Accessibility Tools

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

James Ley

Subscribe to this RSS feed

The ABR Podcast 

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

Subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, Google, or Spotify, or search for ‘The ABR Podcast’ on your favourite podcast app.

goldsworthy

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:

Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre

by •
December 2003–January 2004, no. 257
James Ley reviews 'Vernon God Little' by D.B.C. Pierre

‘The fucken oozing nakedness, the despair of being such a vulnerable egg-sac of a critter, like, a so-called human being, just sickens me sometimes, especially right now. The Human Condition Mom calls it. Watch out for that fucker.’

The speaker of these lines, fifteen-year-old Vernon Little, is a literary descendant of Huckleberry Finn.

... (read more)
Page 8 of 8