Welcome to issue number 350 of ABR! Leading the way is our Calibre Prize winner for 2013 – Martin Thomas’s magnificent account of the violation and restitution of Aboriginal bones in west Arnhem Land. Gillian Terzis and Alison Broinowski review new books by Al Gore and Oliver Stone, respectively. Patrick Allington praises a novella by Marion May Campbell, who is our guest on Open Page. There is news of two new ABR writers’ fellowships, each worth $5000. We also have poems by Laurie Duggan, Clive James, and Jennifer Maiden.
April 2013, no. 350
2013 Calibre Prize (Winner): Because it's Your Country
The morgue in Gunbalanya holds no more than half a dozen corpses – and, as usual, it was full. When the Old Man died in the wet season of 2012, they had to fly him to Darwin, only to discover that the morgue there was already overcrowded. So they moved him aga ...
Gillian Terzis on Al Gore's 'The Future'
Confronting the void that awaits any failed US presidential nominee is a tough gig. Short shrift is given to those who have come so far, only to fall short at the last hurdle. Take Bob Dole, who became a shill for Viagra in the late 1990s after losing to Bill Cl ...
Don Anderson reviews 'A World of Other People' by Steven Carroll
Novels have been appearing in the last decade or so in which one or more of the characters are actual historical figures, often themselves writers, appearing in propria persona, not considerately disguised and renamed, as Horace Skimpole was in Bleak H ...
Patrick Allington reviews 'Konkretion' by Marion May Campbell
Whereas many twenty-first-century novels seem way too long, konkretion is a distilled, complex gem. It is a novella full of questions and questing, most of which riff from this observation made in the context of Germany’s militant Red Army Faction: ‘w ...
