The ABR Podcast

Shortly before Simon Tedeschi’s grandmother, Lucy Gershwin, died sixteen years ago, she recorded a memoir of her wartime years. Gershwin, a Polish Jew, was the only survivor of a family obliterated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Simon Tedeschi’s powerful essay, ‘This woman my grandmother’, reflects on the moment he decided to read her memoirs and encounter the tragic outlines of a life that remains shaded by a reticence typical of her generation.

The Gough Whitlam and Malcom Fraser Chair of Australian Studies was established at Harvard University in 1976 as a diplomatic gift marking the bicentenary of the American Revolution. It was also part of a global strategic initiative that saw Australian Studies visiting professorships spring up in places from Dublin and Copenhagen to Tokyo and Beijing. While not all such professorships have fared equally well, the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies has been bolstered by the financial largesse of its host institution as well as by its record of strong recruitment. In this episode of The ABR Podcast, Joan Beaumont reflects on the history of this unique institutional arrangement ...

When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon in 1994, few imagined that eighteen years later the company’s skyrocketing profits would actually launch him into space. What started out as a virtual bookstore run out of Bezos’ garage would turn into an e-commerce giant, forever changing the culture and economics of bookselling. In this episode of The ABR Podcast, James Ley reads his essay-review of Mark McGurl’s new study, Everything and Less: The novel in the age of Amazon. Where McGurl sees Amazon as refreshingly iconoclastic, Ley is more sceptical ...

In an age of disinformation, whistleblowers such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have been accorded the status of folk heroes. And yet, as their respective cases show, no other act of public service is harried as ruthlessly and vindictively by governments whose secrets have been aired. In this episode of The ABR Podcast, listen to Kieran Pender read his cover feature for the April issue, in which he argues for stronger whistleblower protections by examining the case of Bernard Collaery.

Few phrases captured the atmosphere of lethargy and disorientation in which many of us lived under lockdown as ‘brain fog’. The term has come to denote a whole range of symptoms – from fatigue and forgetfulness to anxiety and an inability to focus – that serve as an historical marker for our Covid moment. Yet, as literary scholar Thomas H. Ford observes, the malaise is far from unique to the twenty-first century. In this episode of The ABR Podcast, listen to Ford as he traces the history of cognitive fuzziness, revealing the persistent concerns about mental overwork of which ‘brain fog’ is only the latest diagnosis.

In this special episode of The ABR Podcast, Peter Rose reads the second and concluding instalment of his 2021 diary, taking us from July to December. These entries continue his chronicle of life under rolling lockdowns – not only for himself, but also for his mother, Elsie, who had moved into aged care earlier that year because of her declining health. Against the arrhythmic schedule of closures and prohibitions, faint tracings of the pre-pandemical world appear: birthday celebrations, an English batting collapse, email trouble, a high five. Written under a cloud of personal and collective uncertainty, these diaries record a son’s observance of his mother’s last days. Elsie Rose died at the age of ninety-five on 15 March 2022.

Author and scholar Kevin Birmingham has shown that books as much as people are worthy subjects of biography. This year he has followed up The Most Dangerous Book, his award-winning account of the battle to get James Joyce’s Ulysses published, with The Sinner and the Saint, a book about the genesis of another classic: Crime and Punishment. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Geordie Williamson reads his review of Birmingham’s latest study, one which ‘brings microscopic detail and a sense of drama to the composition’ of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece.

Race, gender, class, sexuality – categories of identity have become central to not only our understanding of politics, but also our appreciation of art. Has the prominence of these categories, however, begun to circumscribe the achievements of writers celebrated on the basis of their identity? In this episode of The ABR Podcast, Mindy Gill reads her cover feature from the March issue. By parsing the rhetoric with which non-white writers are evaluated by reviewers, Gill shrewdly observes that in equating marginalisation with authenticity we do writers no favours. For in having their cultural background valued above all else, writers are being tacitly encouraged to eschew refinements of style and technique for a verisimilitude that often borders on caricature.

For his sins, Peter Rose has always kept a diary. Over the years, ABR has occasionally published extracts, which have tended to consist of annual highlights laced with gossip and humour. The 2021 instalment is rather different in tone. The lockdowns occasioned by the pandemic also coincided with a marked deterioration in the health of his mother, who moved into aged care in March last year. 

Best known for films such as Robocop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Showgirls (1995), the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has made his name as a provocateur whose lurid social satires are infused with campy violence and heady eroticism. Having tackled the American military-industrial complex and the Las Vegas sex industry, Verhoeven now takes on an even bigger institution: the Catholic Church. His new film, Benedetta, charts the fallout from the liaison between two young nuns in a seventeenth-century Italian convent. In this week’s podcast, listen to Miles Pattenden read his review of the film for ABR Arts. As Pattenden notes, ‘those who buy their tickets for the soupçons of Sapphic frottage are unlikely to be disappointed’.