Kaylia Payne chats with author Penelope Hanley about feminism, writing, and her latest novel, ‘After She Left‘. * How long did it take to write After She Left? Probably about two years altogether but it was spread over a much longer time because usually I’m working full time and it’s too hard to write much fiction….
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“It’s got Baby written in wispy orange lettering on the side. It’s bluish-white, with dirty bits at the water line, and the sea clinging at its little hips like low-waisted pants. There are bigger boats around it, but Baby catches the sun better… “Baby appears gradually from behind all the bigger, more robust boats, dancing…
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The Doll Factory is the intoxicating story of a young woman who aspires to be an artist, and the man whose obsession may destroy her world for ever. The Doll Factory, the debut novel by Elizabeth Macneal, is a powerful story of art, obsession and possession. London. 1850. The Great Exhibition is being erected in…
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In Above Us Only Sky, Michele Young-Stone, an MFA grad and the author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, once again digs into a quirky pseudo-realism that’s based in the great conflict of growing up. In an interview, she admits that Above Us Only Sky is a few different things rolled into one: it’s…
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Honor Jane Newman is the author of a short and handy self-help book for women titled Killing the Perfectionist Within: A Self-Help Guide for Women Suffering from Perfectionism, Anxiety, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The book includes tips and tricks to tackle the difficult emotions and situations that can arise when you seek perfectionism on a daily basis….
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Not Just Black and White: a conversation between a mother and a daughter is the inspiring and harrowing true story of mother and daughter duo Lesley and Tammy Williams. The novel follows the lives of these two Murri (Aboriginal) women in the form of written conversations between mother and daughter. This puts a light tone…
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The woman behind the counter jiggles the baby on her hip. The child is red-faced and crying. Customers smile sympathetically as the woman tries to serve them and placate him. She had no choice in the matter. The daycare is closed today. There is no one at home who can care for her son. Thus…
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An awkward love affair in year seven, an engagement in her early twenties and a surreal liaison on an isolated island are just some of the different relationships Sydney based writer Brooke Hemphill explores in her memoir Lesbian for a Year. The reader jumps on board the sexual orientation train and joins Hemphill as she…
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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…
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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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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…
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Natasha Walker has been marketed as “the best-selling authoress of Australia’s hottest erotic fiction” on the back of the best-selling The Secret Lives of Emma trilogy. But this information is not entirely correct. You see, Natasha Walker’s big secret has been revealed: she isn’t Natasha Walker, but John Purcell. Yes, the erotic authoress is in…
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Amity Gaige’s Schroder is a lyrical rollercoaster that follows the frenzied highs and ugly lows of a man driven by paternal love. It is a captivating, yet shocking, story of the dangers of miscommunications and untruths that we partake in to find belonging. Eric Schroder, a first-generation East German immigrant, is a lonely soul. He…
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Orlando Bloom is a sexy beast. This is scrawled in blue ink on the autograph page of my grade eight yearbook. At 13, that was only the beginning of a long obsession that my best friend and I had with ‘Orli’; we were dedicated fangirls. It seems fangirling is an essential part of growing up…
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