Non Fiction
The Australian sweet tooth and ongoing love of cakes and desserts is evident in two recent publications. Both cover the basics as well as offering more ambitious fare; they are good places to start if this is your thing.
Phillippa Grogan’s eponymous pâtisserie in Melbourne, established in 1994, offers the type of baked goods presented in this publication: ...
Ann Moyal was born in 1926, so now she is heading towards her ninetieth birthday. She has already launched a work of autobiography into the world, written in her mid-sixties. But her life did not, then, ‘take a quieter turn’. On the contrary, she tells us, ‘I’d continued to spend my ageing life with passion, involvement, and intensity.’ And that has inspir ...
Brigitta Olubas reviews 'Australian Literary Studies Vol. 28, no. 1-2''
This is a thoughtful and timely issue of Australian Literary Studies (ALS), one of Australia’s most substantial scholarly journals. It brings together scholars from institutions across Australia, India, and New Zealand to reflect on the state of the discipline of English in the context of a number of recent upheavals, including those directly relatin ...
Usually the subject’s death signals the end of a biography, but for Dylan Jones it is the starting point. Three decades after his death in 1977, Elvis Presley has proven even more ubiquitous, and lucrative, than he was in life. When he died – with the official cause listed as heart failure, but a vast cocktail of drugs playing an undeniable role – his manager, ...
Kári Gíslason reviews a new biography of Hans Christian Andersen
How a writer bears witness to his age is necessarily the expression of many things, not least the possibly quite peculiar nature of an author’s life. Literary works often emerge from complex upbringings, from periods of youthful isolation spent reading and writing. More still seem to have been written as a result of the fraught relationships that befall authors, p ...
In her foreword, Emily Maguire says, ‘You need a desperate, hungry energy to tell a story, to write a poem, to scratch at the surface of a life and see what slithers beneath.’ For some, the university campus is the place for this desperation and hunger to find a voice and have a public hearing. For the University of Sydney, the public hearing is in the form of < ...
Kent MacCarter’s third collection of poems comprises a patchwork of forms and phenomena, in parts influenced by and dedicated to poets of the New York School and the ‘Generation of 1968’. MacCarter’s own cosmopolitan greetings share the offbeat tones and imagery of precursors, including Frank O’Hara and John Forbes. Touches of the former’s dry humour per ...
Adrian Walsh reviews 'The Essential Hirschman' and his biography
Albert O. Hirschman (1915–2012) was a development economist and political theorist whose work is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how economic life figures in the political worlds we inhabit and the ways in which we give meaning to our lives in market-based societies. Perhaps best known for the distinction between ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ ...
Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby was the Third Man of the notorious Cambridge spy network set up in the 1930s and partially unmasked in the early 1950s, when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Moscow. He had been in British intelligence (MI6) since the beginning of the war, but had been working for Soviet intelligence for some years before that. A high-flyer, ...
Voices of the dispossessed appropriate the narratives in the current issue of Westerly. The fiction in this issue is the strongest section, largely due to the originality and diversity of the writing. M.T. O’Byrne’s magic-realist short story, ‘The Day Before Christmas Island’, introduces the voice of the refugee. Reminiscent of Life of Pi (2001 ...