Literary Studies
The autobiography, that seemingly inevitable act of self-revelation, is frequently a work tricked out with very little art. For the novelist, unlike the anecdote-disposing musician or painter, the problem is doubled: they are making a home with the same tools. Rare is the autobiography that, like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) or Martin Amis’s Experience (2001), speaks in ...
Jane Goodall
The Novels of Alex Miller: An Introduction
edited by Robert Dixon
Allen & Unwin, $39.99 pb, 268 pp, 9781742378640
As creative writing programs continue to surge in popularity, it has become something of an uphill battle to recruit students fo ...
James Ley reviews 'The Lives of the Novelists' by John Sutherland
Here are some of the interesting things you may learn if you read John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists:
↓ that James Fenimore Cooper was expelled from Yale for training a donkey to sit in the professor’s chair
↓ that Evelyn Waugh once attempted suicide but was prevented from drowning by a passing shoal o ...
Graeme Harper is a big name in the academic field of creative writing. He was the first in Australia to be awarded a doctorate in creative writing (UTS, 1993) and followed that with a PhD from the University of East Anglia; he has held professorships in creative writing in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. He edits journals and writes textbooks o ...
This is how Claire Tomalin closes her Dickens biography: ‘He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens’, followed by a long list of types. I consider Dickens the surrealist, or thesentimentalist, but then I pick Dickens the tireless walker. And I concede, with Tomalin, that regarding h ...
Simone de Beauvoir (edited by Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann): 'The Useless Mouths' and Other Literary Writings
Gems and oddities from Simone de Beauvoir
Colin Nettelbeck
‘The Useless Mouths’ and Other Literary Writings
by Simone de Beauvoir (edited by Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann)
University of Illinois Press (Footprint Books), $69 hb, 408 pp, 9780252036347
Shadowland
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Who is Ozymandias? And Other Puzzles in Poetry
by John Fuller
Random House, $36.95 hb, 256 pp, 9780701184575
Those who write about poetry these days don’t go in much for lightness. More often their solemnity spring ...
As contemporary author fan bases go, Margaret Atwood’s must be among the broadest. She is read at crèches, on university campuses, and in nursing homes. Feminists, birders, and would-be writers jostle to see her perform at literary festivals. Yet despite an Arthur C. Clarke Award and, in her own words ...
... (read more)Chris Flynn and Peter Carey on the challenging times for mid-list authors
British author Glen Duncan released his eighth novel this year, the title of which, The Last Werewolf, is fairly self-explanatory. Although a much more philosophical (and entertaining) read than one might imagine in our current supernaturally-dominated ‘box-office’ novel landscape, Duncan’s book was a marked departure from an author better known for h ...
Literary critics used to adopt a persona claiming disinterested separation from the text being analysed. Critical theory, in particular post-colonial and gender studies, eroded this stance, showing that criticism is always self-interested, concealing or inadvertently revealing tacit assumptions stemming from the critic’s biography, class, gender, and political per ...