As you know, Issue Two is released tomorrow. The Kill Your Darlings winter issue opens with Monica Dux’s ‘Temple of The Female Eunuch’, which is both a response to the recent additions to the ‘Parsnip School of Greer Criticism’ and a genuine reflection on the book’s impact both at the time of publication and now. Other commentary includes Benjamin Law on coming late to music, Michaela McGuire on being ‘a writer’ and Gideon Haigh on the state of Australian biography. We’ve got new fiction from Pierz Newton-John and Virginia Peters, to name just a couple, and we chat with novelist (and controversialist) Philip Pullman about his new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
View the full contents here.

Please join Kill Your Darlings in celebrating the launch of Issue Two! We’ll be having a short launch, followed by an evening of bingo. (Yes, that’s right. BINGO.) It’ll be a night of all sorts of fun, plus we’ll be giving away loads of prizes, including books, wine, chocolate and subscriptions.

Melbourne

When: 6pm, Tuesday 13 July
Where: Bella Union Bar, Trades Hall (cnr Lygon and Victoria St, Carlton)

Adelaide

When: Thursday 15 July
Where:  The Wheatsheaf Hotel (39 George St, Thebarton)

RSVPs welcomed to info@killyourdarlingsjournal.com.

A C Grayling
Thinking of Answers
Bloomsbury Publishing (Allen and Unwin)
$35 (hardback)
978 1 4088 0598 5

Despite its unimaginative title, A C Grayling’s collection of philosophical essays, Thinking of Answers, is a thoughtful and a thought-provoking book. Grayling – a professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a regular contributor to The Times, Economist and Literary Review – doesn’t hide away in philosophy’s common musty stomping ground, but leaves the ivory tower and happily steps into the bustling marketplace of ideas, where he turns his impressive intellect to a variety of topics, from robots and stem cells to the idea of remorse, Shakespeare, civil liberties and goodness.

If you are someone who regularly curls up with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Heidegger’s Being and Time, or if you read Wittgenstein over your cornflakes, you might turn your nose up at these essays, which are rarely longer than a couple of thousand words. But despite their brevity, they are not simple and, more importantly, not simplistic. Each essay has a title and deals with a question such as ‘Climate Change: Why does climate change not prompt more alarm?’ or ‘Stendhal on Love: How much light does Stendhal’s On Love throw on the subject of love?’ The bite-sized snippets do not provide answers to these questions as much as a framework of considerations and arguments that might be useful for thinking of answers. Read more

The pleasure of, and also the trouble with, writing something about book reviewing like ‘Feeding The Hand That Bites’ is that you become a perceived sympathetic ear to everyone’s literary horror story.

Since my article appeared in the first edition of Kill Your Darlings, I have been privy to the stories of a novelist stalked on Facebook by another novelist whose book he’d given a negative review, a book so bad that nobody would review it because the author was an important figure in the distribution of literary grants, and a writer whose book was reviewed savagely by another writer whose book on the same subject was about to be published. I’ve heard publishers complain bitterly about the bizarre books some newspapers choose to review, and the important ones they somehow forget about; they’ve confided, sotto voce, that they regard the review pages of Australian papers as of little practical relevance.

Now, this doesn’t mean that my critique was right. I’m not sure that similar stories and attitudes haven’t been in circulation throughout the annals of literary history. But that wasn’t really the point of ‘Feeding the Hand’. It seemed a good idea at the time, and it still does: even if I was wrong, it could not hurt to remind people of the usefulness of nourishing intelligent, provocative and fearless criticism, at a time when for all sorts of reasons it is under threat and undervalued. The piece was pungent, naturally. It also offended a few luvvies, and I don’t doubt that some will in future hold it against me. You’re meant to suck up to people who might review your work, not take a dump and smear it in their eyeballs. But, of course, the fights most worth having are the ones you can’t win. Read more

So, the final teaser for Issue Two before its release on July 1. Newcomer Samuel Rutter’s story, ‘Comfort Inn’, is a laconic account of glancing connections set in Atlanta, Georgia.

It’s cold. He’s wearing a jacket – because you never put your jacket in your checked luggage – but it’s only a light jacket, and he’s only got a thin T-shirt underneath, and here it feels like it’s capable of snowing. He’s waiting on a concrete platform outside the airport in Atlanta, Georgia, waiting for a minibus because he has missed his connecting flight. He’s not the only one being put up at the Comfort Inn, but none of the others are looking at him, or paying him any attention. No one is talking at all. A girl in a leather jacket flicks a cigarette butt into the gutter. A mother smacks her child.

The lady at reception is fat and understanding: ‘Well, sir, that is an awful long way to come.’ He accidentally brushes her clammy hands as she gives him the key to his room, which is not a key but a plastic card twice as thick as a credit card. She is smiling, but her left eye is bruised and puffy.

His room is at the far end of the corridor on the fourth floor (he can take the elevator on the other side of the lobby), but no one is offering to show him the way. He doesn’t have any bags, either. He supposes that his luggage is in transit.

So this is America, he thinks. I’m not even supposed to be in America, I’m supposed to be in Mexico. The elevator walls are lined with mirrors, and he sees that he’s not looking too good after the flight. His face and his hair get so greasy. He pulls a stray nose-hair from his left nostril, which makes him sneeze all over the mirrored wall.

Pre-order Kill Your Darlings Issue Two or subscribe to the print journal here.