Gail Jones

Our Shadows by Gail Jones

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October 2020, no. 425
Sue Kossew reviews 'Our Shadows' by Gail Jones

Gail Jones’s new novel, Our Shadows, provides readers with another virtuoso performance, showing a writer fully in control of her medium. It is a poetic and beautifully crafted evocation of shadowy pasts whose traumatic effects (in the world and in individual lives) stretch deep into the present and the future.

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Gail Jones: Word, image, ethics by Tanya Dalziell

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September 2020, no. 424
Sue Kossew reviews 'Gail Jones: Word, image, ethics' by Tanya Dalziell

Gail Jones’s beautifully crafted narratives invite and reward careful reading. All her work bears the mark of her formidable intellect. Yet her texts don’t show off: they assert the primacy of embodied experience and interpersonal relationships as much as the inner life of the mind. They provoke you to attend to their many layers of meaning, often requiring at least two readings (and some research) to fully grasp their complexity. But the reader’s reward is in the ‘ah’ moments when, for example, an image takes on particular resonance or an idea emerges from the text’s depths. It is to these intricacies that Tanya Dalziell’s monograph, Gail Jones: Word, image, ethics, turns its attention.

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2018 Australian Book Review Film Survey

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June-July 2018, no. 402

We invited some writers, film critics, and film professionals to nominate their favourite film – not The Greatest Film Ever Sold, but one that matters to them personally.

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The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones

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April 2018, no. 400
Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'The Death of Noah Glass' by Gail Jones

Noah Glass is dead, his fully clothed body discovered floating face down in the swimming pool of his Sydney apartment block, early one morning. Born in Perth in 1946, father of two adult children, widower, Christian, art historian, and specialist in the painting of fifteenth-century artist Piero della Francesca, Noah has ...

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The Simple Act of Reading edited by Debra Adelaide

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January-February 2016, no. 378
Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Simple Act of Reading' edited by Debra Adelaide

Let's start with the title. The act of reading is anything but simple, as Fiona McFarlane and Gabrielle Carey both point out. Eyes, brain, and mind cooperate to create from a series of symbols with no intrinsic representative value a coherent message, or some amusing nonsense, or a persuasive argument, or a boring anecdote, or a parade of transparent lies.

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A Guide to Berlin by Gail Jones

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September 2015, no. 374
Gillian Dooley reviews 'A Guide to Berlin' by Gail Jones

I sit in a safe room with the winter sun on my back and read of violence and menace in an icy city. Gail Jones’s Berlin is so bleak and the novel’s dénouement so shattering that I need that brief benign warmth. This is not, I hasten to protest, a spoiler: the book begins by foreshadowing a scene of guilt, shoc ...

The missing novels: our critics nominate some overlooked classics

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September 2015, no. 374

Early success is no guarantee of a book’s continued availability or circulation. Some major and/or once-fashionable authors recede from public consciousness, and in some cases go out of print. We invited some writers and critics to identity novelists who they feel should be better known.

Five Bells by Gail Jones

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February 2011, no. 328

At the heart of Gail Jones’s Five Bells is a hymn to Kenneth Slessor’s dazzling elegy of the same name, published in 1939.

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Open Page with Gail Jones

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March 2011, no. 329
Open Page with Gail Jones

To find cogency, peace, quiet, and joy; to practise radical attention to the world, to be an activist through words, and to forge solidarity through imagination.

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Sorry by Gail Jones

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May 2007, no. 291
Michelle Griffin reviews 'Sorry' by Gail Jones

A smattering of cultural theory is helpful when reading Gail Jones. The academic bones of her writing always show through the thin padding of her concept-driven stories: deconstructed photography in Sixty Lights (2005), technology and intimacy entwined in Dreams of Speaking (2006). It is more than disconcerting when the narrator of Jones’s third novel, Sorry, starts to interrogate the text with the aplomb of a Cultural Studies postgraduate, especially as the said narrator, Perdita, is a twelve-year-old girl living in Perth, in 1942, curled up in bed with a copy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. ‘Since the first reader is the author,’ Perdita thinks to herself, ‘might there be a channel, somehow, between author and reader, an indefinable intimacy, a secret pact? There are always moments, reading a novel, in which one recognises oneself, or comes across a described detail especially and personally redolent; might there be in this covert world, yet another zone of connection?’

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