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Picador

Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living was always going to be a tough book to follow. Carrie Tiffany’s début novel, published in 2005, was shortlisted for various major prizes, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Orange Prize. It also won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award in 2005 and the Dobbie Literary Award in 2007. Everyman’s Rules tells the story of a sewing instructor and a soil scientist who meet aboard the ‘Better Farming Train’ as it passes through the Victorian countryside, and who settle in the impoverished Mallee farmland.

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With the likes of Helen Garner, Arnold Zable, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, the contents page of this essay collection reads like a who’s who of Australian literature. The editor–contributors are the poet Alex Skovron, philosopher Raimond Gaita, and novelist Alex Miller. The publisher is Picador. The man honoured in these essays is Jacob Rosenberg.

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Weeks before its release, the Man Booker tipsters are laying short odds on Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, the successor to his 2004 winner, The Line of Beauty. Booker cynics might agree that the great British literary race has in some seasons had more in common with pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey than the Derby, but here is surely a promising contender for 2011’s glittering prize. Wher ...

When the book arrived for review, a paperback of 656 pages, my heart sank. Americans are the world’s greatest researchers. Reading it would be like drinking from a fire hose. But it began incisively, with a turning point in the 2008 presidential campaign that established Obama’s audacity as a ‘complex, cautious, intelligent, shrewd, young African-American man’ who would project his ambitions and hopes as the aspirations of the United States of America itself. Soon we were in Kenya, with Tom Mboya, Jomo Kenyatta, the Mau Mau uprising, and Barack Hussein Obama Sr, a promising young economist with a rich, musical voice and a confident manner on his way to the University of Hawaii. We also meet the most compelling character in the book, perhaps in Obama’s life: his mother, a seventeen-year-old from Kansas, intrepid and idealistic, who takes up with the dasher from Kenya, becomes pregnant and marries him.

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Kim Scott noted in 2001 that the biographical notes accompanying his first two novels (True Country, 1993, and Benang: From the Heart, 1999) changed ...

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Bill Henson: Photographs by Bill Henson, introduction by David Malouf

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September 1988, no. 104

In under a decade Bill Henson has managed, by careful and strategic marketing, to become probably Australia’s leading art photographer. This status is based on the precise circulation of three or four exhibitions of work, Untitled Sequence 1979, the Untitled 1980–82 series, the Untitled 1983–84 series, and the Untitled 1985–86 series. The titles indicate a continuity of practice rather than anything else, a statement that the photographer has been engaged throughout this time in producing work. By an economic placement of the work in different commercial and public galleries around the country and in contemporary survey shows, such as the 1981 Perspecta and more significantly, the Australian Bicentennial Perspecta, Henson has managed to maximize the exposure and impact of his work. The Australian Bicentennial Perspecta provides a useful means of circulating the work internationally (the exhibition has been shown in Germany), although Henson, like most of us, does not really need the bicentennial; it simply provides a free trip into the international market in which Henson’s work is already placed by virtue of its content and formal qualities.

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Who is, or rather who was, André Gide? I ask this because a distinguished editor warned me, on hearing that I was about to review Robert Dessaix’s enticing new book, that nowadays nobody would remember who Gide was. Ah, the years, the years! It was another story in the time of my youth ...

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Why are there so many books about death and dying appearing at the moment? Is it about the baby boomers facing up to their mortality? It is certainly a subject that interests me, and Debra Adelaide’s novel should be compelling. Unfortunately, I found its determined flippancy laboured and grating. The first-person narrator, Delia, a writer of household guides, is not yet forty. Given a bad prognosis for her breast cancer, she decides that her last work will be a guide to dying, in which she will record her physical and emotional journey.

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Jack by Judy Johnson & Navigation by Judy Johnson

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April 2008, no. 300

Narrative, historical narrative in particular, figures strongly in these recent books from Judy Johnson – one a new collection of poems, the other a welcome reissue of her verse novel. Jack was first published in 2006 by Pandanus, shortly before that imprint’s demise. It won the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and is republished now by Picador. With its lonely, embittered, one-eyed captain, its miscellany of onboard characters and Coral Sea setting, it is not without potentially cliched romantic elements – which the Picador cover, with its Blue Lagoon-like scene and blockbuster typeface, is happy to trade on. But Jack compels.

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There is only one verse in the Koran that deals with suicide. Its content seems pretty clear: ‘Do not kill yourselves’ (4:29). Of course, the verse has not stopped waves of Muslim suicide bombers in the past twenty-five years. Nor has it stopped a smattering of extremist Muslim clerics from using the Koran to promote or justify suicide missions. Their somewhat contorted reasoning usually goes like this: the Koran promises an afterlife to so-called martyrs who die ‘struggling in the way of God’ (2:154); therefore, those who are killed in Allah’s way are not considered dead but ‘are alive, are provided sustenance from their Lord’ (3:169). Thus, suicide bombers have not transgressed verse 4:29 but are martyrs who have died defending Islam and will live on in the afterlife.

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