A year or so ago, when the reality of my impending graduation from university and borderline-desperate financial situation hit me, I began applying for ‘professional jobs’ in a bid to pad out my resume. I traded in skater skirts, leather boots and brilliantly executed smoky eyes for pencil skirts, patent pumps and natural make-up. My…
Read more
About thirty seconds of googling will turn up innumerable think pieces that proclaim the end of the novel or lament the decline of the reading public. Yet print book sales are happily on the rise again and even non-readers can get their narrative fix in the form of recent film adaptations. Despite the distractions of…
Read more
Australian writer Josephine Rowe’s debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal paints the portrait of the Burroughs family living in Melbourne during the 1990s. Written from multiple perspectives and presented in fragmented, often brutally descriptive prose, this book was applauded by writers Chris Womersley and Wayne Macauley respectively as ‘a novel of startling imagery and power’, and…
Read more
Amy Stewart’s novel Girl Waits With Gun, based on the forgotten true story of one of the first American female deputy sheriffs, is every feminist’s dream read. Brimming with humour, sass, mystery, and delivered to the reader by a narrator so completely resistant to stereotype, Stewart’s novel is worthy of its acclaim from beginning to…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
Okay, so I once tweeted that any Faulkner novel was most certainly pretentious artwank at its finest but, in fact, I secretly quite like Faulkner’s novels. Specifically, I quite like As I Lay Dying, first published in 1930. (I am cursing that I do not live in New York because James Franco—*swoons, suppresses inner fangirl*—has…
Read more
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…
Read more
In its opening sentence—‘My name is Constance Schuyler Klein’—and its title, Patrick McGrath’s Constance declares itself a narrative concerned with identity, although an identity that is anything but stable. Constance is a young woman living in Manhattan and working as an editor in the 1960s. She has recently married an English professor several years her…
Read more
On his one hundredth birthday, feeling reluctant to go to his party in which the Mayor and the media will be in attendance, Allan climbs out his window and disappears. He heads to the bus station, steals a suitcase, borders a bus, befriends a petty thief, an eternal student and his beautiful fiancé, and her…
Read more
Zoo Time opens with novelist and narrator, Guy Ableman being caught by police for stealing a copy of his own book from an Oxfam shop. Only, Guy doesn’t see it as ‘stealing’, rather he’s ‘releasing’ it from the gaze of a woefully stupid public. Author of Zoo Time and man booker prize award winning novelist,…
Read more
The Rum Diary brings Hunter S. Thompson’s novel of the same name to the big screen, with Johnny Depp as its lead character, Paul Kemp. Kemp is a struggling writer with a love for alcohol that sees him start the movie with a hangover so bad he requires sunglasses indoors. He decides to earn some…
Read more
