Literary Studies
Lands of Likeness: For a poetics of contemplation by Kevin Hart
What was the best decision Brian Johns ever made?
In 2005, Johns – legendary leader of Penguin Books Australia, publisher of Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley, Frank Moorhouse, and so many others, and later managing director of the ABC and SBS – nominated his publication of the Buru Quartet, by Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Johns was speaking at an event for Pramoedya’s Indonesian editor and publisher Joesoef Isak, who was receiving the inaugural PEN Keneally Award for publishing. This may have been a case of politeness on Johns’s part, but there are reasons to think this was likely a more considered assessment.
... (read more)The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee edited by Andrew van der Vlies and Lucie Valerie Graham
The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the salvation of philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger, translated by Shaun Whiteside
Retroland: A reader’s guide to the dazzling diversity of modern fiction by Peter Kemp
Ralph Ellison could be abrasive. His biographer Arnold Rampersad records that James Baldwin thought Ellison ‘the angriest man he knew’. Shirley Hazzard observed that when Ellison was drinking he ‘could become obnoxious very quickly’. His friend Albert Murray recognised something in him that was ‘potentially violent, very violent. He was ready to take on people and use whatever street corner language they understood. He was ready to fight, to come to blows. You really didn’t want to mess with Ralph Ellison.’
... (read more)