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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Highway 13
Fiction

Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane

Jorge Luis Borges thought the appearance of a major new author or creative work should prompt a realignment of literature’s family tree. Fresh genealogies of influence suddenly manifested, while old antecedents could find themselves pruned to a nub. Borges knew that actions in the present can remake our sense of past and future both.

From the Archive

June–July 2003, no. 252

Margaret Robson Kett reviews Four Young Adult Non-Fiction Books

Exploration of the unknown is a universally captivating subject, and young people are not immune to its appeal. Most of their experience of other lands, peoples and times must necessarily be vicarious. These books attempt to reach this audience.

From the Archive

June 2011, no. 332

Good Living Street: A Personal History by David Walker

Would it be indulgent to invoke Leonard Cohen? It’s just that his song ‘Take This Waltz’, which begins ‘Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women’, brings to mind that city’s fin-de-siècle world. In a liquescent poetic mosaic of shoulders and thighs, lilies, hyacinths, moonshine, and dew, I see the women as if painted by Gustav Klimt – portraitist, libertine – someone who ‘climbs to your picture with a garland of freshly cut tears’. And Cohen’s Kafkaesque ‘lobby with nine hundred windows’ stirs up images of Vienna as a city of windows, of watching and being watched.

From the Archive