Reviews

New Review of Like to the Lark by Stuart Barnes. By Joseph Schreiber (rough ghosts https://roughghosts.com/)

Review of Abandon Every Hope: essays for the dead by Hayley Singer

from The Canberra Times by Jasper Lindell 25 March 2023 On those regular enough nights when, after work, I cannot be bothered cooking very much, I know I can buy a roast chicken in a little plastic bag sitting in a supermarket warmer for little more than $10. The gnarly business of killing the chicken, […]

Review of Children of Tomorrow by JR Burgmann

from The Conversation 21 March 2023 by Meg Brayshaw, John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature, University of Sydney For at least the past decade, writers and critics have been debating the capacity of literary fiction to represent the realities of climate change. Some argue fiction is one of our best tools for reckoning with a […]

People who Lunch: essays on work, leisure and loose living by Sally Olds

Communes, polyamory, and the history of the fraternal society officially known as the Royal Antediluvian Order of the Buffaloes — aka the Buffalo Club — are among the subjects probed by Sally Olds in her first book. A collection of six incisive and intellectually dextrous essays, it sees the Melbourne-based writer and critic considering topics […]

Reviews of Clean by Scott-Patrick Mitchell

“The sublime nature of Mitchell’s work is evident throughout, for the poet constantly juggles elements of both the picturesque and the sinister.” Holden Walker. Full review in Mascara here: “The inimitable SPM’s first full-length collection is a fear-and-loathing-journey-book through addiction and back again. These are beautifully written, harrowing, wise, tightly-wound poems of witness, survival and […]

Reviews of My Giddy Aunt and her sister comedians by Sharon Connolly

“Female performers at the turn of the 20th century found both joy and frustration in theatre. If you thought Deadwood was a lawless, heartless place, try early Australia.” “Connolly’s ancestors, male & female on both sides were musical, dramatic, creative, talented & driven. What would a woman do with her talents? Even if married to […]

Reviews of Words are Eagles by Gregory Day

Nature writing seems so often to categorise itself, and that for me is ultimately its limitation as an activist mode, but, at its best, it breaks such bounds and articulates the unspoken spaces between the natural and human worlds, and respects the segues between them. Gregory Day manages to achieve this form of “nature writing” […]

Reviews of Imaginative Possession by Belinda Probert

“Wanting to belong forms the root system of Belinda Probert’s Imaginative Possession, marking the terrain – how can she, as an immigrant, ever feel at home in Australia? – and producing shoots of longing for the landscapes of her English childhood. Even now, forty-five years after arriving in Perth to take up a teaching position […]

Reviews of The Sweetest Fruit by Monique Truong

Review in The Saturday Paper by Leah Jing McIntosh, September 2021 “A slow burn, The Sweetest Fruits is a thoughtful layering of fictions and truths, a novel that will most certainly dazzle.”

Reviews of Delia Akeley and the Monkey by Iain McCalman

Review in Australian Book Review by Libby Robin March 2022 “This book is about Africa but also about the stifling limits of New York that drove Akeley, his two wives, and JT to different sorts of madness. Fevers are often associated with African jungles, but the expectations of the urban jungle of Manhattan added another level of craziness. As museums […]

Reviews of The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Selim Özdoğan

Review in Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, January 2022 “Selim Ozdogan is a writer of the Turkish diaspora, born in Germany. The first in a trilogy, this novel is realist, focused on aspirational workers. It is also a devastating critique of entitled patriarchy and its consequences: smothered women. The blacksmith Timur is a loving father who […]

Reviews of No Enemies No Friends: Restoring Australia’s Global Relevance by Allan Behm