Category Archives: Reviews
Reviews
The Women’s Prize review: Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
Formerly known as the Orange Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded annually and ‘celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world’. We delve into the third of the six shortlisted novels – Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. Kingsolver is no stranger to … Read more
Reviews
The Women’s Prize review: Life after Life by Kate Atkinson
Formerly known as the Orange Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded annually and ‘celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world.’ We delve into the second of the six shortlisted novels — Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life. The highly popular … Read more
Reviews
The Women’s Prize review: NW by Zadie Smith
Formerly known as the Orange Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded annually and ‘celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world.’ We delve into the first of the six shortlisted novels – Zadie Smith’s portrait of the modern urban zone, … Read more
Reviews
Off Track: Podcasting upright and outdoors
‘Walking is the gentlest form of listening’ – Anthony Magen Off Track strode onto Radio National and into our podcast feeds in 2012. This was a year of significant change in RN’s program schedule, remarked on at the time primarily for the axing of Ramona Koval’s The … Read more
Reviews
The Blackmail goes offline
OFFLINE is a print edition of The Blackmail. The Blackmail has been dishing out Aussie-centric popular culture, art culture and subculture online since 2009. As with countless other magazines and journals that appear in my RSS feeds and inbox, I can’t pretend I’ve been a completely religious … Read more
Reviews
The Nose: cage-free journalism
It’s a waste of words, at this point, to bemoan the flailing publishing industry and the decline of the traditional newspaper. When it comes to print, there’s a feeling of bitterness and complacent resignation. Enter The Nose. Opening the pages of this Melbourne-based indie broadsheet is refreshing. … Read more
Reviews
Gushing: Trunk Books’ Blood
Before I knew it I was nursing my babe and the smell of frying onion was wafting up the stairs. Spouse and midwife had stripped the placenta of its membranes on the kitchen cutting-board, and now he was cooking a post-partum dinner. – Cressida J. Heyes, … Read more
Film, Reviews
Moral baroque: the full and messy world of Margaret
Margaret is an important and beautiful movie which, after years of legal wrangling, never really made it to our cinema screens. Most of the trouble, supposedly, was in trying to get an edit of the film on which director Kenneth Lonergan and its producers could agree – … Read more
Music, Reviews
Claustrophobic and Bittersweet: Tristesse Contemporaine and The Music From the Balconies Nearby Was Overlaid by the Noise of Sporadic Acts of Violence
The Parisian DJ-collective-cum-record label Dirty Sound System – DJs Guillaume Sorge and Clovis Goux, alongside a roster of associated producers and curators – have always been somewhat out of sync with their contemporaries, and this characteristic has usually served them well. In 2003, at the fag end … Read more
Film, Reviews
Wild, whimsical thing: Beasts of the Southern Wild
It’s not an original thought to find child actors distasteful. Those treacly little creatures who over-enunciate lines too often break the fantastic illusion of reality that films try to conjure. Even in hammy, saccharine musicals like Mary Poppins or Anchors Aweigh, or heavy-handed dramas like Jerry McGuire, … Read more
