Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

James Halford

James Halford

James Halford is the author of Requiem with Yellow Butterflies (2019), a Latin America travel memoir. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Queensland.

James Halford reviews 'From Here on, Monsters' by Elizabeth Bryer

September 2019, no. 414 27 August 2019
The most charismatic of the many monsters in Elizabeth Bryer’s début novel is the conceptual artist Maddison Worthington, who commands attention with her lipstick of ‘Mephistophelian red’ and her perfume of ‘white woods, musk and heliotrope’. From the solitude of a labyrinthine mansion, Worthington devises headline-grabbing installations, and performances that often incorporate hidden-c ... (read more)

James Halford reviews 'Mouthful of Birds: Stories' by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

August 2019, no. 413 27 June 2019
Despite seven years of expatriate life in Germany, the Argentine Samanta Schweblin’s writerly gaze, like that of Australia’s Peter Carey or Janette Turner Hospital, remains trained upon her homeland: ‘I write from outside, literally and in a literary sense. But always looking toward Argentina.’ Schweblin acknowledges a debt to the fantastic, the genre that, in Tzvetan Todorov’s influenti ... (read more)