March, 2012

Guest Post by Julian Novitz Alain de Botton would like us to be happier. By ‘us’ I mean people like him, and me, and probably you as well (though I realise that’s a pretty big assumption to make in the second sentence of this review): readers who approach life with the gentle, possibly naïve hope [...]

The longlist of titles for the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award have been announced today. There are thirteen nominees in the longlist this year (from 61 entires): Tony Birch Blood Steven Carroll The Spirit of Progress Mark Dapin Spirit House Virginia Duigan The Precipice Anna Funder All That I Am Kate Grenville Sarah Thornhill Gail [...]

Guest Post by Sam van Zweden I read once about a philosophical theory that says that everything we accumulate or achieve is assimilated into our everyday lives, and we naturally re-assess and raise the bar so that we want more, to conquer higher heights. This is something like how I approach the world of books [...]

Guest Post by Erin Handley It’s difficult to know what position to take with Martha Schabas’ debut novel, Various Positions.  On one hand, the plot is fraught with clichés connected to ballet and to ‘coming of age’ plotlines. On the other, it’s an ambitious homage to Nabokov’s Lolita that questions the nature of truth and [...]

Guest Post by Sian Campbell So, it turns out that even when you’re a recently graduated creative writing student (i.e. only one unthinkably low hospitality wage away from homeless) you are not immune to the siren call of Jetstar sales, and when $400 return flights to Tokyo called earlier in the year, I answered the [...]

Women’s Work is Overland’s new anthology of short stories by emerging female writers launched today as part of International Women’s Day. The collection was developed in conjunction with the Stella Prize as a response to debates about the gender imbalance in literary publishing. As editor Clare Strahan writes, The underrepresentation of women in writing is [...]

Guest Post by Rebecca Harkins-Cross There is a passage in Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding in which college baseball captain Mike Schwartz describes what he sees as the paradox at the heart of his sport: You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special [...]

If narrator Billy Montgomery’s life was an action movie, A Tiger in Eden depicts the time after the credits roll, after the gunshots and the bloodshed when the protagonist rides off into the sunset to some tropical climate to escape their fate. Billy is on the run from the violence and warring of the Troubles [...]

Guest Post by Benjamin Solah  My introduction to haunted houses, monsters and scary stories is credited to R.L. Stine and his Goosebumps series. One of my first memories of being excited by books was the pile of colourful novels with titles in dripping blood that sat stacked on my school desk in primary school. In [...]

For those following the debates in recent years about the representation of women in publishing, literary journals, book reviews etc. VIDA: Women in Literary Arts this week announced their second annual count of the publication rates between women and men in some of the world’s most respected literary outlets, such as The New Yorker, Granta, The London Review of [...]