Updates

The bunyip version of the ‘international’ style that Emmett Stinson writes of became very recognisable to me as a publisher of Australian literary fiction in the 1990s. Gestural, smooth, economical, all the requisite ‘gaps for the reader’ in place. It’s still around, and makes for an inconsequential and decontextualised literature.

The most compelling reason for doubting Anna Funder’s fictional capabilities was expressed by the writer herself a few years ago. Taking issue with the German film The Lives of Others, she informed the journalist in a Sydney Morning Herald interview that the story could not be believed…