May, 2012

A girl sits on a crowded train reading aloud an explicit section from Nabokov’s Lolita: She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me [...]

‘New York, 1922. The tempo of the city had changed sharply. The buildings were higher. The parties were bigger. The moons were looser and the liquor was cheaper. The restlessness, approached hysteria.’  Confetti falls, fireworks explode and sparkle, expensive shirts are flung from mezzanine floors, orchids are in abundance, sleek cars glide, while Jay-Z and Kanye [...]

Scribbled notes / Late nights / Early mornings / Lilting author signatures still fresh inside new novels / The mesmerising experience of prose read aloud by the author who penned it / Black coffee / Dead phone batteries / Lightbulb books hanging overhead / Sitting in the green room watching authors prepare for their sessions / The sunny sky [...]

Guest post by January Jones Book to screen adaptations are not a new phenomenon, however, the recent popularity of such films has reached heightened proportions. You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the hype surrounding recent blockbuster The Hunger Games; the first film of a trilogy based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling [...]

*Spoiler alert: this is not intended as a straight review and I do refer to key plot points in this analysis. In the context of the Miles Franklin and its criteria of presenting ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ Funder’s work seems, initially, difficult to advocate. Though the ‘now’ of the novel is the primary [...]