Tag Archives: fiction
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
Comment
The death of the long sentence
When did the long sentence die? There is no anniversary on which to mourn its gentle passing. Clearly, it was still alive and well in the first half of the twentieth century – some of my favourite proponents of the long sentence published their unwieldy masterpieces in … Read more
Reviews
Review: Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion
‘What twenty-seven-year-old Johan Harstad has written is quite plainly a work of genius,’ claims a recommendation on the cover of Buzz Aldrin: What Happened To You in All the Confusion? The cynic in me was immediately suspicious of such effusive praise. But the Norwegian author’s novel has … Read more
Podcast
‘Uncomfortable places’: Michelle Aung Thin’s The Monsoon Bride
It’s 1930. Winsome McLintock is a convent girl about to marry a man she barely knows, and she will follow him to Rangoon, the then capital of Burma. Rangoon is a rich and exciting city, but it’s also full of tension – the wealthy British residents live … Read more
Guest Posts
The Meanjin Literary Smackdown
The Meanjin Tournament of Books is a literary stoush that seeks to name the Great Australian Novel. With sixteen book titles, the round robin-style competition has four judges pitting book against book until the winning title emerges. It’s the Australian Grand Slam of book competitions, if you will. … Read more
On Writing
On writing: Rosie Scott
Rosie Scott is an internationally published, award-winning novelist. Her latest novel, Faith Singer, was included in an international list of ’50 Essential Reads by living writers’ compiled by the Guardian, Orange Prize Committee and the Hay Literary Festival. Rosie is also course director of Getting Started, a … Read more
Interviews
I mourn the death of story: Andrew Nicoll on The Love and Death of Caterina
Andrew Nicoll, author of The Good Mayor, has just released his second novel, The Love and Death of Caterina. Despite being kidnapped by S.A. Jones at a writers’ festival a few years back, he agreed to talk to her about his new book. The love and death … Read more
Interviews
César Aira: ‘Writing is my freedom, where I receive orders from no one, not even from myself’
Argentina’s César Aira has written and published over seventy novels (though no one seems certain how many there actually are), few of them longer than a hundred pages. He was first introduced to Anglophone readers in 1996, and five of his works are now available in English. … Read more
Podcast
Podcast: Melanie Joosten’s Berlin Syndrome
Picture this: a young Australian woman is waiting at the traffic lights in East Berlin when a tall man with curly hair asks her if she likes strawberries. She says yes, a seemingly small decision that leads to bigger ones, decisions so big that her life changes … 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
