Tag Archives: non-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
Reviews
Peering into the Lives of Others: The Life You Chose and That Chose You: The 25th UTS Writers’ Anthology
The talent pool at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is clearly impressive – a student editorial committee has chosen from more than 300 submissions to deliver a tight and scorchingly successful collection of just 35 short stories, poems, and script-writing and non-fiction pieces. No doubt the … Read more
Books
Summer Reading: The Donald Friend Diaries – Chronicles and Confessions of an Australian Artist (ed. Ian Britain)
For a man who is known principally as a visual artist, Donald Friend’s written work has received extraordinary praise. In the foreword to Text’s 2010 edition of Friend’s diaries, Barry Humphries brands the work ‘among the most evocative and amusing writings in all of Australian literature’. … Read more
Reviews
The art of disconnecting: William Powers’ Hamlet’s Blackberry [review]
My dad was the first person I knew to get a mobile phone. I remember when he first brought it home from work and my older sister and I marvelled over it, dreaming of the day we too would own a mobile phone. He hated it. He … Read more
Books
Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language / Robert McCrum [review]
ISBN: 9780670918874 RRP: $32.95 Publisher: Penguin If you were to read the title, jacket blurb or publicity material for Robert McCrum’s new book you could be excused for assuming that it dealt largely with a modern phenomenon. ‘Globish’ or Global English is, after all, a relatively modish … Read more
Books
War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times by Linda Polman [review]
War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times Linda Polman ISBN: 9780670918966 RRP: $32.95 First, a little story. In 1854 Florence Nightingale responded to a request from the British War office for volunteers to help care for sick and wounded soldiers from the Crimean … Read more
Books
‘The real conquerors of Australia’: Brian Coman’s Tooth and Nail [review]
European settlement of the new world is almost invariably portrayed as a purely human occupation or “conquest”. In ecological terms, however, the real conquerors of Australia were not humans. Brian Coman, Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia One of my earliest memories is … Read more
