Have you read a blook?

My War: Killing Time in Iraq by former US machine gunner Colby Buzzell is a bold memoir about his year fighting in Iraq.

It is a blook — a printed and bound book based on a blog or website;

It has won the 2007 Lulu Blooker prize for the best book of the year based on a blog he had written in his free time in the war zone.

Buzzell, 31, was awarded the $10,000 prize, beating 110 entries from 15 countries.

Before the US army stopped him from blogging, book agents had started emailing him; the book has since been published by Penguin and translated into seven languages.

More and more publishing houses are now looking online to find and hone new writing talent. First-time writers are also looking to the web, to express themselves creatively and be discovered in the course of this creative pursuit.

The Lulu Blooker Prize

It is a literary prize set up in 2005 in recognition of the growing number of writers to be found online. The prize is the brainchild of Lulu.com, a provider of self-publishing technology and services, where browsers can turn their web content into a blook.

Information sourced from www.smh.com.au; www.lulublookerprize.com

We review

The Dissidents
By Nell Freudenberger

Nell Freudenberger's first full fledged novel, The Dissident, adds a whole new element to the cross cultural, American-abroad tale. This book was recently long-listed for the Orange Prize.

It is a story about a visiting Chinese painter and a dissident on the fringes of Chinese society, Yuan Zhao, who spends a year teaching at an exclusive Los Angeles girls' school while also setting up for an exhibition.

We delve into the inhibiting and life-altering ways in which Zhao's sudden presence inexorably affects and is affected by his American hosts, Cece Travers and her family, who are dealing with a series of family crises.

Childhood muse

An LA native, Freudenberger tells of her childhood muse for the novel, a Chinese, non- English speaking art teacher she had during high school… and the first teacher at a private American educational institution to ever tell the students they were wrong.

The experience has stayed with Freudenberger.

"For me, any novel is always about things we've felt or have happened to us," she says. This shines through the novel as we are taken over by a need to explore art.

And so stem the age-old questions — what is, and isn't art? And how do cultures perceive each other, especially through such mediums?

Author of the week

Nell Freudenberger
According to her contemporary colleagues and critics alike, 32-year-old American writer Nell Freudenberger is young, good-looking and talented… and above all, successful.

Raised by parents who were deeply involved in the arts and languages, Freudenberger travelled to Thailand to teach English after graduating from Harvard. Here she discovered writing. The cultural experience compelled her to confront her identity — that feeling of 'Americanness' she had never really considered.

And so she went back home, in hand many letters and fiction pieces she had written, to pursue a master of fine arts degree at New York University. She also managed to find a part-time job at The New Yorker magazine, in which her first short story was printed.

Her debut book, Lucky Girls, a collection of five 'long-short stories', turned Freudenberger into the youngest PEN/ Malamud short story award winner as well as recipient of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. The Dissident was published a few months ago. It is likely to give this 'young, good-looking and talented' girl another reason to triumph.

The writer is an International Student Correspondent for NOTES, studying at the University of Sydney, Australia