Books, Reviews
Stumbling into adulthood: Paul D. Carter’s Eleven Seasons
I have a confession: I know nothing about football. So it’s a good thing this year’s Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award winner for an unpublished manuscript is about more than just that. Paul D. Carter’s Eleven Seasons is a grunge-era bildungsroman, an homage to working-class Melbourne and one young … Read more
Reviews
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age – how digital media is shaping our lives and what we can do to take control
There have been plenty of books lately on the subject of how digital media impacts negatively upon our personal lives, from Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows to Susan Maushart’s The Winter of Our Disconnect (in which the Perth-based journalist and mother undergoes a ‘digital cleanse’ with her family … Read more
Reviews
Personality takes the cake and eats it too: Marieke Hardy’s You’ll Be Sorry when I’m Dead
You’ll Be Sorry when I’m Dead begins, as any marketable book should, with a bang – a story about Marieke Hardy’s long-running obsession with prostitution, culminating in various threesomes between herself, a hooker and her boyfriend. The story is racy, amusing and compelling – because let’s face … Read more
Reviews
Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing: 40 years on, how far have women come?
Ten years after her Orange Prize-winning novel Bel Canto, Ann Patchett returns to South America with State of Wonder. Marina – a forty-something, divorced pharmacologist – is engaged in a less-than-ideal affair with her boss, Mr Fox, head of large drug company Vogel. Vogel is funding … Read more
