Category Archives: Books
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
Books
I, Vandal
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. Only with a pencil, but still, I’m incurable. Every book I read, I scribble in the margins. With library books I do it lightly and always erase after the event – promise. With books I own, the doodles lie wantonly … Read more
Books
A subjective sport: The Meanjin Tournament of Books
Two months ago I went to an event at the Wheeler Centre and found myself taking part in both a feminist discussion and a social reading quest: the Meanjin Tournament of Books has been an excellent literary adventure. First, the confession: I didn’t end up reading all … Read more
Books
‘A strange kind of intimacy’: a day with Jon-Jon Goulian
The first time I heard of Jon-Jon Goulian, I was flipping through US Vogue, and a personal essay called Fish Out of Water caught my eye. I’d already become fascinated by androgyny in men’s fashion – from the ethereal beauty of Andrej Pejic to Marc Jacobs in … Read more
Books
Romance reading: a ‘confession’
I waited for the literary exorcism that never came. I’d broken the news to my family, my friends, my former colleagues at an independent bookshop, fellow students in my fancy publishing course, my one-year-old cousin, that guy I met on the tram the other day … I … Read more
Books, Interviews
History in the service of fiction: Anna Funder’s All That I Am
The first thing I did after finishing Anna Funder’s debut novel All That I Am was to order a copy of Ernst Toller’s autobiography I Was a German. Toller features as a ‘character’ in Funder’s much anticipated book. We meet him holed up in a New York … Read more
Books
On the long-awaited cultural item #2: Isobelle Carmody’s The Sending
About a month ago, a book called The Sending, by Australian writer Isobelle Carmody, was spotted in libraries a month ahead of its official release date. Far from the steel chains, security guards and on-pain-of-death secrecy surrounding the final Harry Potter book, the 756-page, penultimate instalment of … Read more
