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Castaways, convicts and cannibals: Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves
Why do we read Patrick White? The answer, ‘because he won a Nobel Prize’ is not sufficient in itself. If it were, we’d read Vicente Aleixandre, Jaroslav Seifert and Wislawa Szymborska. But by and...
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Patroclus Now: Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles
A novel based on Homer’s The Iliad that wins one of the highest literary accolades can expect a lot of attention. On a first read, debut novelist Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, the 2012...
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Extract: Jessie Cole’s Darkness on the Edge of Town
We’re delighted to run an extract from KYD alumnus Jessie Cole’s debut novel (Jessie’s story ‘The Wake’ appeared in KYD No. 8). Titled Darkness on the Edge of Town, the novel tells the story of...
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A child’s song of war and home: Majok Tulba’s Beneath the Darkening Sky
What is it that is so precious about childhood? In Victorian England, the prevailing view was that children were little more than half-formed, incompetent adults. In more modern times, we often hear...
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Not such a bitter aftertaste: Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth
Long before Mulder and Scully turned the phrase ‘trust no one’ into an iconic piece of pop culture, Agent George Smiley, world-weary MI6 intelligence officer and star of several spy novels by John le...
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Pulp fiction: Australia’s other forgotten literary history
There’s been a lot of talk so far this year about Australia’s forgotten literary history. Universities have been criticised for failing to appreciate and teach Australian literature. Text is...
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Hook, line and sinker: Emily Maguire’s Fishing for Tigers
It’s hard not to be hooked by the opening lines of Emily Maguire’s Fishing for Tigers: ‘I had picked Hanoi because the airfare was cheap and I knew almost nothing about the place. The need to be...
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The (non-)completist
Do you like to read every book by your favourite author? I don’t…and I do. I discovered Marilynne Robinson in 2004, when her second novel, Gilead, came out. Narrated by John Ames, a small-town...
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I won’t be eating my words: narrative in cookbooks
Until this year, cookbooks had managed to evade all those doomsday prophecies about the death of the book. But in March, a Sydney Morning Herald article dared to ask the question on every worried...
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Novel writing and the melodic blizzard: the influence of music on The Burial
There has been some confusion about which Warren Ellis wrote the blurb on the cover of my recently released novel, The Burial. Is it Warren Ellis the writer of comics and novels or Warren Ellis the...
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Joyful Strains: Stirring the multicultural melting pot
This week Affirm Press publishes Joyful Strains, a book celebrating the experiences of 27 new Australians on their expatriation to these shores. I am a new Australian and also publisher at Affirm...
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The epic in the every-day: Iris Lavell’s Elsewhere in Success
It is always a delight to uncover a wonderful piece of debut fiction such as Iris Lavell’s Elsewhere in Success. This character-driven novel is about Harry and Louisa, two re-partnered baby boomers...
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The terrible power of ‘echidna books’: Julienne Van Loon’s Harmless
When I was in primary school there was a book I simultaneously loved and feared. It was a picture book featuring Australian bush animals one of whom, the echidna, was ostracised by the others because...
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Eleven years later: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch
A friend and I used to joke that if we ever became famous writers, we’d make sure that our author photos were just like Donna Tartt’s: dramatic, dimly lit and slightly unsettling. Inside the back...
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Looking west: an evening with Tim Winton
It’s four years since I left WA and in that time I keep hearing about how it’s changed. ‘It’s so expensive.’ ‘The airport is full of miners in fluoro.’ ‘The place has changed.’ But I brush it off –...
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MUBAs and Shakers: The 2013 Most Underrated Book Award
The 2013 winner of SPN’s Most Underrated Book Award: Fish-Hair Woman by Merlinda Bobis The Small Press Network hosted the Most Underrated Book Awards of 2013 last Friday night. From the start, the...
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‘The concentrated stench of so much life’: Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland
Best known for her highly lauded short story collections and novel The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri has again emerged with a skilful examination of the highly distinct religious, social and ideological...
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Of seadogs and fisherwomen: Sarah Drummond’s Salt Story
I have been fangirling at A WineDark Sea for a while now—it is, hands down, the best blog I have had the luck to read. Its author, Sarah Drummond, was a commercial fisherwoman when I first happened on...
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Going by the book in 2014
As January draws to a close, I suppose it’s finally time to accept that the holiday period is well and truly over (it takes some of us a little longer than others to acknowledge the rude and sudden...
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Click trick: the blog-to-book phenomenon
Back in the early 2000s, a twenty-something New Yorker with a soul-crushing secretarial job suddenly started living every blogger’s dream: she scored a publishing deal to turn her popular food blog,...
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