Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Kevin Rabalais

Kevin Rabalais

Kevin Rabalais's books include Novel Voices (2003), The Landscape of Desire (2008), and Conversations with James Salter (2015).

Kevin Rabalais reviews 'Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies' by Jay Parini

September 2015, no. 374 25 August 2015
You could call central casting for a debonair man of letters, but they’d never send someone as perfect for the role as Gore Vidal. By the time the stylish, sharp-witted – and yes, Hollywood-handsome – Vidal turned twenty-one, he had already served as first mate on a US supply ship in the Aleutian Islands during World War II and published a novel about the experience. With Williwaw (1946), Vi ... (read more)

Kevin Rabalais reviews 'The Wonder Lover' by Malcolm Knox

June-July 2015, no. 372 28 May 2015
Since the publication of his début novel, Summerland (2000), Malcolm Knox has established himself as one of the most ambitious and exciting fiction writers at work in Australia. A seasoned journalist, recipient of two Walkley Awards– one for his work, with Caroline Overington, in the exposé of Norma Khouri– and prolific author of diverse non-fiction works that include I Still Call Australia ... (read more)

'My Brother Jack at fifty' by Kevin Rabalais

August 2014, no. 363 01 August 2014
The novel begins with the burnished quality of something handed down through generations, its opening lines like the first breath of a myth. Seductive in tone and concision, charged with an  aura of enchantment, the early paragraphs of George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964) do more than merely lure the reader into the narrative. In these sentences, Johnston reveals the conviction and cont ... (read more)

Kevin Rabalais reviews 'A First Place' by David Malouf

May 2014, no. 361 29 April 2014
Some obsessions, present from the start, infiltrate a writer’s pages to the degree that they become synonymous with his body of work. This reaches beyond preoccupation and setting to include matters of style and sensibility. Such a combination allows the reader to discern, often in the space of a single sentence, one writer’s DNA from another’s. We return to certain writers to witness what n ... (read more)
Page 2 of 2