Kathy Charles’ debut novel Hollywood Ending was recently released by Text Publishing. In my review for the October issue of Australian Book Review I said: ‘Kathy Charles creates a world both familiar and strange … Despite being highly, if darkly, entertaining, the book hints at deeper issues, such as the extent of superficial distraction in contemporary [...]
Tag Archives: Australian authors
This cumulative kind of effect when you stop: an interview with Emily Maguire on Smoke in the Room, part two
November 5, 2009 – 7:53 am
Part One of this interview can be found here.
Pictured: Emily Maguire and I before the Sleepers Salon in October.
I ask Maguire about the setting. Is it pertinent for this story to be set in Sydney? She says it probably could have been a few cities, but ‘western Sydney is – the cliché is ‘melting pot’, [...]
This cumulative kind of effect when you stop: an interview with Emily Maguire on Smoke in the Room, part one
November 3, 2009 – 12:23 pm
In Smoke in the Room, three characters end up in a share house in Sydney. Katie works on instinct and is weighted by an overwhelming empathy. Adam, an American, is grieving and needs to save money to get home. Graeme, an aid worker, has rid himself of possessions and simplified his existence. In this novel, [...]
Julia Leigh’s Disquiet
September 9, 2009 – 7:54 am
9780143009573
Penguin
In an active, atmospheric introduction, a woman and her two children arrive at the gate, and then the house, of the woman’s childhood. The woman, Olivia, explains to her mother she ‘had to come home’ and is accepted. Soon arrives Olivia’s grief-stricken brother and wife, with their baby’s body (who has just died in birth).
From [...]
The real possibility of joy: an interview with Josephine Emery
August 18, 2009 – 8:03 am
Josephine Emery’s The Real Possibility of Joy: A Personal Journey From Man to Woman is released in September from Pier 9. It’s a compelling, poignant, fascinating, honest memoir. And as a writer, screenwriter and former director of the literature board at the Australia Council for the Arts, Josephine Emery really knows how to write. I reviewed [...]
The Danger Game – Kalinda Ashton
July 30, 2009 – 8:03 am
Sleepers Publishing
August 2009, Australia
9781740668132
Three children – one insular, one bold, and one stubborn and growing – dare each other to undertake dangerous or humiliating tasks in the ‘danger game’. Their lives are daring enough, with an unstable father and a mother on-edge, and mature secrets inside each of their little heads.
Only two of them live in the [...]
Peter Goldsworthy’s Everything I Knew
July 14, 2009 – 8:06 am
Penguin Aus
ISBN 9780143009634 (paperback – out August 2009)
It’s 1964 in small-town South Australia and Robert Burns (like the poet) is on the cusp of adolescence. ‘Happiness is a default state’, he narrates, looking back. Reading it, no matter when or where you grew up, one can relate to that simplicity, the time before ‘adult’ aspects of [...]
Thoughts on 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner Breath, by Tim Winton
June 22, 2009 – 8:03 am
Breath, Tim Winton, Penguin, 9780143009580
Breath is my first Tim Winton. Yes, I know. He’s just not someone I had gotten to yet. And yes, I will read Cloudstreet, eventually. Last week, Breath was awarded our nation’s most prestigious literary prize – the Miles Franklin Literary Award, which is for books that in some way present aspects [...]
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Melbourne launch of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature
The Red Rotunda at the Cowen Gallery at the State Library of Victoria is filled with silver-haired literary giants, and a young woman enters, sweaty and carrying two bags (she has walked from work). She sees a couple of familiar faces but is too intimidated to talk to them. She clasps a glass of champagne and [...]