Author Archives:
Excerpts
Excerpt: from ‘Fliss’ by James Roy
James Roy’s first collection, Almost Wednesday, was released in 1996 and was followed by the CBCA Notable Book Full Moon Racing and several other acclaimed titles. His new book, City (UQP), is a collection of connected short stories that reflect our lives and those of the people … Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
Apocalypse, death and disaster at the NGV
This easily overlooked gem, situated above the NGV’s blockbuster Napoleon exhibition, can be seen as a kind of grim companion piece: while Napoleon is steeped in the rhetoric of glory, The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster lingers on the suffering caused by unchecked human ambition. The … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Thinking objects with Moonrise Kingdom
In the inaugural issue of Screen Machine, Huw Walmsley-Evans succinctly identifies the clichéd critical move vis-à-vis the films of Wes Anderson: almost without fail, the complaint is that ‘there are some real, valuable characters and emotions to be found in this film, but they are obscured by … Read more
The Podcast Review
The Podcast Review: The Slate Culture Gabfest
In The Podcast Review, guest reviewer Dion Kagan takes a look at a highlight of the international podcasting spectrum. There’s a moment in first-year humanities tutorials when, in the face of a certain type of interpretation (of a scene in a film, for example), a certain type … Read more
Books
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 preacher, Gilead has an incomparable quiet humanity; I fell in love with the … Read more
Books, Reviews
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 swallowed up by strangeness was the closest thing to desire … Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
LCD Soundsystem’s discography of a friendship
LCD Soundsystem (2005) 2007. It’s two years since I slouched back to Brisbane from a stint overseas. Luke is the last of my best friends to remain here, in this oversized country town that shaped our university days. I’m surprised he hasn’t yet taken flight: he emerged … Read more
Interviews
‘The deep opening and the revelation of the human heart’: an interview with Diane Williams
A.S. Patric: Jonathan Franzen has described you as a hero of the avant-garde. How do you feel about a very popular writer who has had colossal mainstream success making this statement about you and your work? Diane Williams: I am honored to have such a stirring, elegant … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Reigning men? Masculinity in Magic Mike
You’re not just stripping. You are fulfilling every woman’s wildest fantasies. You are the husband that they never had. You are that dreamboat guy that never came along. You are the one-night stand: that free fling of a fuck that they get to have tonight, with you … Read more
Books
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 re-releasing ‘classics’ of Australian literature. The Wheeler Centre has organised a series of talks in which contemporary writers … Read more
Column: Books and Writing
Speculative fictions: Edgar Allen Poe and The Raven
To borrow a line from the British artist Richard Hamilton, ‘just what is it that makes authors so different, so appealing?’ I asked myself this question quite a bit last week. I had time to kill; twelve hours on a plane is a long time. It can … Read more
Books, Reviews
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 Carré, was meting out this sombre advice to his peers. But what happens … Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
Tapas and tattoos: celebrating craft in Melbourne
Section of The Melbourne Tapa: Lose Matala Koe Kilisital by Sesilia Veamatahau Wardell, 2012, feta’aki, cassava paste, acrylic, 150cm x 150cm When I think of the word ‘craft’, a range of images are conjured, from construction paper glued to Paddle Pop sticks with Clag, to the finest, … Read more
Podcast
Podcast: Kill your darlings? Editors talk
If you’ve spent the last year crafting a book about depressed teens, vampires or misplaced mums, you might want to step away from the keyboard. Guest producer Sonja Dechian talks to editors of books and journals about the things they’ve learned from the slush pile – their … Read more
Interviews
‘Some incredible story told’: an interview with Gillian Mears
In the preamble to Foal’s Bread, there’s an exhortation: ‘Man, woman, boy or girl, when you arrive at the jacaranda tree, take a lick of your horse’s salty neck.’ Is this something you did when riding a horse? What of your own experiences on a horse did … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Gleefully changing my mind
When I was at university, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the cool television show of the time. It was almost impossible to get through any subject of an undergraduate Arts degree without a week on Buffy, genre and postmodern aesthetics. But I didn’t really get it: I … Read more
Column: Books and Writing
Selling out
I’ve decided to sell out. I’m over being relegated to the literary fiction shelves, where good books go to die. I want readers – I mean, ‘markets’ – and I’m prepared to dumb it down, sex it up and dog whistle at all remaining points of … Read more
Books, Reviews
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 that children are the future – but even this attitude locates children’s importance in … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Pixar and Studio Ghibli, face to face
The English edition of Starting Point: 1979–1996, a collection of Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki’s articles and interviews, comes with a foreword by John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios and director of several well-known animated films such as Toy Story and … Read more
Column: Books and Writing
Anatomy of a cover: The Weight of a Human Heart
When it came to the choosing of a suitable front cover for his new short story collection, The Weight of a Human Heart, Australian author Ryan O’Neill had a more eventful time than most. Over the course of many months, nine covers were considered before both O’Neill … Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
Conceptualised: making albums indivisible
With the trend continuing in the music industry for album sales to drop while singles sales rise, bands are forced to work harder to entice fans to part with an album’s worth of cash. Three recent releases are notable examples of loose concept albums that come matched … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Polisse: empathy or exploitation?
At what point does representation become exploitation? Classifying the inherent ethical value of art is a perilous pursuit. As the response to Bill Henson’s photography or the calls to ban Adrian Lyne’s Lolita, Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin and Srđan Spasojević’s A Serbian Film reveal, this is particularly … Read more
Editors' Picks
Editors’ picks for July: An Uncommon Reader, Edward St Aubyn and Heat
In this new column, Editors’ Picks, the Kill Your Darlings editors share recent reading favourites. What are your picks? An Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett – Rebecca Starford, Editor I’ve just finished An Uncommon Reader. It’s a delightful novella from playwright and actor Alan Bennett, most famous … Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
The hollowness of privilege: Queen Lear
Image credit: Jeff Busby For my money, King Lear is the problem child of Shakespeare’s major tragedies. While the other three of the ‘Big Four’ – Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth – are resolved in a deeply cathartic manner, Lear’s relentless bleakness stymies the audience’s relief at every … Read more
Column: Books and Writing
Reading with a vengeance
It’s not just the dream of the 90s that’s alive in Portland. The best of the 80s is also getting a revamp. Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure novels that were hugely popular in that decade? One anonymous, highly inventive Portland local (of course, he’s also a zinester) … Read more
Podcast
Podcast: Around the block
Are you a narcissist and an exhibitionist? Or just a peeping Tom? If you’re a writer, you’re probably all of the above. Or at least, psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler would have thought so. He coined the phrase ‘writer’s block’ – that dreaded affliction that interferes with productivity and … Read more
Books
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 Vincent and his teenage daughter, Gemma, after a stranger crashes her car outside their … Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
Discipline, art and writing: tackling the question of contemporaneity
Discipline is a new, Melbourne-based contemporary art journal with a distinct agenda. According to its website, the journal ‘aims to ground a new body of sustained intellectual writing about contemporary art that does not merely fall back on the crutch of plurality as a means for theorising … Read more
Column: Film and TV
The Spanish Film Festival: a celluloid armada
In 2010, I wrote an article about the Palestinian Film Festival. That festival showcased the works of a fragile film industry that receives no government funding – a national cinema without a nation state – from mainly diasporic Palestinian directors. Likewise, the festival itself had no major … Read more
