Jay Daniel Thompson
Jay Daniel Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in Professional Communication at RMIT University.
In To the Highlands, the second instalment in a trilogy entitled ‘One Boy’s Journey to Man’, Jon Doust provides a gripping examination of racism and male sexuality in 1960s Australia.
In the novel’s opening pages, Jack Muir arrives on some unnamed ‘islands’ to take up a banking job. Muir is barely out of high school. His early days in his new surroundings are marked by drunken carousi ... (read more)
f ourW twenty-two is an initiative of the Booranga Writers’ Centre in Wagga Wagga. This current edition features short stories and poems by (predominantly) Australian writers. Some of these writers are prominent names; others are relatively unknown.
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Three years after her first novel, The Book of Emmett, which chronicled the trials and tribulations of a troubled family, Melbourne writer Deborah Forster covers similar territory in her second, The Meaning of Grace. It opens with an elderly woman named Grace dying of cancer in hospital, then rewinds several decades, back to when a much younger Grace and her children moved to the seaside town of Y ... (read more)
The history of Australian rock music is rich and eclectic. Vanda and Young: Inside Australia’s Hit Factory and Behind the Rock and Beyond: The Diary of a Rock Band, 1956–1980 provide two perspectives on the early years of rock music in this country. John Tait, owner of a second-hand record and bookshop in Melbourne and a self-confessed ‘avid collector of Australian music’, has writte ... (read more)
The most recent edition of La Trobe Journal is an exploration of Melbourne’s gay and lesbian past. Amusingly titled Queen City of the South, it investigates an aspect of this city’s history that has frequently been overlooked or ‘hidden’. In the Introduction, guest editor Graham Willett argues that the compilation will help bring to light ‘striking stories and deep insights’ about the ... (read more)
The decision to use Ned Kelly’s last words as the subtitle of Griffith Review 33 was most unwise. This well-worn line threatens to overshadow the journal’s contents, which are otherwise fresh and intelligent.
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When We Have Wings, the first novel by Blue Mountains journalist Claire Corbett, offers an ambitious and politically engaged blend of detective narrative, family melodrama, and futuristic thriller. In the dystopian world that Corbett depicts, social élites are distinguished by their ability to fly. These elect ‘fliers’ soar through the air using genuine wings. One such flier is the affluent P ... (read more)
The Blood Countess is the latest novel by author and media identity Tara Moss. The book promises to be the first in a series about Pandora English, a fashion journalist who socialises with the undead.
The novel begins with the recently orphaned Pandora’s arrival at the New York apartment owned by her great-aunt Celia. The latter looks much younger than her eighty-plus years, never appears in th ... (read more)
Applause
Jay Daniel Thompson
The Indignities is the sequel to Vanity Fierce (1998). In this new book, Graeme Aitken provides another provocative perspective on love and other catastrophes in Sydney’s gay male community.
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