8 Results

Thursday On the flight over I read Jonah Lehrer, watch Animal Planet and listen to Philip Glass and Emily Haines. Nathan Scolaro picks me up at the airport and on the drive we discuss some of the festival authors. Nathan asks if I’ve read Armistead Maupin and I say, unfortunately, no. He loves Tales Of [...]

The following three books are some of the new ones I’ve read in preparation for Perth Writers Festival (5 to 7 March). I’ll be chairing panels featuring the authors. Find out more about those panels on this post. The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan Faber, 9780571215997 [...]

A quick note to let you know the podcast of my conversation with Alex Miller is now up. You can find it at the 720 ABC Perth website, here, or you can search in the iTunes store and download it to your computer, or iPod/iPhone for listening on the go. If you get a chance, let [...]

The last three days just slipped by. I thought I felt the Earth rotating beneath my feet on Monday night as I watched the sun set on Cottesloe Beach. My first sunset. A pink ribbon with little ships in it. Some people paused and others continued splashing and squawking like the rainbow birds. On the University campus, [...]

We live ‘by and through and for ideas’ said AC Grayling at last night’s opening address. But the majority of ideas that we possess, that have shaped us - the way we see and react to the world - are unconscious or at least unexamined. Spinoza said that freedom came from making the ‘inadequate’ ideas ‘adequate’, that [...]

Granta 2009 (Aus/NZ, US) 9781847081162 All the world’s a stage… A novel as a performance, more – a novel as flirtation (the performance of flirting): self-conscious, inviting yet exclusive. The reader is all the roles, all the characters and all the actors – for in The Rehearsal there are layers of fictional existence – blended, [...]