Text Publishing, June 2011 9781921758010 (trade paperback, ebook) Reviewed by Raili Simojoki If you’ve read any of Craig Sherborne’s writing, you’ll know not to expect a rosy-eyed view of the world. The Amateur Science of Love follows the grim journey of a love affair gone wrong. Colin leaves the unglamorous environs of his parents’ farm […]
Text Publishing 9781921758133, March 2011 (Aus) (also UK) Reviewed by Imogen Baratta Helen Hodgman’s Blue Skies tells the story of an unnamed young wife and mother living in the ‘heart shaped island’ of Tasmania. The agonising banality of her day-to-day life plays out within the confines of stark, suffocating suburbia, amid the manicured lawns and […]
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell (Aus, US, UK) Text Publishing, September 2010 9781921656569 Johanna Adorján’s grandparents took their own lives in October 1991. In this reserved and moving book Adorján pieces together the last day of their lives, interspersing this narrative with details of her grandparents’ pasts, pieces of her own story, and musings on various related […]
A sun-drenched and possibly superficial series of blog posts On Friday I had my first three panels. I won’t go into too much detail, but there were highlights – such as being on stage alongside Tom Cho on one, and Krissy Kneen on another (and not as a chair, but fellow writer); meeting Susan Wyndham, […]
As the title indicates, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want it (Text, May 2010 in Aus, Riverhead US), Maile Meloy’s engaging collection of stories, is about the fear, desire, pleasure, confusion and complications of wanting it both ways and sometimes having it so. It’s like Guido’s dilemma in Fellini’s 8 1/2 – he wants […]
Text Publishing 2010 9781921656033 (Aus, US) Kathleen Solson, the editor-in-chief of an international newspaper based in Rome, suspects her husband is having an affair. Solson has always ranked people by ‘intelligence’, her ex notes. Maybe she is calculating. Maybe she needs attention. In Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists we are given a glimpse of Solson’s life, as […]
Affection: A Memoir of Love, Sex and Intimacy Text Publishing 9781921520617 August 2009 (Aus, US) Prompts: LiteraryMinded Responses: Krissy Kneen Things that are fast/things that are slow Motorcycles. Rollercoaster. Pick ups. Orgasms. All too fast. Slow would be nice. Slow is the ideal, something to aspire to. It all ends too quickly. Everything. And the […]
This is just about the coolest thing currently traversing the intertubes. Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro is coming out in Australia in August with Text Publishing (Faber in the US). His UK publisher Canongate has created a website for the book with the man himself reading chapter extracts of this deliciously black, sexually twisted, […]