Rebecca Starford
Rebecca Starford is the co-founder and publishing-director of Kill Your Darlings and an editor at Text Publishing. She has written for Guardian, Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Australian newspapers. She was a founding member of the Stella Prize steering committee.
Making Tracks (UTS Writers’ Anthology: Making Tracks, ABC Books, $24.95 pb, 186 pp) is the latest collection of poems, short stories and experimental prose by students in the prestigious writing courses at the University of Technology, Sydney. The anthology covers the themes of loss, love and self-discovery, often confronting the writers’ personal experiences from childhood and adolescenc ... (read more)
Reflecting the nineteenth-century obsession with death and the afterlife, thousands of British men and women turned to spiritualism and psychical research. This was, in part, a consequence of many educated people's unease with orthodox religion. From crowded public halls to private drawing rooms, practitioners were present during putative ‘messages’ from the dead, rapped out on tables, walls a ... (read more)
Expulsion from Syria on suspicion of terrorism; an encounter with someone who might be Osama bin Laden in a Tehran bazaar; expulsion from the Hungarian parliament in hand-cuffs; an interview with the editor-in-chief of al-Jazeera: this gripping sequence of events reads more like a synopsis of a John le Carré novel than Ken Haley’s two-year journey, as detailed in Emails from the Edge. In this e ... (read more)
Towards the end of her story, Jean Debelle Lamensdorf admits that she ‘wanted to mentally shut out the horror of Vietnam – to remember only a sanitised version of our year out there’. Having spent twelve gruelling months working as a volunteer for the Red Cross, tending to the non-medical welfare of wounded ANZAC troops, Debelle Lamensdorf has succeeded in cleansing this personal account of ... (read more)
The Woman in the Lobby lacks the satirical punch of Fabulous Nobodies (1989) and the blithe esprit of Wraith (1999) that has made Lee Tulloch such a diverting storyteller. This overlong novel, entertaining in places, engages in some of the lowest common denominators of popular fiction – fashion, drugs and lots of sex.
Dumped by her husband, Violet, a global aid worker, begins an affair with int ... (read more)
The first of Western Australia’s 9,000 or so adult convicts were not transported there until 1850, but 234 boys from the Parkhurst Reformatory, on the Isle of White, had been sent to the colony in the 1840s. Classified as ‘Government Juvenile Immigrants’, they became apprentice settlers. Among them was fifteen-year-old John Gavin, the first European to be executed in Western Australia. David ... (read more)
Since its establishment in 2003, Sleepers Publishing has made quite a name for itself. Coordinating literary salons and the annual publication of the Sleepers Almanac, which garners contributions from some of the country’s most esteemed practitioners, the small press is now branching out into the domain of full-length fiction, with Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming as the opener ... (read more)
Marisa Raoul’s memoir recounts the ten years she spent living and working with her husband in France. With French travel memoirs lining bookshop shelves – such as Ellie Nielsen’s Buying a Piece of Paris (2007), Mark Greenside’s I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do) and Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (both 2008) and, of course, Peter Mayle’s wildly popular A Year in Provence (1991) ... (read more)
After twenty years in the Tokyo police, Inspector Aoki knows the ‘beeping of the excrement detector in his brain was a definite warning that shit was coming down the freeway’. His declaration is indicative of this convoluted plot. Aoki, after seventeen months heading an excruciating investigation into the corrupt ‘Fatman’, a high-profile government official, discovers that his case has bee ... (read more)