Kenneth Mackenzie | The Young Desire It | Review -
In his poem ‘Heat’, Kenneth Mackenzie wrote of a traveller who announces his intention to go down to the river and went down and never came back into the heat from the water’s ease in which he...
View ArticleRachel Kushner | The Flamethrowers | Review -
‘Why do you invent … and tell lies?’ So asks Reno, the protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. She has come home with the artist Ronnie Fontaine after a dinner party, during which he told an...
View ArticleChris Womersley | Cairo | Jennifer Mills | Review |
One Saturday night in August 1986, Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman was stolen from the St Kilda Road premises of the National Gallery of Victoria. Two days later the ransom demands appeared: a $25 000...
View ArticleAli Alizadeh | Transactions | Review
The writer must make himself, in the text, the spiritual actor either of his sufferings, those dragons he has nurtured, or of some happiness. —Stéphane Mallarmé I happened to see the exhibition Direct...
View ArticleJohn le Carré | A Delicate Truth | The Spy Who Came in from the Cold |
There’s no getting around John le Carré. He is the man who did more than anyone else to invent the way we think of Cold War cloak-and-dagger stuff, the novelist who invented the Father Brown of the...
View ArticleEleanor Catton | The Luminaries | Review |
In his 1967 essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, John Barth complains about what he sees as the stagnation of contemporary fiction, arguing that ‘a good many novelists write turn-of-the-century type...
View ArticleGeorge Saunders | Tenth of December | Review |
Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs. Say the staircase was marble. Say she descended and all heads turned. Where was {special one}? Approaching now,...
View ArticleThe Narrow Road to the Deep North | Richard Flanagan | Susan Lever |
I read Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North in the same week that I saw the Griffin Theatre production of John Romeril’s The Floating World, the classic 1975 play on the legacy of the...
View ArticleChristos Tsiolkas | Barracuda | Julieanne Lamond | Review |
Ten years ago, David Marr stirred the pot with his Colin Simpson Lecture by claiming that ‘few Australian novels … address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live.’ As Sophie...
View ArticleTim Winton | Eyrie | Review |
Eyrie’s central character, Tom Keely, is defeated and ineffectual, a pill-popping and lonely one-time idealist who has fallen out of his own life. He is also arguably a haunted version of Tim Winton....
View ArticleKarl Ove Knausgaard | A Death in the Family | A Man in Love | Review |
The opening lines of A Death in the Family perform a small but calculated bait and switch. ‘For the heart,’ it begins, ‘life is simple.’ The phrase instantly wraps us in the warm comforting embrace of...
View ArticleBlanche d’Alpuget | The Young Lion | Peter Craven | Review |
It seems, on the face of it, a bit bizarre that Blanche d’Alpuget should have written what is clearly the first of a series of novels about Henry II, and a bit odd too that she should have called it...
View ArticleJames Salter | All That Is | Collected Stories | Review |
James Salter recently appeared on the Guardian’s short story podcast, reading Lydia Davis’ ‘Break It Down’. The story is an erotic taxonomy of loss from what seems like, but is never clearly announced...
View ArticleAlex Miller | Coal Creek | Review |
Silence pervades much of Alex Miller’s Coal Creek. Characters, in particular our guide and narrator, Bobby Blue, rarely vocalise their thoughts. And this silence is golden, if we accept Bobby’s world...
View ArticleLuke Carman | An Elegant Young Man | Sophia Barnes | Review |
Collections of short, intertwined stories are a distinct pleasure, offering a peculiar freedom from a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end, at the same time as they take us gradually deeper...
View ArticleThomas Pynchon | Bleeding Edge | Review | James Gourley |
There is a certain similarity of reaction, so the story goes, to a new Thomas Pynchon novel. Each generates a sense of anticipation; we ask ourselves whether the new Pynchon will approximate the...
View ArticleSergio De La Pava | A Naked Singularity | Personae | Review |
In the second part of Roberto Bolaño’s 2066 (2004), one of his protagonists, the academic Amalfitano, recalls an encounter with a young pharmacist he would see constantly reading at the desk of his...
View ArticleThe Night Guest | Fiona McFarlane | Review |
Once upon a time, the imaginary was part of the everyday. Gods, monsters, spirits looked over our shoulders, went bump in the night, and progressed in pigment along the rock walls of caves. Even with...
View ArticleRenata Adler | Speedboat | Pitch Dark |
Were circumstance, or accident, contrive to have you flick through the 4 July 1964 issue of the New Yorker, there is a chance you might notice, sitting between the columns of text on page 71, what is,...
View ArticleLouis Armand | Cairo | Review |
Climate catastrophe, drone warfare, border fascism, corporate dictatorship, the auto-surveillance of social media, the banality of corruption, the hypocrisy of the security state and its...
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