The same night Banjo walks out on his wife Jade, he is killed by a hit and run driver. But his spirit remains, and he is compelled to watch Jade slip into a depression while their daughters struggle to hold things together. Even in death, Banjo aches with love for his wife, despite knowledge of…
Read more
‘Great Hera! I am running so late today!’ ‘Aphrodite aid me in getting through this after-lunch meeting!’ ‘Suffering Sappho I am exhausted!’ Not curses we hear in today’s world – but wouldn’t we all secretly love to make such glorious exclamations? Wonder Woman did. In Jill Lepore’s readable new book The Secret History of Wonder…
Read more
Although a powerful form of expression, poetry remains a misunderstood and underappreciated art form. This deeply personal publication by Gwyndyn Alexander is essentially an answer to a question – put forth by a man of, in her words, the ‘scientific sort’ – querying the function of poetry. What is a poet? What is the point…
Read more
Frances and her partner Charlie have left their old lives to start over in Sydney. Coming from Melbourne, with its grid-mapped streets and dark, sensible fashions, Frances feels like an outsider in a city that yields to the natural landscape. On lonely spring days she takes her rescue dog, Rod, for long walks…
Read more
New Zealand author Lloyd Jones seems fascinated by art’s capacity to bring men and women together. It’s a theme which drives his 2008 novel Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance in which the tango becomes a way to survive WWI. The idea also surfaced as the focus of his novel…
Read more
Starting at midnight, November 1 and ending at 11.59pm on November 30, hundreds of thousands of people across the world started writing their novels in honour of National Novel Writing Month. I was one of them. For those that don’t know, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is an annual international challenge where participants sign…
Read more
In 1990, British heavy metal band Judas Priest were taken to court. Two young men from Nevada, James Vance and Raymond Belknap, shot themselves, and the parents believed the ‘reckless misconduct’ of the band members drove them to suicide. It was alleged Judas Priests’ album Stained Class contained the subliminal message to ‘do it’, which prompted the…
Read more
Amy Poehler’s newly-released Yes Please is part memoir, part self-help book, part opportunity to peer into the Poehler family scrapbook. Dotted with photos, youthful creative writing attempts, and full-colour scans of personal mementoes ranging from college playbills to handwritten acrostic odes to Tina Fey, Yes Please is a bright and cheerful tour through Poehler’s life…
Read more
Detective-Inspector Debra Hawkins is a steely, no-nonsense cop in Gabrielle Lord’s sixteenth crime novel. Debra is the head of new taskforce, RED-V, which targets domestic violence in middle-eastern communities. ‘Over the last few years,’ she informs her team, ‘We’ve discovered around one thousand incidents of forced marriages and attempted forced marriages here in Australia.’ As well…
Read more
Lena Dunham: media darling, outspoken feminist, director of and actress in HBO’s Girls, and now, author. Not That Kind of Girl is a memoir, a compilation of twenty-eight personal essays that has set fire to a media storm. This is mostly due to the sexual content—at one point Dunham describes her seven-year-old self discovering sexuality via an…
Read more
Death comes to us all; only the fortunate are allowed to grieve. Half the World in Winter is Maggie Joel’s second novel, which centres around the domestic life of a middle-class family in Victorian London. The patriarch of the family is Lucas Jarmyn, the only son and heir of a railway entrepreneur. When we meet…
Read more
The Bookshelf Diaries takes a peek into the reading life of writers, readers and book lovers. Today, Allison Tait talks, multi-reading, inspiration, and reading while writing. What are you reading right now? I am a serial multi-reader (if that’s a thing). I am currently reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (which is taking me far…
Read more
This collection is the ultimate in feminist poetry. Its breadth is mind-boggling, its vision grand. ‘Lupa’ means wolf, so Lupa and Lamb is the hunter and the hunted, the dichotomy of woman as dangerous seductress she-devil, and innocent bleating victim. These tired archetypes cross cultures and centuries. she is the lamb in the sheepfold…
Read more
As Agent Dana Scully says in The X-Files: ‘It’s a good story, Mulder, and very well told, but I don’t believe it.’ Gillian Anderson’s debut novel A Vision of Fire, co-written with prolific author Jeff Rovin, spins a rocketing tale of political crisis, Norse mythology and the search for a lost civilisation. Child psychologist Dr…
Read more
