Shannon Burns

Shannon Burns reviews 'Scary Monsters' by Michelle de Kretser

October 2021, no. 436 • 23 September 2021

To read Michelle de Kretser’s fiction is to sense important details swimming under the surface of our awareness, forming patterns that will come into view by the end of the story, or after contemplating it for a time, or while rereading. There is always enough to satisfy our immediate needs – rich aphorisms, sharp characterisation, satirical wickedness, the play of language, political and hist ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'The Other Half of You' by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

August 2021, no. 434 • 22 July 2021

Bani Adam returns as the narrator–protagonist of Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You, a sequel to his two previous books. The most recent one, The Lebs (2018), gave us the story of Bani’s teenage years at Punchbowl Boys’ High School: the trials of a Lebanese Muslim boy in a majority Lebanese Muslim community nestled inside the larger, diverse territories of Western Sydney, in po ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'O' by Steven Carroll

April 2021, no. 430 • 23 March 2021

On the back cover of O, we learn that the protagonist of the novel, Dominique, lived through the German occupation of France, participated in the Resistance, relished its ‘clandestine life’, and later wrote an ‘erotic novel about surrender, submission and shame’, which became the real-life international bestseller and French national scandal, Histoire d’O (1954). ‘But what is the story ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'On Getting Off: Sex and philosophy' by Damon Young

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 17 December 2020

On Getting Off is an attempt to think about sex philosophically, through the lens of personal, literary, and artistic experience. Damon Young, a Melbourne philosopher, is keen on reflective sex and legitimises this fetish with a carrot and stick, seducing readers by arguing for its superior pleasures and threatening us by implying that the alternatives are morally dubious or diminishing. He consid ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Essays One' by Lydia Davis

April 2020, no. 420 • 20 March 2020

Essays One is the first of two volumes of collected non-fiction drawn from all periods of Lydia Davis’s long career. While the second collection will, according to the author, ‘concentrate more single-mindedly on translation and the experience of reading foreign languages’, this volume has an alternating focus on writing and reading practices, translation, commentary, reviews, and personal e ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Ducks, Newburyport' by Lucy Ellmann

December 2019, no. 417 • 25 October 2019

Lucy Ellmann’s ambitious seventh novel stages the workings of a mind as it digests – or fails to digest – life-altering experiences. Ducks, Newburyport is, for the most part, the ruminating inner monologue of a bewildered and frightened woman. It spans a thousand mostly artful pages and is an undeniably impressive accomplishment. However, for readers who relished Ellmann’s brilliant comic ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'The Rapids: Ways of looking at mania' by Sam Twyford-Moore

August 2018, no. 403 • 26 July 2018

In The Rapids: Ways of looking at mania, Sam Twyford-Moore takes a personal, exploratory, and speculative approach to the subject of mania. Because the author has been significantly governed by manic episodes on several occasions (he was diagnosed with manic depression as he ‘came into adulthood’), The Rapids offers an insider’s perspective. It also considers some of the public and cultural ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'Relatively Famous' by Roger Averill

May 2018, no. 401 • 26 April 2018

In Relatively Famous, Roger Averill combines a fictional memoir with extracts from a faux-biography of the memoirist’s Booker Prize-winning father, Gilbert Madigan. The biography amounts to a fairly bloodless summary of the events of Madigan’s life, and his son’s memoir is similarly sedate. This makes for a limp but sensitively conceived novel about paternal failure and the extent to which p ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc' by Ali Alizadeh

October 2017, no. 395 • 27 September 2017

The many gaps in the verifiable history of Jeanne d’Arc’s early years in rural France, as well as her improbable rise to prominence and martyrdom, have left room for a considerable amount of speculation and projection over the centuries. There is no shortage of fictional or historical accounts of her life, or ways of characterising the Maid’s struggle, but with The Last Days of Jeanne d’Ar ... (read more)

Shannon Burns reviews 'The Town' by Shaun Prescott

September 2017, no. 394 • 25 August 2017

Shaun Prescott’s début novel shares obvious conceptual territory with the fiction of Franz Kafka and Gerald Murnane, both of whom are mentioned in its promotional material. As with The Castle (1926) and The Plains (1982), The Town recounts the dreamlike experiences and observations of an enigmatic narrator–protagonist after he arrives in an unnamed town. But unlike Kafka’s surveyor or Murna ... (read more)