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23.01.2022 Got an idea for an essay? Submissions are currently open for the $7,500 Calibre Essay Prize. Open worldwide, the Calibre Prize accepts all essays written in English between 2,0005,000 words. Closing 15 Jan 2021. Don't miss out! This year’s Calibre Prize is judged by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Billy Griffiths and Peter Rose. More information about the judges can be found here: http://bit.ly/31a3Xst For more information about the Calibre Prize, please use the following links:... - Past winners and their essays: http://bit.ly/34ZdljB - Terms and Conditions: http://bit.ly/3iZ2njg - Frequently Asked Questions: http://bit.ly/3lMQ0s9 ABR gratefully acknowledges the long-standing support of Colin Golvan AM QC, Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.
23.01.2022 Welcome to our last issue for 2020. What a turbulent year it’s been but also a rousing one for ABR. This issue includes our perennial favourite, Books of the Year, where this year 33 ABR critics nominate some of their favourite books. More highlights: Brenda Niall on 'The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard' by Shirley Hazzard Anna MacDonald on 'On Beverley Farmer: Writers on Writers' by Josephine Rowe... Kerryn Goldsworthy on 'The Fifth Season' by Philip Salom Don Anderson on 'The Silence: A novel' by Don DeLillo Alice Nelson on 'Jack' by Marilynne Robinson John Hawke on 'Beautiful Objects: Selected poems' by Martin Johnston Geordie Williamson on 'Tom Stoppard: A life' by Hermione Lee Interviews with Danielle Clode and Paul Giles Plus much more! Read the full issue here: https://bit.ly/3f6wZNG Order any issue of ABR postage free: https://bit.ly/3jUcNSU
22.01.2022 'John Blay’s Wild Nature belongs to a long if amorphous tradition of walking with intent. It completes his trekking trilogy, following Back Country (1987) and On Track (2015). "Suddenly it comes clear," he writes. "We can map whatever we find and tell the story of the great escarpment forests."' Saskia Beudel reviews 'Wild Nature: Walking Australia’s south east forests' by John Blay | NewSouth Books
22.01.2022 'A summary of Callil’s career might make her sound like a high-achieving establishment figure. That would leave out other qualities. She is outspoken, often a contrarian, passionately committed to ideas. A strong feminist but not easily categorised, she says that she "never bothered with wars about makeup or bras or 'chairmen'". She just thought, "get on with it".' Brenda Niall reviews 'Oh Happy Day: Those times and these times' by Carmen Callil | Penguin Books Australia/Jonathan Cape
20.01.2022 'Lee’s monumental biography, impeccable in its enquiries, built from archive-diving and numerous interviews with intimates of Stoppard’s, as well as generous time spent with the subject, coheres around the idea of Stoppard as an artist shaped by Englishness and shaped, in much the same way earlier generations of European Jewish intellectuals and creative figures were, by gratitude.' Geordie Williamson on 'Tom Stoppard: A life' by Hermione Lee | Alfred A. Knopf
20.01.2022 'Besides treading familiar territory on Keynes’s contribution to the discipline of economics, Carter also shows an intimate portrait of Keynes (better known as Maynard to his friends) and how Keynesian ideas transformed the landscape of modern American power.' John Tang reviews 'The Price of Peace: Money, democracy and the life of John Maynard Keynes' by Zachary D. Carter | Penguin Books Australia / Random House
18.01.2022 'I wonder whether expensive policies to "imprison and torture innocent people", couched as saving lives at sea or deterring people smugglers, are really our smartest available ideas. In the halls of Parliament, in the homes of our conservative electorates, in the chambers of Australia’s most parochial hearts, can we not imagine brighter, less costly, more effective solutions, sans the limbo, isolation, and imprisonment?' Hessom Razavi on 'Failures of imagination: A journey from Tehran’s prisons to Australia’s immigration detention centres'
18.01.2022 'The abject inadequacy of the medical model’s diagnostic approach to pain management is laid bare. Maslen has been confronting this deadly untranslatability between qualitative and quantitative languages for half her life.' Kate Crowcroft reviews 'Show Me Where It Hurts: Living with invisible illness' by Kylie Maslen | Text Publishing
17.01.2022 'Best known for her two brilliant novels, Hazzard sharpened her prose as a New Yorker writer of short fiction. When, as a young and under-confident writer, she first met New Yorker editor William Maxwell, she thought: "Now, everything will be all right".' Brenda Niall on 'The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard' by Shirley Hazzard | Virago Press
16.01.2022 'All the craft I know won’t bring a poem to life if inspiration is lacking. There has to be a moment of perception buried in it like a seed. Growing that seed, and discovering what kind of organism it will be, requires all the skill (craft, in both senses) I can muster.' Read our interview with Judith Bishop, our Poet of the Month
16.01.2022 'The longing for another woman, often unarticulated and complicated by the uncertainties of youth, is a recurring theme across the collection. Ashmere celebrates the possibilities of love and tenderness between women while also giving us a sense of the historical difficulty facing such couples, especially in the context of familial and social expectations.' Rose Lucas on 'Dreams They Forgot' by Emma Ashmere | Wakefield Press
16.01.2022 'Lucky’s central conceits lie in how we respond to failure, how we live in the shadow of other people’s decisions, and how we elevate ourselves while staying true to our own ideas about who we are. Each character grapples with a sense of impostor syndrome.' Sonia Nair reviews 'Lucky’s' by Andrew Pippos | Picador books
15.01.2022 Welcome to the November issue! On our cover is a very young Hessom Razavi, the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow. In his cover article, Hessom relates his family’s trials after the Iranian Revolution, their flight to Australia, and his awareness of the immense ordeals facing refugees in Australia’s immigration centres. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth examines regional differences in Australian writing and considers the ways in which regional factors can influence authors. Plus reviews, poetry, ...interviews, commentary, and more! Some highlights: Beejay Silcox on 'The Lying Life of Adults' by Elena Ferrante Declan Fry on 'Inside Story' by Martin Amis James Ley on 'The Living Sea of Waking Dreams' by Richard Flanagan Susan Wyndham on 'All Our Shimmering Skies' by Trent Dalton Joshua Black pays tribute to Labor senator Susan Ryan Tony Hughes-d'Aeth on regionalism in Australian literature Alan Atkinson on 'People of the River' by Grace Karskens Brenda Niall on 'Oh Happy Day' by Carmen Callil Kate Crowcroft on 'Show Me Where It Hurts' by Kylie Maslen New poetry by Toby Fitch, Sarah Day, and Judith Bishop Plus much more! Read the full issue here: https://bit.ly/3f6wZNG Order any issue of ABR postage free: https://bit.ly/3jUcNSU
15.01.2022 '"Serendipity". I’d like to consign that word to a Hallmark Card, set it on fire, and fling it over the moon. If I could restore one word to modern parlance, it would be "vim". It’s such a speedy, sprightly, bright little word. I like a person with vim.' An interview with author Craig Silvey.
14.01.2022 'Tony Page’s Anh and Lucien is an intricately plotted verse novel set in French Indochina during World War II. It centres on an unlikely same-sex love affair between Lucien, a colonial bureaucrat, and Anh, a young Vietnamese communist who supports Ho Chi Minh’s independence movement.' James Antoniou reviews 'Anh and Lucien' by Tony Page, 'Scratchland' by Noëlle Janaczewska, and 'The Alpaca Cantos' by Jenny Blackford | UWA Publishing / Pitt Street Poetry
14.01.2022 'In Australia, our idea of a university was also filtered through a British imperial frame. Our universities thus looked to Oxford and Cambridge (or, more practically and less denominationally, to London and Edinburgh) rather than to Bologna and Berlin for their operational models. It was the global shock of World War I, and a growing awareness of German scientific advances in particular, that helped draw the Australian university system towards a more continental-style model of research-led teaching and learning. Peter Tregear on 'Australian Universities' by Gwilym Croucher and James Waghorne | UNSW Press
14.01.2022 'While Mitchell’s works are animated by bold colours and an assertive physical working of them, she was always strictly in command of her making: this is studio art, not performative Abstract Expressionism. Now we know from photographs, and the video included in the exhibition, that Mitchell worked methodically, fastidiously: more than half the catalogue is devoted to photographs of the artist’s processes, her working relationship with Tyler and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler, and her garden and landscape subjects in France.' Julie Ewington on 'Joan Mitchell: World of Colour' | National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
14.01.2022 'A literary meditation on the landscapes and violence of both the mulga plains of south-west Queensland and the rural backroads of Andalusia, Amnesia Road is rhapsodic and brutal, portraying the natural environments of these regions with textured, chromatic reverence while unflinchingly detailing the atrocities committed there.' Amnesia Road on Luke Stegemann | NewSouth Publishing
13.01.2022 'If we accept imagination as the natural precursor for empathy, it follows that cultivating it can provide an antidote to human cruelty or ambivalence; in other words, "the more I imagine your suffering, the less I am able to condone it".' Hessom Razavi, ABR's Behrouz Boochani Fellow, on 'Failures of imagination: A journey from Tehran’s prisons to Australia’s immigration detention centres'
12.01.2022 'Thucydides once said, "In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it."' Nadia David reviews 'How to Win an Election' by Chris Wallace | NewSouth Books
12.01.2022 Read the new December issue here: https://bit.ly/3mydrGJ
11.01.2022 'At once mythic in scale and deeply attentive to the textures of this world, Robinson’s novels are full of people for whom notions of grace, redemption, and salvation are not abstractions but aspirations people who, as Robinson once wrote of herself, look to Galilee for meaning.' Alice Nelson reviews 'Jack' by Marilynne Robinson | Hachette Australia Books
11.01.2022 'Our prime minister evades any serious discussion of these choices with a simple but powerful rhetorical manoeuvre. He denies that he is making any choices, because the issues at stake mean that he, and we, have no real alternatives to the policy he is adopting. He justifies this by claiming that those issues engage our interests, our values, and our sovereignty, and as such are non-negotiable.' Hugh White reviews 'China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order' by Geoff Raby | Melbourne University Publishing
10.01.2022 Is it possible to parse Australian writers by states and territories? In today's episode, Tony Hughes-d'Aeth Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia speculates about new ways of contemplating Australian writers through the lens of regionalism. As he writes in his essay in our upcoming November issue, 'Thinking in a regional accent: New ways of contemplating Australian writers': 'Yes, we are divided into states and territories, but are these ...anything other than lines on a map, drawn with a ruler and a set square, and the occasional river? The contrast between the political map of Australia and the now iconic AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia graphically exposes the poverty of the Australian regional imagination and the essential irreality of our territorial demarcations. More particularly, for someone like me, is it right to conceive of Australia in terms of literary regions?' See more
10.01.2022 In today's episode, Joshua Black reads his tribute to former Labor senator Susan Ryan, featured in our November issue. Ryan was a historic figure in Australian politics: she was the first woman from the ALP to serve in cabinet, and cemented her legacy with the Sex Discrimination Act (1984) which prohibited sexual discrimination in the workplace. Here, Black recounts his interview with the pioneering politician only weeks before her death on 27 September 2020.
10.01.2022 'How does one talk about wounds without fetishising their workings, and how in a society where pain is taboo does one speak of it authentically? In Show Me Where it Hurts, writer and journalist Kylie Maslen balances the difficulty of this equation: telling the story of her disability and having that story remain fundamentally unspeakable.' Kate Crowcroft reviews 'Show Me Where It Hurts: Living with invisible illness' by Kylie Maslen | Text Publishing
09.01.2022 'Richard Flanagan’s eighth novel is a rough beast. It has clearly been written to the moment, in anger and sorrow. Its prose radiates the heat of its composition. It is what one character calls a "growing scream", prompted by the wilful ignorance and general imbecility of the present.' James Ley reviews 'The Living Sea of Waking Dreams' by Richard Flanagan | Penguin Books Australia/Knopf
08.01.2022 'A Letter to Layla is very much a book of our times. Its impetus lies in our rapidly changing climate, and it concludes with the unexpected impact of Covid-19. In between, the book explores both our distant past and our future.' Danielle Clode reviews 'A Letter to Layla: Travels to our deep past and near future' by Ramona Koval | Text Publishing
08.01.2022 'Betty O’Neill pieces together her family history in an effort to learn more about her father, a stranger she briefly encountered when she was nineteen. What began as an innocuous exercise at a writers’ retreat would evolve into a three-year research project through which the author uncovers the riveting story of Antoni Jagielski resistance fighter, Holocaust survivor, unsettled postwar migrant, and absent father.' Iva Glisic reviews 'The Other Side of Absence: Discovering my father’s secrets' by Betty O’Neill | Ventura Press
07.01.2022 'Mankiewicz co-wrote Citizen Kane with Welles, a fraught process that irreparably damaged their relationship. Fincher’s sympathies lie firmly with his titular hero, not only sidelining Welles in the writing of Citizen Kane, but presenting him in several scenes as a smirking, almost vaudevillian, villain.' Barnaby Smith on 'Mank' | Netflix
06.01.2022 'Lioness is Sue Brierley’s story, beginning with her birth to migrants recently arrived in Burnie. Josef and Julie Stelnicki, fleeing postwar Europe, believed that the ship they boarded would take them to Canada but ended up in Tasmania. Sue, the middle daughter, describes her early life as one of privation.' Margaret Robson Kett reviews 'Lioness: The extraordinary untold story of Sue Brierley, mother of Saroo, the boy known as Lion' by Sue Brierley | Viking Books
06.01.2022 'One might turn Brands’s question inside out and ask: what is a moral historian to write in immoral times? Whose voices are worth listening to? Whose stories ought we be telling? And what questions do we think are important? In an era when claims for basic natural rights are asserted under the straightforward banner Black Lives Matter, do we really need another book, however adroitly written, about Lincoln and Brown?' Clare Corbould on 'The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the struggle for American freedom' by H.W. Brands | Alfred A. Knopf
06.01.2022 'Have audiences become so inured to having the latest films delivered to their homes that they no longer feel the need to go out and sit in a cinema for two or three hours, still wearing their masks? Or are people so sick of their television screens that they are craving the shared experience of a cinema?' 'Cinema’s future in Australia' by Richard Leathem
06.01.2022 Greetings to our fellow Victorians on the easing of Stage 4 restrictions. The past four months have been exceptionally trying, and few cities around the world have known such restrictions, but the state has come through. Special thanks to all our healthcare workers who have faced huge risks to curb the pandemic. Meanwhile, ABR remains open and positive after this trying but stirring time. Welcome to our countless new subscribers who have turned to ABR for good literary journalism, added commentary, the new podcast, and great creative writing. We’re particularly grateful to the posties and couriers who have kept us in books and delivered ABR to our readers.
04.01.2022 'The Mother Fault is both a dystopian adventure and a nuanced study of relationships, motherhood, identity, and what it takes to keep children safe.' Amy Baillieu on 'The Mother Fault' by Kate Mildenhall
02.01.2022 'Interstate rivalry in Australia is not uncommon, with familiar stoushes over GST share, the Murray Darling Basin, the location of naval shipbuilding, and the hosting of sporting events. But the idea that Australia has internal borders, not just to check fruit but to stop the movement of people, Australian people, is something that has only emerged with Covid-19.' 'Thinking in a regional accent: New ways of contemplating Australian writers' by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
02.01.2022 Kylie Maslen's début essay collection, Show Me Where It Hurts, is an intimate exploration of living with chronic illness. Maslen describes her own experiences with the invisible illness she has lived with for the last twenty years, delving into its daily reality while incorporating music, literature, television, film, online culture, and more. In today's episode, Kate Crowcroft reads her review of the book, which she describes as 'essential reading for those of us with the privilege of having a body that behaves itself'.
02.01.2022 In today's episode, Amy Baillieu speaks to Nicole Abadee about Sofie Laguna's latest novel, Infinite Splendours. In her November issue review, Abadee reflects that Laguna 'does not shy away from confronting subject matter' and notes that Infinite Splendours represents 'new territory' for Laguna as it follows protagonist Lawrence from childhood into adulthood. Baillieu and Abadee also discuss Abadee's own podcast Books Books Books.
02.01.2022 'Modern mega-farms are like nothing on earth. Imagine a vast black field stretching from horizon to horizon. A driverless tractor glides across the skyline spreading synthetic fertiliser. A cluster of grain towers looms over an empty asphalt parking lot. A row of pig sheds gleams in the distance. The square blot of the manure lagoon simmers in the hot sun. There are no trees. No birds. No mess. Everything is orderly, unpeopled, and entirely alien.' Andrew Fuhrmann reviews 'English Pastoral: An inheritance' by James Rebanks | Penguin Books Australia/Allen Lane
02.01.2022 'At the heart of Trevor Shearston’s latest novel, The Beach Caves, is the act of digging. The protagonist, Annette Cooley, is a young archaeology student, thrilled by the allure of her Honours supervisor’s most recent find: the stone remains of an Aboriginal village on the New South Wales south coast that could rewrite the pre-European history of Australia.' Andrew McLeod on 'The Beach Caves' by Trevor Shearston | Scribe Publications
02.01.2022 'The ordinary in these diaries the daily, the diurnal, the stumbled-upon, the breathing in and out is turned into something else through the writer’s extraordinary craft. "What I love on my desk is the notebooks I’ve typed up, their freshness, their un-public tone, their glancing quality and high sensuous awareness," she confesses. "Nothing 'serious' I write can ever match these ..."' Nicholas Jose on 'One Day I’ll Remember This' by Helen Garner for Book of the Week | Text Publishing
01.01.2022 'This is a story of desperate loneliness and fear, of neglect, family violence, betrayal, and self-disgust. But it is also one of love and solidarity, a celebration of the kindness of strangers who become family and friends.' Anna MacDonald reviews 'Honeybee' by Craig Silvey | Allen & Unwin Books
01.01.2022 'Where the Fruit Falls joins contemporary works such as Tony Birch’s The White Girl (2019), where intricacies of the author’s historical focus shine through. Like Birch, Wyld focuses on a time where constitutional recognition was said to have drastically changed First Nations people’s lives. These authors tell a different story though, offering narratives that are arguably more truthful regarding the extent of varying forms of oppression experienced by First Nations people influenced by where you landed and how safe it was to put roots down and exist.' Laura La Rosa on Karen Wyld | UWA Publishing
