What if there was a drug that allowed humans to never need to sleep, and what if that drug had never been properly tested? To make matters worse, what if the guy who created the drug was your dad? Sleepwalking is the debut young adult novel by one of Lip‘s favourite writers and book reviewers Raelke Grimmer….
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Amazing Babes is a beautiful picture book dedicated to celebrating the diversity and power of women’s achievements in recent history. The title, with its connotations of pouting, superficial girls, is inherently ironic: these amazing babes are the antithesis of the pin-up chick cliché. Inspirational contemporary female figures such as Tavi Gevinson, Malala Yousafzai and riot…
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There are stories we grow up hearing; we can never unknow them. Spread through culture by constant retelling, we engage with fairytales like Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella every day. They inform our conception of reality. Griffith Review’s annual Fiction Edition, Once Upon a Time in Oz, plays tribute to these eternal narratives with…
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Fourteen-year-old Layla is a 21st century Lolita, and like her antecedent, she’s not one to shy away from a man’s attention. She knows that all it takes is a gesture, a look, and she can have almost any man she wants. It makes her feel powerful, like she matters. But what she really wants is…
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Playwright Michele Lee admitted in a recent interview that writing a memoir at such a young age could be interpreted as ‘self-absorbed.’ However, Banana Girl thrusts us into her twenty-somethings with such intimate realism that any self-indulgence on her part is completely excusable. In the lead up to a four month literary residency in her…
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Anjelica Huston was not a name I recognised before I started reading her memoir A Story Lately Told, although maybe I should have, given her fame and high profile career as a model and actress. To be fair, the highlights of her career took place before I was born, and more than anything I was…
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Christie Thompson’s debut novel relates contemporary Australian adolescence with brutal honesty. As her characters come of age in the grimy outer suburbs of Canberra in 2009, they manifest all the ennui and self-sabotage of the teen years. 17-year-old Jez is bored and disaffected. Her days in a suburb on the fringes of the national capital…
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Where shall I take you, I asked, when we are wed? ‘The sea,’ she answered. ‘Will you take me to the sea?’ Oh, I said grandly, oh I will pour out oceans for you. In fairy tales, as in real estate, it is all about location (repeat ad nauseam). Any change, any alteration, any turning…
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Ah, patriarchy. There’s no greater evidence that it’s a man’s world (or was a man’s world) than when we read the pages of a history book. The inherently male bias runs through most records of the centuries, because money and power lay solely at the hands of men (read this for an excellent explanation). Herstory…
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In Defence of Love, Poetry and Wishful Thinking I think all the 200 poems in Australian Love Poems 2013 are exquisite and, like exotic and familiar lovers, each seduces the reader in its own way. But, since I am one of the poets in the book, I am not going to review this anthology. I…
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What does poetry sound like? Melbourne performance poet Anna Fern is one the brightest and most exciting contemporary artists on the spoken word scene. Fern employs a full range of sonic elements in her work, from everyday objects, instruments and her voice, to create an unexpected, playful and an emotionally resonant, immersive poetic experience. I…
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For the uninitiated, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is a seminal feminist text in the form of an extended essay, published in 1929. Although the narrative of the essay is fictional, it is based on real manuscripts of lectures presented by Woolf at the Cambridge women’s colleges. A Room of One’s Own is…
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Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard is the story of a smart woman who does a bad thing, and, for fear of revealing her indiscretion, finds herself implicated in a far worse crime. Yvonne Carmichael is a scientist at the top of her field, a mother of two grown children and a model wife, that is…
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On Thursday this week, Canadian writer Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In doing so, she became only the 13th woman of 110 Nobel Literature Laureates. The dominance of dead white men is perhaps unsurprising, given the Nobel Academy’s longstanding tradition of selecting writers deemed worthy by the literary canon. Female writers are…
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