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Stephanie Bishop

Stephanie Bishop’s The Anniversary is an example of both deft literary craft and an engrossing read – a feat rarer than it should be. Billed as a ‘novel about writing and desire’, this is more a work interrogating the nexus between art, celebrity, and commerce, while unpicking the ways in which gender informs all three.

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Walt Whitman’s famous line ‘I sing the body electric’ could well serve as the epilogue to Etchings 2, whose dynamic offerings are gathered under the theme of connectivity and the generation of energy. indeed, being ‘wired’ has become a predominant feature of modern existence. This is obviously true of our relationship to the internet and of our addiction to instantaneous transactions and connections. Yet we are wired in other ways as well. To be wired is also to be anxious and edgy; it implies a disconnection, a nervous distance. The pieces showcased in Etchings 2 examine the multifariousness of this experience.

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Stephanie Bishop’s third novel, Man Out of Time, her most mature work to date, echoes Virginia Woolf’s psychological realism and the claustrophobic intensity of Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (1966). Indeed, an unkind reviewer might compare Bishop’s latest novel to ...

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One of the most potent stories we can tell is a story of migration. With the exception of indigenous people, every Australian originally came from somewhere else. Take just one source: the emigrants from England. Kate Grenville writes about her convict and settler ancestry in her

I studied creative writing at UTS. Yes, it was worth it, mainly because I encountered some brilliant teachers – Martin Harrison in particular. Martin’s courses didn’t simply ‘teach’ me about writing; they changed the way I saw the world. Then I went on to do a conventional PhD at Cambridge, partly due to a strong belief that you learn to write by reading closely, and by immersing yourself in the work of others. I have taken to thinking of this PhD as a kind of apprenticeship in style.

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Childhood, Freud taught, becomes us, but our earliest memories can be sly; they resist us when we seek them, and pounce when we are unprepared. It is thus only by chance that Proust comes upon his first recollections, those idyllic scenes revived in long wafts of hawthorn-scented nostalgia. The legacy of childhood and its fickle reminiscence has always been prominent in Charlotte Wood’s work. In The Children, childhood is remembered as a grim affair, something the three siblings at its centre would rather leave behind. Yet much of this novel hinges on the idea that childhood is something we never escape: old memories involuntarily impinge upon us, and the self that defined us as children, the book suggests, constitutes us throughout our lives.

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The Singing by Stephanie Bishop & The Patron Saint Of Eels by Gregory Day

by
August 2005, no. 273

The Singing is the inaugural publication in the Varuna Firsts series, a collaboration between the Varuna Writers’ House and Brandl & Schlesinger. Both should be applauded for bringing a distinctive new voice into Australian writing; not to mention the honour due to the prodigious talent of Stephanie Bishop herself. Bishop has written a haunting novel with a seemingly simple story: love gone awry. A woman runs into an ex-lover on the street (neither protagonist is named), and this meeting throws her back into the story of their past. The two narratives – her solitary life now and the tale, mainly, of the relationship’s end – run in parallel. The novel’s energy, however, is ruminative rather than linear, circling around the nature of their love, pressing at the bruises left by its collapse.

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When E.M. Forster published Aspects of the Novel in 1927, he was not writing as a critic, and the success of the book is due to precisely that. Forster gives us the intuitive judgements of a novelist – a series of rough observations full of verve. James Wood’s How Fiction Works is indebted to Forster’s study and turns on like questions (what constitutes a convincing character? How does narrative style shape a novel? What defines a telling detail?). But while he poses theoretical questions, Wood does not offer theoretical answers. And unlike Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel (1985), Wood is not interested in the way writers gloss their own creations.

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