John Freeman has my dream job. As editor in chief of the well-regarded UK literary journal, Granta, he interviews seminal writers the world over about the nature of their work and their ideas. How to Read a Novelist, ipso facto, is a dream of a book. It’s a well-produced compendium of fine pieces about literary
I was gobsmacked by Interferon Psalms so I’m glad it has won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry announced in late July. For months I’d been wondering why these Psalms, which very deliberately use mock biblical language and tell of Davies’ treatment of his hepatitis with the drug Interferon, got under my skin so
Here’s a novel to whet your theological appetite. Why? Varieties of religious experience is the book’s theme. Daniel Stein, the book’s hero, is a Polish Jew who survives the horrors of Nazism and converts to Catholicism after the war. During the war he managed to hide his origins and work as an interpreter — risking
These “bests” kept my reading fires burning in an uncharacteristically cool month. They gave me hours of intrigue but I’ll cut to the chase here by commenting only on the best of the best. There’s one codicil: You should really read the books and choose your own favourites! Best story — Louis Nowra’s “The Index
Trust no-one! This is a key message of The Betrayal — an intriguing novel about a couple born shortly after the Russian Revolution and who came to adulthood during the Great Terror of the 1930s. Anna and Andrei lived through the Siege of Leningrad and had high hopes afterwards that everything would settle and be
This novel’s an intriguing ride for those who want an intergenerational Australian family story set in a rural setting. It’s jaunty as a show pony and dappled with striking characters — some larrikins, some lovable — all adding flavour to this pre-WWII tale of show-jumping and falls from form and grace. At its heart Foal’s
If you’re not interested in negotiating the twin griefs of burying a daughter and growing old then forget it. Blue Nights charts them both in a scarifying and cool-eyed way. As soon as a child is born (or adopted, as was Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo) guilt about failure enters the picture. When the daughter, whom
The pieces I liked best in this unusual sibling tale were ponderings about memory. Forty-something introspective, Denise, says of her father: “Inside, beyond my recall of events and dates and talk, there was this hot-wired memory of his body … Your experiences, the hard felt ones, don’t fade. They are written forever in your flesh,
You may know that it was the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote the oft-quoted exhortation to “Live the questions now … [so that] you might live some day into the answer.” You may not know that, on his birth, Rainer Maria’s mother, Phia, consecrated him to “the gracious Madonna” and gave him a
Edith Campbell Berry is a fascinating protagonist and the Edith trilogy, of which Cold Light is the last, is a tour de force. The trilogy took 25 years to write and the sweep of history this last volume of the work encompasses (1950 to the Whitlam era) is staggering. Like the other Edith volumes —
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