A recent and marvellous live reading of Jon Steiner’s story ‘Poioumenon’ gave me fresh insight into the power of Steiner’s words and the clarity and cleverness of his thinking. ‘Poioumenon’ is from Steiner’s collection The Last Wilkie’s and Other Stories. It’s a weird and wonderful riff on envy and its particularly convoluted manifestation in the
It’s the End of the Fictional Year! I’ve read so many books I haven’t blogged about my ‘accountant’ is demanding an EOFY summary. Here’s Part 1. Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain Set on a rainy day in Sydney, four characters are pondering the pains and joys of where they’re at in
Stella Montgomery is trapped with her three humourless aunts in the Hotel Majestic in the drab coastal town of Withering-by-Sea. Spurred on by an old atlas, she dreams of adventure and—when she spies something she shouldn’t have—she gets caught up in one! Stella vows to keep the small package Mr Filbert has hidden in the
Grab your gumshoes and telephoto lens. It’s time to pay ‘Krymphixshon’ a visit to examine the Crime Scenes. This one’s well worth your scrutiny. I’m not a die-hard crime reader who hoovers up a multiple-book series in a weekend like some people I know. My crime reading is both sporadic and serendipitous. So, when I
On selfies: ‘Here’s me outside the palace of me.’ It was a great moment. The performance poet, Kate Tempest, nailing the emptiness of our narcissistic obsession with the self and our physical appearance. Tempest mesmerised the audience at the opening of the Sydney Writers Festival on May 18. She ‘told’ us (aka performed) a few
Damage and despair haunt the pages of Josephine Rowe’s first novel like the phantom panther said to have stalked the area near Puckapunyal Army Base in central Victoria. This makes A Loving, Faithful Animal an eerie and unsettling book—and a difficult read. Persist, though, and you’ll be rewarded by Rowe’s precise and poetic use of
The Waiting Room is an intense portrait of a woman unravelling and an intriguing study of the complexity of the mother-daughter bond. It also explores the legacy of the Holocaust and the ripple effect of its damage: How hard is it for a child of a Holocaust survivor to carve out her own identity? What
What are we talking about? Wild Chicory is the accomplished first novella from Australian author Kim Kelly. It follows several generations of the Kennedy family as they move from the coast of County Kerry in Ireland to rural New South Wales and the slums of Sydney’s Surry Hills. Nell Kennedy comes to Australia as a
Nobody does melancholic reverie quite like the American author, poet, singer and songwriter Patti Smith. Her autobiography, M Train, published late last year, has this elegiac and quietly celebratory quality in spades. Imagine life passing like a train trip. Snatches, fragments, impressions caught along the way and recorded, then simmered and stirred into poetic prose.
This one’s a romp! It starts from a dog’s eye view of the bustle of a New Delhi railway station then pans out to reveal a colourful cast of characters (human and animal), a fast-paced plot, and a tragi-comic take on the city and the Indian nation. It’s so filmic, so Bollywood and so much
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