In Brief
Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Portable Curiosities' by Julie Koh
Julie Koh's first full-length short story collection, Portable Curiosities, is an electrifying satire on Anglo-Australian hegemony and the underbelly of the Australian Dream ...
... (read more)David Thomas Henry Wright reviews 'Their brilliant careers: The fantastic lives of sixteen extraordinary Australian writers' by Ryan O'Neill
In the acknowledgments of Their Brilliant Careers, the author gives thanks to Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), which 'provides essential background ...
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When snow falls, it blurs the line of sight. Sometimes it covers the world with a soft blanket, dampening everything else; sometimes it chills to the marrow ...
... (read more)Daniel Juckes reviews 'Things My Mother Taught Me' by Claire Halliday
Claire Halliday's Things My Mother Taught Me opens thus: 'History is a personal thing.' But in this book – a collection of interviews with famous Australians about ...
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Ethel Livesey was a piece of work. By the time she stood trial in 1946, she had already served several terms in prison. The serial fraudster had accumulated more than ...
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The work of Brisbane-based author Patrick Holland is reputedly influenced by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose Tabula Rasa cemented his standing ...
... (read more)Josephine Taylor reviews 'Our Tiny, Useless Hearts' by Toni Jordan
It is the morning after a husband's affair has been discovered, and the house is in chaos: the opening to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877) is deliberately evoked in Toni ...
... (read more)Jay Daniel Thompson reviews 'William Yang: Stories of love and death' by Helena Grehan and Edward Scheer
William Yang is one of Australia's best-known and most prolific photographers. In William Yang: Stories of love and death, Helena Grehan and Edward Scheer interrogate the political and aesthetic themes running through this artist's output.
...Gillian Dooley reviews 'Places Women Make: Unearthing the contribution of women to our cities' by Jane Jose
In Places Women Make, Jane Jose writes that she is ‘not proving a theory about the skills of men versus those of women’, but celebrating ‘the places in cities we know women have given us’.
Jose moves with sometimes disorienting rapidity from place to place, from female lord mayor to colonial matron to feisty 1970s female activist. We learn that the female perspective is ...
Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Whisperings in the Blood: A memoir' by Shelley Davidow
Shelley Davidow's multi-generational memoir begins in 1913 with her Jewish great-grandfather Jacob escaping the pogroms of tsarist Lithuania for the rigours of life in the American Midwest. The English language eludes Jacob, who struggles to make a decent living in his adopted country. Poverty contributes to his wife's untimely death. Jacob's son and daughter are co ...