Dear Chancellor French, I write this open letter to you to make certain points about the environment of university press publishing, in support of UWA Press and its Director, Professor Terri-ann White, and her team.
... (read more)Sometimes Western Australia feels a long way from anywhere. Of course, that can be an attraction. It makes for something distinct and telling: everyone either revels in it or rebels against it, and both are productive in their own way. But now we must resist. The University of Western Australia’s recent decision to close UWA Publishing (at least in its present form) has made the gap between here and the rest of the country yawn. Western Australians need support from other literary communities across Australia if UWAP is to be reinstated.
... (read more)This novel, Delia Falconer’s first, takes the form of a love lament: all about breath in bodies; textures and surfaces; clouds; mountains; photography; colour; gardens; illness. Much more, too, of course, and it is a work that certainly does not warrant such a glib cataloguing of elements and attributes. It is ambitious, and successful ...
... (read more)To complement our ‘Books of the Year’ feature, which appeared in the December 2018 issue, we invited some senior publishers to nominate their favourite books of 2018 – all published by other companies.
... (read more)I’m fresh from Hannah Kent’s compelling, humane, and utterly convincing The Good People (Picador, 10/16). Kent completely inhabits her material. In this single nineteenth ...
... (read more)Performances by Batsheva Dance Company involve more than movement and choreography. Behind each production is a philosophy, markedly different from the vocabulary, tics, and motifs we expect from choreographers. Ohad Naharin has introduced a revolutionary aspect to the company ...
... (read more)To highlight Australian Book Review's arts coverage and to celebrate some of the year's memorable concerts, operas, films, ballets, plays, and exhibitions, we invited a group of critics and arts professionals to nominate their favourites – and to nominate one production they are looking forward to in 2016. (We indicate which works were reviewed in Arts Up ...
Unsurprisingly, each of Sylvie Guillem’s six performances of Life in Progress in the Sydney leg of a world tour sold out. She will soon retire as a dancer after thirty-nine remarkable years. Unsurprisingly too, her program was edgy and contained two brand new works. Sylvie Guillem doesn’t rest on her laurels, and this wasn’t an anthology of her ‘great ...
There is currently a very appealing trend in publishing with books about cities written by creative writers: fiction writers, novelists, and essayists. In Australia we have had the Cities Series from NewSouth Publishing: personal, writerly books that capture the spirit of our capital cities (and Alice Springs) and take us along pathways, with the idiosyncrati ...