Non-fiction
As Opposed to What? The Antinomies of Realism & Periodizing Jameson
With The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson finally provides the sustained examination of literary realism that those following his critical writings have long suspected might one day appear.
Invisible giants: Making Make-Believe Real by Garry Wills
Garry Wills is a great American political essayist and historian whose imagination has always been set on fire by the power of the word in the time of Elizabeth I. In his new book, he writes about it at length. And it is an extraordinary thing to try to imagine the Elizabethan moment and do justice to the majesty of its artistic achievements …
H is for Hinch: A Companion to the Australian Media
If the Companion does not aspire to be an integrated history of the media, what is its raison d’être? In some ways, it is easier to note what the book is not. It is not a contemporary guide to media practitioners or media outlets. It is not a list of contacts or available products. Nor is it an analysis of media product or producers. It does not set out to critique the media. But it does set out to be comprehensive.
One unusual dude: Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth
Booth’s point is simple enough: Larkin projected multiple personas in his life, many of which summoned up images of old Englishness, while at the same time getting on with being a modern person and an important poet. Some of this has been obvious for some time. Though he projected the approved Movement-style philistinism and Little-Englandism, the poems of The Less Deceived are the obvious product of someone steeped in French symbolism, pre-war surrealism, and the explosive effects of apocalyptics such as George Barker.
Gut instinct: This House of Grief by Helen Garner
Like The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation before it, This House of Grief proceeds from Garner’s first instinctive response. All three books are grounded in the idea that to feel something is a kind of fact. All wonder about the meaning and the status of that subjective fact. In this sense, they might be read as essays that question the concept of rationality.
Bold capitals, squiggly underline!! Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Chast burrows into this feral old age and draws it out with uncanny, page-expanding, emotional precision. It is not reporting from the trenches, or a facing-down of the last frontier, but something else. Chast is giving over a whole multi-tracked, multi-voiced, sensory feast of a book to something – something barely bearable sometimes, and infused with pain and dread always; something that gets sprinted past, or poeticised to within an inch of its life, or else chronicled with a deadly, breathless earnestness – and she does it in such a way that I could not tear myself away from her book.