, and Beat’s Amelia Schmidt.

There will be stupidly cheap beer generously provided by Grolsch.

There will be dancing.

There will be music.

But most importantly, it will give us something to talk about for another four months.

Oh, and it’s free.

* From “The End” by Nick Sun I mean Rick Doom:

Just when things seemed like they couldn’t get any more different, famine struck. Not in the sense of an absence of food, but an absence of imagination. Humanity consumed more and created less, and, as a result of their under-developed creative lives, people developed a debilitating addiction to nostalgia and cliché. Everyone became mentally trapped in the romanticised past, whence they projected unrealistic visions of the future while decaying in the present.

“Remember that time when we were remembering that time?” was an oft-heard refrain. When the dying watched their lives flash before their eyes, all they’d see was themselves at various ages in various locations reminiscing about reminiscing about reminiscing about stuff that they’d once planned on having had happen to them.

This endless cycle of nostalgia increased in speed as nothing new was created and even more was over-recycled. Everyone’s temporal perception compressed and people began to over-emotionally reminisce about things that had just happened to them. “Remember breakfast three minutes ago? Such a wonderful bowl of porridge! Ah youth,” one five-year-old was heard to say, eyes wistfully wet with sentiment, wiping his rose-coloured glasses. What everyone didn’t know was that each time a nostalgic fantasy or cliché was repeated it gained momentum and its anti-anti-anti­matter mass increased. The tipping point was reached when The Karate Kid III was remade for the three-hundred-and-thirty-third time, this time with an aging Jessica Alba playing Mr Miyagi and the reanimated corpse of Heath Ledger, inexplicably in blackface (well, it was directed by the ghost of the ghost of the ghost of James Cameron), playing Ralph Macchio playing Genghis Khan playing Shirley Temple playing the Karate Kid. Upon its debut screening, a mesomorphic quantum squish hole was torn in the space-time warpflux capacitator and triple black anti-anti-anti matter spewed out of the cinema screen and invaded the world in the form of a vague existential malaise and constant dissatisfaction with everything in an environment of plenty.

People started to reminisce about things that were about to happen. It was more pattern recognition than psychic prophecy: the same things kept happening, so they weren’t difficult to predict. Temporal perspective broke down. No one could tell if they were living in the present, future or past, and time became one long, unbroken, disorienting moment that seemed to last forever but was over very quickly. And when it was over everyone would try and reminisce about it but the experience would be unsatisfying; similar to re-watching your favourite childhood movie as an adult and realising it was a tawdry, clichéd piece of shit.

Gleebooks on Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
Better Read Than Dead on King St, Newtown
Ariel Books on Oxford St, Paddington
Title Music and Film on Crown St, Surry Hills; Whilloughby Rd, Crows Nest; Gertrude St, Fitzroy; Sydney Rd, Brunswick, and High St, Northcote.
Modern Times on King St, Newtown
Cream on King St, Newtown
The Brunswick St Bookstore on (yep) Brunswick St, Fitzroy
Metropolis Bookshop on Swanston St, Melbourne
Polyester Records on Flinders Lane, Melbourne

And if you live no where near these places, you can buy your copy at our online store, here, and we will post it to you.

Our other exciting news is that our app is now available for download. If you search for PPR in the app store, you can not only carry the book around inside your iPhone or iPad, but you can hear the writer (or, in two cases, someone else) read the stories to you.

With the book, the app is free. Without it, it costs a mere $5. A bargain so low it’s a highway to receivership.

After the readings Belles Will Ring played a set that looked like this:

We danced, we drank, we woke up sore all over, and in no fit state to actually read the thing, but BY GEORGE are we unremittingly grateful for the support that has been shown for this at turns exhausting, defeating and mania-inducing project.

Sorry for the gush. But it had to be said.

ALREADY BANNED IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA, the Penguin Plays Rough Book of Short Stories is suffering a tortured upbringing. No one seems to understand her. Which is why, on Saturday, May 21, from 7 pm SHARP, we will be catapulting our book into the the loving and understanding arms of Sydney-siders, and we want YOU to not only be one of those loving and understanding Sydney-siders, but to also read at the launch.

Continuing the *proud* Australian tradition of talk back radio, Penguin Plays Rough is giving you the chance to answer back to the stories and ideas in its very first book.

Below, you will find five stories from our book available for you to download. We want you to read them, and respond. Perhaps you think the main character in one of the stories is vulgar, and should be put in his/her place? Perhaps you think one of the minor characters should be given a chance? Perhaps you’d like to re-frame the whole story under the sea – or, if it’s already under the sea, at Penrith Panthers? If they make you deliriously vitriolic, self-righteous, happy, angry, sad, horny, ashamed, embarrassed, scared or excited – good! We want you to come and tell us all about it, behind the mic, at our launch. But the catch is, you can only answer back if you frame your passionate opinions as short, five-minute fiction.

The writers of the stories available below will be reading their pieces, and straight afterwards, you’ll have your chance to respond – but there’ll only be enough time for one response per story, so make sure you get there at 6.30 and put your name on the door. Help us turn what could have been a book launch, into a web of intersecting storylines and a potential bloodbath of opinion.

And this is an audio file of Pip talking about the PPR Book of Short Stories:

26.12.10 – Canvas feat Pip Smith

So there you have both visual and aural evidence that there is a PPR Book of Short Stories currently growing fingers and toes in the Great Womb of Sydney.

In case you can’t be bothered downloading the audio file, it basically says that the book is going to be a bit like this:

In that there will be bits that fold out (more specifically, an A2 sized map of all the stories illustrted by the one and only Gemma O’Brien).

But it will be more like this:

In that it will be red and black all over (designed and typeset by Stuart Hall and Elise Santangelino).

And like this:

In that it will be able to do many things at once.

(More specifically, the iPhone/ iPad app version of the anthology will read to you – or rather, it will have the writers of the stories read to you, while music plays and/or crowds applaud, writhe and scream in unbridled delight)

But most importantly it will have an effect very similar to this:

because it will have stories in it, written by people from all over the shop, with all sorts of different world views, tastes, writing styles and degrees of clinical insanity. Their names, should you choose to stalk them, are:

Jazz Andrews, Vanessa Berry, Luke Carman, Felicity Castagna, Jason Childs, Francesca Ciantar, Annaliese Constable, Zoe Coombs Marr, David Finnigan&George Luis Borges, Alexandra Freiman, Kenzie Larsen&Eddie Sharp, Jade Markham, Amanda Maxwell, Zoe Norton Lodge, Claudia O’Doherty, Peter Polites, Aidan Roberts, Michael Sala, Alli Sebastian Wolf, DeAnne Smith, Pip Smith, Nick Sun and Sam Twyford-Moore.

And also because each story will have been picturified by these artists:

Tarik Ahlip, Lucien Alperstein, Julian Day, Anastasia Freeman, Sarah Gleeson, Natalie Hughes, Matt Huynh, Heesco Khosnaran, Dominik Krupinski, Wil Loeng, Kenzie Larsen, Helen Nehill, Adriana Picker, Aidan Roberts, Georgina Rudd and Sam Twyford-Moore.

And finally, here is an example of a paragraph of a story from the PPR Book of Short Stories:

How you get to see God is they take you into what looks like a plastic surgery clinic somewhere in the heavenly city and they lay you on your back and then they put headphones on. The first thing I heard when they put the headphones on was the first few notes of “Since I Left You” by the Avalanches, “dum dum dum DUM DUM,” but then suddenly it all hit at once, you see they don’t play you the whole album in sequence, they play you each individual second of the album at the same time, all at once, but instead of hearing a blast of noise you are able to separate out and appreciate every single second of the whole album “Since I Left You” and in your mind you can arrange each second in any order, experiencing in that one second each song and every possible remix of that song at the same time, and that is God.

- David Finnigan, Unfortunately I Can’t Completely Disregard the Christian God

The PPR Book of Short Stories will be available for presale on THIS VERY WEBSITE imminently.

It will also be for sale in a more tangible way in May 2011.