Reviews

One of the strange contradictions of fiction is that immense beauty can often be found in writing about grief and loss. The things we often choose to look away from or avoid in everyday life can, in the hands of a novelist like Ashley Hay, become rich terrain.

When Fallada handed the final draft of Little Man, What Now? to Rowohlt in early 1932 there were eight and half million people unemployed in Germany. By 1933, a staggering 40 per cent of the population was registered as out of work.

The novella konkretion contains the promise of a novel, a dramatic monologue, poem(s) and the ghosts of several lives. It is a matryoshka doll of refracting voices with Meinhof’s story nestled at its core.

If I were selecting a Modern Australian Poetry XI, Wearney, like his near-namesake in another kind of XI, would be one of the automatic choices. To my mind (and ear), he is one of the best formal poets writing in Australia today.

Anne Carson is among that small number of contemporary writers who have achieved the unthinkable: she has produced poetry that has made the bestseller lists. Since the success of Autobiography of Red (1998), all of her books have sold big…

There is an irony here. In the attempt to render the writer omnipresent yet invisible every character becomes a version of the writer. But then Belomor is not a piece of naturalistic prose. It is a highly crafted artifice that signals its structural underpinnings and its philosophical preoccupations from the beginning.

In 1997, the Booker Prize shortlist included a work by an Australian woman for the first time. Literary Australia was chuffed, but also surprised. Who was this Madeleine St John, published by Fourth Estate?

The Blue Hills poems are so palpably about place that one needs to try to ‘place’ their author before going any farther. If the English language poetry of (almost exactly) the last one hundred years falls into two broad groups – the Non-Poundian and the Post-Poundian – then Duggan belongs to the latter.

In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon… forensically examines families in which children turn out to be not what their parents had fondly expected. The title is a twist on the proverb, ‘The apple never falls far from the tree’. His question is: But what happens when they do?

Somerton Man is one of Adelaide’s great cold cases. The place is built of such true crime stories. On the surface, these narratives tell us, Adelaide is a charmingly ordered, picture-book city. But step carelessly and you could fall through a hole into a parallel world of violence, murder and intrigue.