Beejay Silcox
Beejay Silcox reviews 'Syria’s Secret Library: Reading and redemption in a town under siege' by Mike Thomson
A rebel stronghold on the southern edge of Damascus, the Syrian suburb of Daraya, was violently isolated by the Assad regime for almost four years – a ruthlessly protracted attempt to starve out the city’s pro-democracy insurgency. Power and water supplies were cut, crops were burned, and humanitarian aid was barred. There was no food, no medicine, and no way out.
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When truth is stranger than fiction, fiction is a potent source of truth. In the first week of the Trump administration, sales of 1984 increased by 9,500 per cent, catapulting George Orwell’s sexagenarian novel to the top of global bestseller charts. As Kellyanne Conway recast White House lies as ‘alternative facts’ ...
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I am a girl who knows how to hold a gun. On weekends, Dad drives me out to the pistol club, while Mum pulls white-sapped weeds from the garden. She plants natives that can handle the salt in the air; angular, bristling plants with angular, bristling names: banksia, grevillea, bottlebrush. A line of Geraldton Wax along the verge to replace some mean and blighted ...
ABR News: Giveaways to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Slaughterhouse Five, and The Chaperone; Story of the Month; submissions open for fortyfivedownstair's Emerging Artist Award 2019; the ABR 2020 European tour; Vicki Laveau-Harvie wins the $50,000 Stella Prize 2019; applications open for The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award; and more!
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To celebrate the best books of 2018, Australian Book Review invited nearly forty contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Michelle de Kretser
... (read more)'The art of pain: Writing in the age of trauma' by Beejay Silcox
Inspirational Memoirs, Painful Lives, Real Lives – these were the polite terms, the labels you might find on bookshop shelves, but the term that stuck was Misery Literature. The books had plaintive titles like Tell Me Why, Mummy, and Please, Daddy, No, or single-word gut-punches like Wasted, Fractured, and Damaged ...
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‘Creative writing is, in sum, as American as baseball, apple pie and homicide.’
Mark McGurl, The Program Era (2009)
My rejection from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop arrived by mail. Iowa was steadfastly old-fashioned: there were no online portals or login codes at the near-mythical mothership of American fiction; no emails or text ...
In a cheerless London basement, a young man sifts through the bureaucratic detritus of World War II: ‘to unearth whatever evidence might still remain of actions that history might consider untoward’. The project is called ‘The Silent Correction’ – a furtive dimming of the national memory. Warlight, Michael Ondaatje’s effulgent new novel, is a story of half-lights and half-truths – a novel of matchlight, gaslight, limelight and moonlight, sodium light and storm light, bonfires and bomb-fires ...
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You have come to see a magic show. You arrive at the theatre, take your seat. Before the show begins, the magician steps onstage in his street clothes and explains what you are about to see; where the mirrors are hidden – every trapdoor, false bottom, and wire. When the lights go down, impossibly – even after everything you ...
... (read more)#20 Forty years of ABR: Peter Rose in conversation with Beejay Silcox
Wednesday, 18 April 2018Peter Rose spoke to Beejay Silcox, recipient of Australian Book Review Fortieth Birthday Fellowship, about developments at ABR since the revival of the magazine's second series in 1978. Beejay also discusses her Fellowship essay, 'Defying ...