Tom Thompson

Coming out from behind

September 1991, no. 134

Publishers are like invisible ink. Their imprint is in the mysterious appearance of books on shelves. This explains their obsession with crime novels.

To some authors they appear as good fairies, to others the Brothers Grimm. Publishers can be blamed for pages that fall out (Look ma, a self-exploding paperback!), for a book’s non-appearance at a country town called Ulmere. For appearing too early or too late for review. For a book being reviewed badly, and thus its non-appearance – in shops, newspapers and prized shortlistings.

As an author, it’s good therapy to blame someone and there’s nothing more cleansing than to blame a publisher. I know, because I’ve done it myself. A literary absolution feels good the whole day through.

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Big Boys by Phillip Edmonds & Neonline by Tom Thompson

by Alan Gould •

October 1978, no. 5

Alan Gould reviews ‘Big Boys’ by Phillip Edmonds and ‘Neonline’ by Tom Thompson

Of these two unspectacular books from Second Back Row Press I found Tom Thompson’s Neonline the more rewarding.

It is a book that resists easy identification, being neither a novella nor a sequence of related short stories, and possessing neither a total scheme nor a clutch of subplots, no climax and no emergent theme. There is however a focusing eye, and this restively pursues a loose family of characters around a credible Sydney landscape, which in the closing pages moves via Singapore and Java to Bali.

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