EM Forster

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**The ABR Podcast**

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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Episode #184

It might be … P is for Peter, physician, patient, poet

By Michael Shmith

In this week’s ABR Podcast, Michael Shmith reviews a memoir from poet, novelist, librettist, and Adelaide GP Peter Goldsworthy. The book’s title is The Cancer Finishing School. Shmith begins by observing that doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill, before immediately recognising this as the useless delusion of a patient. Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor whose most recent book is Merlyn, a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer. Listen to Michael Shmith’s ‘It might be …: P is for Peter, physician, patient, poet’, published in the April issue of ABR.

Recent episodes:

The Inheritance

fortyfivedownstairs

by Tim Byrne •

23 January 2024

We can look at the literary canon as our cultural inheritance: flawed and incomplete, maybe, but also a balm and a provocation stretching across the centuries. Part of its value lies in the connections we form between great works, the layers of meaning that build up over time like sediment in rock. American playwright Matthew López engages directly with this notion in his monumental seven-hour play The Inheritance, which is divided into two parts of comparable length. ... (read more)

Peter Rose on the Peculiar Charms of E.M. Forster

by Australian Book Review •

The ABR Podcast

This week we draw on ABR’s expanding digital archive and head back to December 2010, when ABR Editor Peter Rose wrote at length about E.M. Forster, author of novels such as Howards End and Room with a View. In this podcast, Rose discusses Wendy Moffat’s biography of Forster, before roaming more widely to revisit those influential novels and dipping into the immense Forster literature – and the even more gargantuan literature of Bloomsbury, of which Forster was a peripheral and somewhat wary member.

... (read more)

How Fiction Works by James Wood

by Stephanie Bishop •

May 2008, no. 301

Stephanie Bishop reviews 'How Fiction Works' by James Wood

When E.M. Forster published Aspects of the Novel in 1927, he was not writing as a critic, and the success of the book is due to precisely that. Forster gives us the intuitive judgements of a novelist – a series of rough observations full of verve. James Wood’s How Fiction Works is indebted to Forster’s study and turns on like questions (what constitutes a convincing character? How does narrative style shape a novel? What defines a telling detail?). But while he poses theoretical questions, Wood does not offer theoretical answers. And unlike Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel (1985), Wood is not interested in the way writers gloss their own creations.

... (read more)