Text Publishing 9781921758133, March 2011 (Aus) (also UK) Reviewed by Imogen Baratta Helen Hodgman’s Blue Skies tells the story of an unnamed young wife and mother living in the ‘heart shaped island’ of Tasmania. The agonising banality of her day-to-day life plays out within the confines of stark, suffocating suburbia, amid the manicured lawns and [...]
Tag Archives: feminism
Guest review: Lyndon Riggall on The Girl With No Hands by Angela Slatter
March 25, 2011 – 7:15 am
Ticonderoga Publications, 2011 9780980628883 (Aus, US, UK) reviewed by Lyndon Riggall In my first year at University I studied fairytales, and more specifically Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a book which is arguably the poster-child of fairytale re-imaginings. Carter writes well, and in many cases her stories spin beautifully away from tradition while remaining neatly tied [...]
Bookslut review of Wild Unrest
March 9, 2011 – 8:15 pm
I’ve just done my first review for popular American online literary magazine Bookslut. The review is of Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (Aus, US, UK). I say: ‘Wild Unrest is refreshingly non-reductive, in that its author allows Gilman to be complex, to have a nature that [...]
Kate Grenville’s Dark Places
July 28, 2009 – 7:59 am
A LiteraryMinded review of an Australian classic. Dark Places Kate Grenville Macmillan 1994 + Text Publishing 2008 (Aus, US) Dark Places charts the life of a pitiful, self-absorbed and knowingly empty man, Albion Gidley Singer. From a young age he attempts to fill a void that exists within him – a void associated with his lack [...]
How to Eat a Wolf by Sharanya Manivannan: a poem
July 16, 2009 – 8:17 am
Does all lust start and end like this? Don’t get me wrong. I loved my wolf. I held him tethered like a pussycat. I nursed the rumble in his belly with hands gentle as a burglar’s. He lived on milk and blood and ocean. He had violets for his furs. It’s just that he was [...]
Mischa Merz on Bruising: a Boxer’s Story
July 8, 2009 – 8:11 am
In Bruising, passionate boxer Mischa Merz draws you into her experiences of a sweaty, oft-bloody, myth- and history-loaded, predominantly masculine but ever-progressing sport. I first came across Mischa’s work in the extract of this book published in Overland. It had been my favourite piece in the issue, and when Mischa heard, she sent me a [...]
Princesses & Pornstars by Emily Maguire
February 11, 2009 – 8:03 am
Text, 2008 (Australia) 9781921351310 Update: now also available in a YA edition Your Skirt’s Too Short: Sex, Power, Choice Emily Maguire’s Princesses & Pornstars is a call to arms. It’s a highly intelligent, entertaining, and sometimes endearingly awkward rant. To have a feminist stance is not just to talk about women, Maguire argues, it’s to talk [...]
Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy
April 13, 2008 – 1:54 pm
What happened to feminism? Ariel Levy asks. Her book explores how a predominant culture of ‘surfaces’ has produced women who admire ‘sexiness’ without necessarily being sexual. What happened to pleasure?The interviews Levy presents and the sub-cultures (eg. ‘Girls Gone Wild’) she immerses herself in are disturbing, in that most of these women feel lost and [...]
Daily Mail
Elsewhere
Policy
Partners
Independent news, blogs and commentary on politics, media, business, the environment and life.
Copyright © 2012 Private Media Pty Ltd, Publishers of Crikey. All Rights Reserved.
Web development by Valegro
Editor: Jason Whittaker
Publisher: Eric Beecher
Political Correspondent: Bernard Keane
Level 6, 22 William St, Melbourne, 3000
Ph: 1800 985 502
Fax: (03) 8623 9975
Let’s read writing by women
A new committee is being set up to pursue equal rights for women writers in Australia. Besides research, lobbying and setting up mentorships, the committee is looking at establishing a literary prize for Australian women writers, along the lines of the UK’s Orange Prize. The steering committee (including novelist and publisher Sophie Cunningham, critic and [...]