Guest Post by Stephanie Van Schilt Minutes after finishing High Sobriety – Jill Stark’s memoir about her year without alcohol – I attended a birthday party…for a bar. I literally put the book down, got dressed up and ran out the door to celebrate the liquor loving life. In the past, this obvious irony would [...]

Guest Post I’ve visited Charleston, South Carolina, a few times. It’s a beautiful city: old, by US standards, retaining some of the aesthetic quirks of British and French colonialism. There’s narrow cobblestone streets, Art Deco buildings and elaborate white mansions. Strangers on the street ask about your day. And there’s the location: the lower half [...]

Guest Post  “If the dirt could speak, whose story would it tell?” In her debut novel The Burial, Courtney Collins supposes that the earth would favour the stories of those who are furthest from it, ‘the ones who are suspended in flight’. The dirt must long for these distant stories the way a child yearns [...]

Guest Post by Rebecca Howden  From the opening scenes of The Engagement, there’s an atmosphere that drenches the pages with a subtle, simmering sense of dread. Filling her mis-en-scene with gothic tropes that recall the gloomy romance of classics like Rebecca and Jane Eyre, acclaimed Australian writer Chloe Hooper draws us into a tense, brilliantly [...]

 Guest post by Lucas Smith Stories about sudden wealth acquisition too often become morality tales about the inutility of money to enduring happiness. Lionel Asbo, Martin Amis’s fifteenth work of fiction, is a refreshing tale of a man made immensely and permanently happy by his money. The stupid, vindictive, loutish and possibly murderous anti-hero, Lionel [...]

Guest post by Adam Brereton  Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow, in the introduction to their new book Left Turn: Political Essays For The New Left, invite the reader to imagine current examples in popular culture that envision a future ‘in which the world to come is, in any respect whatsoever, an improvement on the present.’ [...]

Guest Post by Elizabeth Bryer  I have been waiting for this book for four years. Not that I knew that it would come into existence; I just hoped, quietly confident, that it would. Rachel Robertson’s ‘Reaching One Thousand’, joint winner of the 2008 ABR Calibre Essay Prize and later published in Black Inc.’s Best Australian [...]

Guest Post by Rebecca Harkins-Cross Ruby J. Murray’s debut novel Running Dogs explores how mythologies, both political and personal, may influence the trajectory of our lives. Protagonist Diana is an Australian aid worker living in Jakarta (an experience that Murray herself had in 2009-10), who occupies a liminal space as neither tourist nor insider in [...]

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 [...]

Guest Post by Rebecca Harkins Cross When Ron Rash isn’t penning fiction and poetry, he works as a Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. It is Rash’s ability to capture this mysterious terrain, which ranges from the southern end of New York State to northern tip of Mississippi, that has always been [...]

Guest post by Lisa Dempster In November 2010 I landed in Sharjah – a place I had not known existed until two months earlier – and several hours later I was sitting in a grand reception hall watching its International Book Fair being opened by one Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed al Qassimi. The room [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]