Category Archives: Books
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
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
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
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
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
Books
Hanging out with television stars: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
I generally try to avoid the US version of The Office, as I do any US remake of a television show, as I often find them too in-your-face and more contrived than the original. The comedic memoir and collection of essays by Mindy Kaling – a writer … Read more
Books
Review: A plot thickened? Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot
It has been a long wait between books for fans of Jeffrey Eugenides: his door-stopper of a novel Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2002. However, readers hoping for a similar multi-generational epic will be surprised by The Marriage Plot. Middlesex was a clever queering of … Read more
Books
Review: A plot thickened? Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot
It has been a long wait between books for fans of Jeffrey Eugenides: his door-stopper of a novel Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2002. However, readers hoping for a similar multi-generational epic will be surprised by The Marriage Plot. Middlesex was a clever queering of … Read more
Books
The Ampersand Project: Unearthing the secret lives of teenagers
Like most editors, my colleagues and I get people pitching us book ideas wherever we go. When a certain kind of someone discovers that you have the power to grant a book deal, it turns out they’ve written a story about their cat or have an unfinished … Read more
