Luke Horton

Index for 2016: Nos 378–387

Indexes • 07 January 2016

ABR Index 2016 NB: this index includes only the material published in the print magazine and therefore does not include all the material published by ABR in 2016.   2016 Reviews Index ABBS, Annabel, The Joyce Girl, Hachette, 387/63, Ann-Marie Priest ACKLAND, Jenny, The Secret Son, Allen & Unwin, 378/47, Katerina Bryant ADELAIDE, Debra, (ed.), The Simple Act of Reading, Vintage, 378/ ... (read more)

Luke Horton reviews 'Dodge Rose' by Jack Cox

May 2016, no. 381 • 22 April 2016

The circumstances around the publication of Dodge Rose, Jack Cox's début novel, have attracted considerable attention in Australian literary circles. A choice publicity tale as to how the novel was rescued from the slush pile by American publisher Dalkey Archive Press has contributed to this. So have claims advanced by Dalkey Archive that Dodge Rose is 'the most astonishing début of the decade', ... (read more)

Index for 2015: Nos 368–377

Indexes • 07 January 2016

Reviews Index 2015 ABBOTT, Edward, The English and Australian Cookery Book and The English and Australian Cookery Book Companion: 1864-2014 Sesquicentenary Edition, The Culinary Historians of Tasmania, 368/67, Christopher MenzACTON, Peter, Poiesis: Manufacturing in Classical Athens, Oxford University Press, 369/56, Glyn DavisADAMSON, Robert, Net Needle Poems, Black Inc., 377/42, A. J. CarruthersA ... (read more)

Luke Horton reviews 'Ghost River' by Tony Birch

December 2015, no. 377 • 25 November 2015

With Ghost River, Tony Birch returns to a world he has delineated over many short stories and in his first novel, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Blood (2011): the world of adolescents living on the margins. Invariably in trouble and in unstable family environments, the adolescents in Birch's fiction tend to find in their marginal status a degree of freedom. They use this freedom to explore what he ... (read more)

Luke Horton reviews 'The Story of the Lost Child' by Elena Ferrante

November 2015, no. 376 • 27 October 2015

Over the last year, Italian enigma Elena Ferrante has become one of the most passionately advocated literary sensations of our time. Enigma, because 'Elena Ferrante' is a pseudonym and no one other than her publisher knows her identity, Ferrante had published several novels before the Neapolitan series, but it is this cycle of four novels, culminating in The Story of the Lost Child (Storia della b ... (read more)

Luke Horton reviews 'Another Great Day At Sea' by Geoff Dyer

May 2015, no. 371 • 30 April 2015

Despite their disparate subject matter, the central concerns of Geoff Dyer’s books remain the same. Whether he is writing about photography, D.H. Lawrence, taking you scene-by-scene through Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, or, as in Another Great Day At Sea, spending two weeks aboard a US aircraft carrier, his abiding concerns – the self, the nature of writing, why one would go to the trouble of ... (read more)

Luke Horton reviews 'Granta 129: Fate' edited by Sigrid Rausing

January-February 2015, no. 368 • 01 January 2015

In 2013, publisher Sigrid Rausing significantly reduced Granta magazine’s staff, and long-time editor John Freeman resigned. At this news, various high-profile contributors, including Peter Carey, expressed their concern for the future of the magazine. But if we can judge solely on the quality of this edition, the new Rausing-edited Granta has lost none of its verve. It remains chock-full of fin ... (read more)

Luke Horton reviews 'Boyhood Island' by Karl Ove Knausgaard

October 2014, no. 365 • 01 October 2014

In Boyhood Island, the third volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s internationally acclaimed My Struggle cycle, we are taken back to where the series began: an island in southern Norway, seven-year-old Karl Ove and his older brother Yngve live under the tyranny of a cruel and taciturn father in the mid-1970s. Unlike the first volume, A Death in the Family (2012), which stays with young Karl Ove for on ... (read more)

Luke Horton reviews 'Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the emergence of identity' by Kwame Anthony Appiah

June–July 2014, no. 362 • 01 June 2014

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) forged one of the most remarkable careers of his generation. Starting in the 1890s, often considered the nadir of race relations in the United States, he became the first black man to hold a Harvard bachelor’s degree; emerged as Booker T. Washington’s most eloquent opponent on the issue of segregation; published pioneering work across many genres, ... (read more)

Sleepers Almanac No. 9

May 2014, no. 361 • 30 April 2014

Sleepers Publishing are up to Almanac No. 9. Despite the ever-increasing competition from newer literary journals, the high quality of this annual short-fiction anthology remains intact. Eschewing the theme-based model used by many journals and instead offering diversity in subject, style, and tone, the Almanac has never been anything less than an intriguing read, and this is certainly true this t ... (read more)