Author Archives:
News
Online subscriber offer: The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries
Ten lucky online subscribers have the chance of winning Justin Heazlewood’s debut ebook, The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries, thanks to our friends at Affirm Press. Winners will receive Justin’s book through booki.sh. (If you don’t have an account, you can sign up for one here at any time.) Neil Gaiman has this … Read more
The Podcast Review
You Look Nice Today: a journal of emotional hygiene
You Look Nice Today is the sound of Twitter on tape. The three hosts stumbled upon one another in the social media platform’s infancy, and were encouraged by another tweeter to document their conversations in a more substantial medium. Read more
Column: Books and Writing
You belong here: an unofficial history of the Emerging Writers’ Festival
Emerging Writers’ Festival (EWF), 2008: I can’t wait to meet Nathan Curnow. Is he the one with the goatee and the nice-guy vibe? No, that’s Kirk Marshall. What about the foxy redhead? No, that’s– Hang on; I think it’s that guy … the one in the bunny … Read more
Books, Reviews
Not so sweet, girly or soft: Riikka Pulkkinen’s True
Not far into Riikka Pulkkinen’s True, Anna is at work tidying the bookshelves when she realises, ‘Almost every novel has a love story, a description of love beginning’. Anna, so heartbroken she recently spent eleven days lying on the floor of her apartment, is no stranger to … Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
Breaking art from its gallery prison: the Google Art Project
Image credit: anemoneunterwegs Last month, Google unveiled its second round of the Google Art Project, which now freely displays online high-resolution images of more than 32,000 artworks from 151 museums and galleries worldwide. You can browse the collection by artist; explore every inch of a painting (what … Read more
Podcast
Podcast: ‘Not down to the skeleton, but down to the marrow’ – Romy Ash’s Floundering
Romy Ash’s debut novel, Floundering, tells the story of Tom and Jordy, who have been living with their grandparents since their mother disappeared. Heartbreaking, and convincingly told from a child’s perspective, Floundering was shortlisted for last year’s The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, and was recently published by Text … Read more
Books
Bangkok stash: chasing the literary dragon in Thailand
Even in Chiang Mai, Thailand’s cultural capital, which is Lonely Planet famous for having more second-hand bookshops than pubs, my search for Thai literature in English translation seemed hopeless. I’m here on an Asialink residency, the perfect excuse to indulge my interest in world literature. I eventually … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Joss Whedon’s character archetypes: The Avengers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer
In The Avengers, writer/director Joss Whedon has inherited a series of Marvel characters who have been established over five preceding films, not to mention a long legacy of comic book appearances. The films that introduced these characters have been pretty good, but nothing remarkable for a casual … Read more
Column: Books and Writing
Maps with words: memoirs of Melbourne
This month marks my second anniversary in Melbourne. Since arriving here I’ve noticed something: there are an awful lot of books devoted to telling the stories of this city. I’m not talking about ‘official history’ books here (although there are plenty of those … Read more
Music
Modern adventures in classical music
A few years ago I applied to be a presenter at the classical music radio station 3MBS. I was twenty-three. 3MBS is a certain kind of Melbourne institution: it may not be as well known as FM counterpart ABC Classics but devotees make up for this through the sheer force of their passion. Read more
Books, Reviews
This is a positive review of Ryan O’Neill’s short story collection The Weight of a Human Heart
The final story in Ryan O’Neill’s debut collection, ‘The Eunuch in the Harem’, plays out in a series of book reviews. A newly minted author has his book slammed by a reviewer, and, on the basis of her beauty in the author photo, the reviewer begins courting the author’s wife as well. Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
‘There aren’t any funny women out there’: perceptions of gender in stand-up comedy
Of the 202 Australian stand-up shows at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, less than 25% of the acts were by solo women or women-only teams. I wasn’t particularly surprised about this, since gender imbalances are common in other creative industries (such as writing, as we know) but my inner feminist was still left feeling rather pummelled. Read more
Column: Film and TV
Food fantasies: virtuosity and curiosity in film
I have to admit that I’m an epicurean chump of the first order – I can spend money on quinoa and obscure spices like asafoetida more quickly than I can pronounce them: is it ‘aso-fo-ti-da’? I can watch, and genuinely enjoy, almost anything to do with cooking. … Read more
Reviews
Success within constraints? Small Wonder, Linda Godfrey and Julie Chevalier (eds)
It is sometimes the case that language, when restricted, blossoms. The French writers and mathematicians in the 1960s Oulipo group made ‘constrained writing’ work for them, and so do some of the writers in Small Wonder. Eight hundred words or less was the challenge given to writers, … Read more
Column: Books and Writing
What we didn’t know and couldn’t read: Nicole Moore’s The Censor’s Library
Several years ago I was fossicking through the national archives researching the regulation of pornography in Australia when I stumbled across a reference to a box of items confiscated by customs officials. The box included something called a ‘boob bath mat’. Intrigued, I approached the archive staff … Read more
Books, Reviews
Sex, magic and fairy tales – Kate Forsyth’s Bitter Greens
Bitter Greens is fantasy writer Kate Forsyth’s first venture into historical fiction. Borrowing events, places, customs and characters from Renaissance Venice and seventeenth-century France, it creates rigidly patriarchal societies where women can only become nuns, wives or whores; where sex and witchcraft will secure power or damnation. … Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
The Trouble with Coriolanus
Coriolanus is a puzzle. In this strange conclusion to Shakespeare’s dizzying series of tragedies, the playwright seems to jettison complex emotional dynamism in favour of ferocious single-mindedness. Read more
Podcast
Podcast: Lawrence Leung’s beginning, middle and end
What makes a story? Is it the structure, the way you tell it, the characters within? Lawrence Leung and I got together to discuss erotic fan fiction, the best way to tell stories, untrue stories and the elusive Ira Glass. Lawrence Leung is an award-winning Australian comedian … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Five films to convert to 3D
In the Guardian, Dave Eggers described Terrence Malick’s films as ‘3-D without being actually 3-D’. It’s not too difficult to imagine what Eggers meant by this throwaway line. Just recall that indelible image from Days of Heaven of workers watching a storm of locusts rise from the … Read more
Column: Books and Writing
‘A staggeringly high level of quality content’: e-books, DRM and the pitfalls of conventional wisdom
I recently talked with editor and publisher Zoe Dattner, who has worked in the publishing industry for more than 10 years. She began her career in the marketing department at Macmillan before quitting in 2003 to co-found small publishing company Sleepers, one of the initiating presses that … Read more
The Podcast Review
Introducing The Podcast Review
In January 1930, Harold Vivien invited 250 volts of electricity to pour through his body. Vivien was the chief control operator at the Columbia Broadcasting Company in New York, and he didn’t become a human transmitter for shits and giggles. Read more
Books, Reviews
Capitalism, my hamster: Marina Lewycka’s Various Pets Alive and Dead
Marina Lewycka spoke at Perth Writers Festival in 2007, shortly after the publication of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and laughed as she told the audience about all the disgruntled letters she received from readers complaining that her novel wasn’t written in Ukrainian and didn’t … Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
Battle of the music producers: whose theme will reign supreme?
Pop music producers are the invisible hands behind every smash hit single: they envision the overall product, compose the track, co-write the lyrics and hone the singer’s performance. The popstar contributes their own talent for co-writing, performing and selling the song; it’s a relationship akin to that of film director and actor. Read more
Music, Reviews
Unreal Love: The Magnetic Fields’ Love at the Bottom of the Sea
Stephin Merritt, the musical arch-contrarian behind American pop fabulists The Magnetic Fields, knows a thing or two about artifice. More specifically he understands that, at its most fundamental level, all music is artifice – what separates music (even musique concrète, music created from recordings of natural noise) … Read more
Column: Film and TV
The book is never better than the film
Hearing somebody say ‘The book is always better than the film’ is like fingernails down a blackboard to me. This ill-informed yet common cliché about the supposed superiority of literary texts over visual texts is highly reductive and suggests that a comparison can be made between two … Read more
Column: Books and Writing
Books: machines to think with
Image credit: jblyberg In case you missed it, this year 14 February wasn’t just an opportunity to pen some purple prose for your beloved. It was also a chance to wax lyrical about your love of reading. On Valentine’s Day 2012, the Australian Government launched their National Year … Read more
Podcast
Podcast: Michael Sala’s family affairs
Truth is often relative, and in no context is it more so – pardon the pun – than when considering family relationships. In the first Kill Your Darlings podcast for 2012, we speak to Michael Sala, author of The Last Thread – a work of fiction that … Read more
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
From paste-ups to people: Laura Alice and the Street Heart arts project
As I park my car beside Labuan Square, a small shopping strip in Norlane, Geelong, artist Laura Alice greets me with smile. She ushers me into the non-profit café where she regularly volunteers, orders me a latté and a chicken sandwich, and sits me down below a … Read more
Classics
Colette’s family plot: autobiography in The Cat
‘Colette’s ‘family plot’ is a garden and a graveyard… The treasure of Colette’s writing is the layered vertical memory that blooms into fiction and thus brings to light those beloved ghosts who, Colette finds, now dwell within the writer herself.’ - Jerry Aline Flieger, Colette and the … Read more
Events
Telling uncomfortable truths: Javier Cercas and Juan Gabriel Vásquez on truth and fiction
‘There’s no contradiction between fiction and truth’, said Javier Cercas, as Juan Gabriel Vásquez nodded, telling the sold-out crowd at the Wheeler Centre last Wednesday that the task of the novelist is to arrive at truth through fiction. Guests of the Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Instituto … Read more
