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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Chinese Postman
Fiction

Chinese Postman by Brian Castro

In Street to Street (2012), Brian Castro wrote, ‘It was important that he was making the gesture, running in the opposite direction from a national literature.’ In Chinese Postman, Castro’s protagonist Abraham Quin is ‘through with all that novel-writing; it’s summer reading for bourgeois ladies’. Quin is a Jewish-Chinese former professor, bearing sufficient similarities to the author to function as an avatar. Quin and Castro are the same age, have written the same number of books, and live in the same place (the Adelaide Hills). Sometimes Quin speaks as Quin, sometimes the author chooses to make his ventriloquism evident, and sometimes the identity of the narrator is unclear, but the voice is always raffish, erudite, mercurial.

Interview

Calibre Essays

From the Archive

August 2004, no. 263

Totem: Totem poem plus 40 love poems by Luke Davies

Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.

From the Archive

February–March 1986, no. 78

Letters to the Editor - Feb March 1986

Dear Sir,

Laurie Muller’s reported comments on the obligations (sic) of libraries and librarians, and the state of Australian publishing (ABR, December 1985–Jan 1986) must surely invite some responses!

From the Archive

March 2006, no. 279

2006 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist | ‘Braid’ by J.S. Harry

Max remembers the first time they made love
when she arrived travel-dusty & sweaty
after complications
getting from Basrah to Baghdad. Much afterwards
while they were lying together very close
she’d told him of a pet she’d had, when small:
had given it its scientific name – Macropanesthia rhinoceros.