Category: Australian Literature
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Testing the Tolerance Threshold
A review of Ashleigh Young’s essay collection Can You Tolerate This?.
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Hanging, Suspended, Ongoing
With the artform of literature having come to a certain point, how to write? and indeed, how to read? What remains possible? And what possibilities are closed or exhausted? Especially when the literary impulse doesn’t falter, when there’s still an imperative to keep going: how? That’s me, briefly making the case for Nicholas John Turner’s Hang […]
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Reading Foster’s Letter
Over at The Collagist, I’ve reviewed Tristan Foster’s début collection of short stories and/or prose poetry — let’s call it a collection of “pieces” — entitled Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father: Foster’s signature move, again and again, is to flag a subject, suggest that it has some sort of meaning, and then […]
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An Ingress to Egress
A review of Egress #1, a new journal of fiction and essays edited by David Winters and Andrew Lattimer.
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On Small Press Acquisitions
Over at Splice, I put some questions to Milly Weaver, the editor at London-based Wundor Editions, about the thinking behind her decision to acquire UK publication rights to the Australian novelist Elizabeth Tan’s début, Rubik: Above all, Rubik’s timeliness struck a chord. The novel offers a prescient exploration into the feelings of loneliness and technological anxiety […]
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A Cold Take on Late Essays
I’ve got a new review in the Glasgow Review of Books today, focusing on J.M. Coetzee’s Late Essays: 2006-2017 as well as his two earlier essay collections, Stranger Shores and Inner Workings: The results are mixed. On the one hand, Coetzee’s greatest gifts as a critic are his eye for narrative design and his ability to elucidate why, under […]
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The Purity of Potential
I make no secret of my admiration for Gerald Murnane; I’ve written about him previously on this blog here, here, and here. Now, for Splice, I’ve taken a close look at Murnane’s collected short stories, published in the United States as Stream System, and I’ve attempted to articulate something of a theory of the Murnanian mindset: […]
Infinite Patience 