On the release of Chris Somerville’s debut collection of short stories, I interviewed the Brisbane based author on epigraphs, water motifs and placelessness.

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 [...]

– This review appears in the December edition of ABC’s Limelight magazine. In the opening pages of The Satanic Verses, protagonists Gibreel and Saladin tumble and fall from the sky in a chaos of fire and debris. When the novel was published in late 1988, it too burst forth with an explosion of protests, riots, [...]

One of the great pleasures / responsibilities of being a lit critic is that you are asked to review countless debut novels. When I first began reviewing, I remember this feeling unusual to me – coming as I did from a background in academia, where you generally don’t read anything without an almost infuriating knowledge [...]

Sometimes when I’m looking for a bar or a gallery or some other place in one of Melbourne’s impossible back alleyways, I open up google maps, and once it’s puzzled through the coordinates and found the location I’ll zoom and zoom in upon that orange mark. At some point in its descent, the map becomes, [...]

This review is cross-posted from the Wheeler Centre’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards series.  It is a talisman of luck, and love. Foal’s bread – both the object and the novel – is a strange, rare and mesmerising thing. ‘Just every now and then,’ he explained, ‘a foal is born with something that looks like a little slice of [...]

This review is cross-posted from the Wheeler Centre‘s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award series.  The most fascinating section of Brenda Niall’s biography of the Durack sisters is the penultimate chapter, ‘The Making of Eddie Burrup.’ As with most artistic controversies involving a nom de plume (or, in this case, de brush), with time, the pseudonym tends [...]

 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 [...]

The means we use to select new books are often obscure. Books don’t receive the same sort of blanket advertising as new release films or television series. Though there are always exceptions – such as the highly effective billboard in Times Square for Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, or the relatively recent phenomenon of book [...]

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 [...]

Fantastical, absurd, surreal, playful, comic, bizarre, dark. Keret’s short stories have the quality of fables, or the sort of baffling dreams that compel you regale all who will listen in the morning, and then wonder quietly to yourself what you may have ingested the night before. It has shades of Kafka, Borges, even, at times, [...]